[URBAN NOTE] "Why Vaughan should stay out of Toronto transportation planning"

[rfmcdonald]

In the Toronto Star, Edward Keenan argues that suburban Vaughan region's representatives should talk about the TTC only when they know what's going on.

Vaughan councillor Alan Shefman took it on himself last week to challenge Toronto’s “no-capacity mythology” when it comes to the Yonge subway line.

I thought at first that Shefman must be employing new slang. In the same way that today’s youth use “epic” and “legendary” to mean “amazing,” I thought perhaps Shefman meant to suggest that overcrowding on the Yonge subway was so legendarily epic as to have reached mythological proportions — as if to say the lack of capacity is such that stories of the crowds wedged into the trains near Wellesley station will be handed down through generations as a form of moral teaching. “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly push his body into a Yonge subway train each morning…”

But no. It appears Shefman was actually trying to suggest that there is space for more passengers. A bunch of city officials from York Region have been pushing to have the Yonge line extended north into Richmond Hill (a neighbour city of Vaughan’s, up there in the northlands above Toronto), and as they make their pitch to the federal Liberals for funding, Shefman was suggesting that project could proceed before 416 transit priorities such as the downtown relief subway line.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Shefman is a clown. Anyone who has ever seen a famous clown-car routine, in which dozens of bozos will come parading out of a Volkswagon Beetle, will know that clowns have a different idea of transportation capacity than the rest of us. It could be that Shefman simply sees entertaining circus-style public transportation opportunities in having riders fold their bodies under seats and sit atop each other’s shoulders and whatnot.

The other possibility is that Shefman simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If you want to see if overcrowding on the Yonge subway is a myth or a reality, you could go to Yonge-Bloor station during the morning rush and try to wedge yourself onto a train. If you survive that experience, and you want to imagine what that same situation will look like down the road, you could consult the city’s recently released studies. They show that without any new construction, by 2031 ridership on the Yonge line at Bloor during rush hour is expected to be 39,600 — some 10 per cent higher than the capacity of the line. If an extension is built to Richmond Hill and the relief line and SmartTrack are not built, as Shefman and his 905 colleagues suggest, the projections show 41,600 passengers per hour — and that includes an 8.3 per cent drop in passengers transferring from the Bloor line because, the report says, “these passengers have been ‘driven away by overcrowding.’”