[URBAN NOTE] "SmartTrack is a little old plan that we can't get untethered"

[rfmcdonald]

NOW Toronto's Jonathan Goldsbie is scathing about John Tory's SmartTrack plan, noting that even basic details are monstrously unclear.

“I feel like I’m swimming through mud here,” Steve Munro says over the phone as we near the one-hour mark of plowing through transit reports in search of answers to what should be basic questions.

Even semi-coherent transit plans are necessarily contingent on a dizzying number of variables, and Munro – the city’s pre-eminent citizen expert on the subject – is superhuman in his ability to recall and tie together such details.

But late in the evening before March 9, when city council's executive committee would meet to consider several interrelated plans (including Mayor John Tory’s signature SmartTrack) even Munro seems more than a little stumped.

About the only thing that's certain, as one report casually mentions, is that “all train services occur in space and time.”

So how often would SmartTrack trains come?

SmartTrack has always been a nebulous concept at best, something built on top of GO Transit’s Regional Express Rail (RER) plan that the province, through Metrolinx, was executing anyway. GO is already in the process of converting much of its network from a commuter rail service into an all-day, two-way transit system; SmartTrack would piggyback on this by adding new stations in Toronto.

But for a long time it remained stunningly unclear whether SmartTrack would actually be its own service with its own set of trains running on the same tracks as the RER.