[URBAN NOTE] "Which track is Smart Track on?"

[rfmcdonald]

At Spacing Toronto, John Lorinc examines the controversies of mass transit, specifically with Smart Track.

One of the enduring features of Toronto’s so-called transit debate is the uneven and treacherous information terrain that ordinary citizens are forced to navigate if they aspire to crazy goals, such as trying to make sense of the endlessly shape-shifting discussion about competing options.

Almost two years after city council voted to commit itself to the $3.5 billion Scarborough subway extension despite a shameful dearth of even cursory analysis, the City continues to crash along with that doomed scheme. While the City is readying itself for a bevy of environmental assessment (EA) reports on that line, there’s still nothing in the public domain by way of rigorous land-use analysis of the proposed routes, any sort of financial due diligence, or even ridership projections that weren’t plucked out of thin air. The City hasn’t released any kind of granular analysis about the projected cost, even as that other train wreck — the York-Spadina subway extension — continues to deliver stunning cost over-runs.

Then yesterday, as if to counterbalance the information vacuum on one big project, the City executes an impressive data dump with the other one — in this case, Smart Track — or Son of Smart Track — or whatever we’re now calling this project that is meant to carry the full freight of John Tory’s political legacy.

The data arrived in the form of a detailed usage scenario analysis done by the University of Toronto’s Transportation Research Institute, which is headed up by civil engineering expert Eric Miller, a renowned authority on trip modeling.

Miller’s group used an elaborate forecasting model, built and updated over many years, to estimate the ridership on various Smart Track permutations by using a range of long-term economic and land-use development assumptions that run from stagnation to hyper-growth. Miller’s scenarios tested various pricing options — TTC rates vs. more costly GO fares — as well as various service levels, with trains running at head times ranging from 5 to 15 minutes.

The study includes forecasts like this: if Toronto’s population rises slowly but the region experiences mid-range employment growth, and the Smart Track corridor (heavy rail to Eglinton, and then an LRT from Mt. Dennis over to the Mississauga Airport Corporate Centre, all running at five-minute intervals) itself attracts new development, then daily boardings, circa 2031, will be in the vicinity of 336,702, which represents almost 55,000 new riders on the TTC every day. Follow?