[URBAN NOTE] "How Do We Solve a Problem Like UPX?"

[rfmcdonald]

James Bow considers the question of what is to be done with the Union Pearson Express.

Metrolinx, the provincial agency charged with upgrading public transit across the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton, has a problem, and its letters are U.P.

The Union Pearson Express is a seriously odd-duck — a major transit improvement that neither the City of Toronto nor the province of Ontario initially asked for, but one which Ontario ended up building. It was launched as a legacy project by the federal transport minister in the dying months of Jean Chretien’s government, but it somehow survived the election of Stephen Harper. It’s a line that actually got built among a sea of transit expansion proposals that went exactly nowhere. It’s supposed to make back all its costs from the farebox. And it’s carrying fewer passengers per day than the 192 AIPORT ROCKET TTC bus to Kipling station.

This is a problem, because while Metrolinx is labouring mightily on a number of important and worthy transit projects, including the Eglinton-Crosstown LRT, this is the first really noticeable piece of new transit infrastructure to bear Metrolinx’s name. And as the media reports on every story of low ridership and warms up a “white elephant” narrative on the line, the project risks tarnishing the credibility of Metrolinx.

I don’t think it’s entirely fair to Metrolinx, although the Union-Perason project is an indictment of the entire transit planning process within the Greater Toronto Area and politicians from every level of government (municipal, provincial and especially federal) that allowed this to happen. I wrote about the whole bizarre history of the Union Pearson Express in Transit Toronto, and the process does deserve a thorough post-mortem to ensure that similar mistakes don’t happen again. However, we are still left with the question of what to do with what we’ve done.