[URBAN NOTE] "What if City Council actually talked about buses?"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc wonders why Torontonians do not talk more about TTC buses.

Bad choices beget more bad choices.

If I lie on a government form, I will almost inevitably have to dissemble more in order to ensure the continued viability of the original lie. If I buy a luxury car on impulse without bothering to calculate how to cover the monthly payments, I will soon have to stop doing something that I need to do.

And that’s where we find ourselves with the $3.5 billion (but probably more) Scarborough subway. The bad decisions continue to pile up.

Consider the weekend’s news, unconvincingly denied by the mayor’s office, that there’s a plan afoot to sell Toronto Hydro and some parts of the Toronto Parking Authority portfolio, presumably to raise much needed capital to cover the costs of the things we can’t afford, like three-stop subways running through low-rise residential neighbourhoods.

Such sell-offs, though not yet approved, are the result of the specific sort of fiscal desperation that John Tory has brought down upon the city by pledging too many super expensive projects and then adamantly refusing to make tough choices.

At such moments, it’s always useful to bring the conversation back to opportunity cost: What is it that we won’t be able to do as a result of these choices? You don’t often see an “opportunity cost’ section on a staff report, but given the madness of council’s current transit plans, perhaps that kind of analysis — like the dissenting opinion of a Supreme Court justice — might prove useful.

Which brings me to the subject of buses, and specifically why we don’t talk more about the goal of making Toronto’s bus network into a service that is just so outstanding, and so easy to use, that local politicians compete with one another to promote major investments in this critical part of the TTC’s operations.