[URBAN NOTE] "Subway fetish does injustice to Scarborough"

[rfmcdonald]

As is usual, Edward Keenan makes sense--here, in the Toronto Star--when he argues that the desire of the people of Scarborough for a subway line as opposed to light rail is an insult, as opposed to a rational choice.

Here comes Margaret Kohn, no less a luminary than the acting director for the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus, to demonstrate the unrelenting Fordian transit illiteracy that persists in this city when it comes to the subject of Scarborough. Writing Dec. 1 on the Opinion page of the Star, she scoffed at the contempt of the “downtown cognoscenti” for the three-stop Bloor-Danforth extension, summing it up as a matter of greedhead urban robber barons hoarding an ever greater share of civic spoils for themselves at the expense of the inner-suburban poor — especially in their lust for new subway lines like personal trophies, in the form of the downtown relief line (a subway line whose primary purpose, if it were ever built, would be to provide more space on trains and more routes for suburban riders to travel into downtown).

Eventually she slows the parade of insults long enough to make what she seems to think is a novel argument: that Scarborough is home to many of the city’s poorest and most disadvantaged residents, and has really terrible transit. Invoking the philosopher John Rawls’ famous “veil of ignorance” test, she asks if most people wouldn’t prefer the subway option if they thought there might be a good chance they’d have to live in Scarborough.

Now it must be noted that her core observation — “that a major investment in public transit in the periphery is a matter of justice” — is not a new contribution to this debate. It is in fact pretty much the agreed premise of all parties on which the debate is based.

What LRT network advocates — those who oppose the subway extension — have argued all along is that pouring billions of dollars into a limited extension of the existing Bloor-Danforth line to Scarborough Town Centre robs Scarborough residents of fair access to transit. Because of the immense cost of tunnelling for little benefit over the alternative, the subway means we tie up our transit resources for a generation to build three new stops that will lose money serving a relatively limited ridership. The LRT alternatives are not only far cheaper to build and operate, but they would serve far more riders, bringing rapid transit closer to more neighbourhoods in Scarborough.