[URBAN NOTE] Four links on the flawed idea of the Scarborough subway extension

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc was angry.

How many times do we have to bang our heads against the wall before we finally get the message?

Apparently, based on Friday’s little news nugget about the Scarborough subway’s inflated cost, that number is not a small one.

In this city, we don’t learn from our mistakes. Rather, we learn only how to make them again, and again, and again. As the old saying goes, history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. But Toronto needs a third phase, because we’re now out there in post-farce terrain.

There’s really only one thing to say about John Tory’s insistence on pressing ahead with a $2.9 billion, one-stop subway extension that will serve fewer people than many of the city’s bus routes and cost 45% more than initially projected?

How, Mr. Mayor, can the City be so ignorant? Or fiscally irresponsible, for that matter?

Steve Munro fisked a minister's defense of the project.

Brad Duguid, Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development & Growth, also the de facto spokesman for the Scarborough Liberal Caucus, was on CBC’s Metro Morning talking about the planned Scarborough Subway Extension (SSE) and its fast-inflating estimated cost.

Duguid had been quoted in the press a few days earlier as saying that downtown elitists have been opposed to the SSE from the start echoing the divisive us-versus-them context for so much of this debate. He likes to sound oh so reasonable, but his message is full of half-truths and puffery designed to support the “we don’t get our share” chorus so common from Scarborough pols and others.

The [subway] project has been on the books for 30 years.

Well, no, it hasn’t. The TTC’s original plan for Scarborough was that an LRT corridor would run northeast all the way to Malvern. (See Once Upon a Time in Scarborough and The Scarborough LRT That Wasn’t). More recently, the Transit City plan included an LRT network for Scarborough, and this received the endorsement of Council. Only when former Mayor Ford chose to use the potential of a subway as bait did Council change its mind.

If anyone has a plan for a subway from Kennedy to STC that has more status than the back of a napkin or a fantasy map, I’ll be happy to see and comment on it.

Jean-Pierre Boutros at Torontoist wondered why Tory agreed to this, and called for a reevaluation.

There is plenty of blame to go around for it, including the perpetually campaigning provincial cabinet, which is making Metrolinx’s mission statement more meaningless each day; 24 members of 2013’s rudderless Toronto City Council, swayed by then-TTC chair Karen Stintz and current TTC chair Josh Colle; City of Toronto and TTC staff, who regrettably engaged in decision-based fact making. I also blame myself, because my earlier opposition should have been broadcast publicly as an individual taxpayer, rather than urgently discussed in City Hall offices.

Regardless, the one person who owns it all now is Toronto’s sophomore mayor, John Tory. The billion-dollar cost increases, the property tax hikes, imposing another decade of duct tape and hope upon riders of the Scarborough RT: all of these mistakes are Tory’s preferences.

Politically, the word “Tory” suggests government restraint, governing without waste, valuing taxpayer money held in trust for the public. Mayor Tory has run on this repeatedly, in many campaigns over a long political career, and he can still be a Tory in the truest sense. As Brian Mulroney once famously said, “You had an option”—and Tory still has one.

As Metrolinx’s CEO Bruce McCuaig told Toronto Life in 2014, “Council has the right to reverse its choices.” He also said that the Scarborough LRT was the best solution, as “we’d already invested $80 million in the project.” Since McCuaig shared his opinions two years ago, Tory has somehow cut out two (out of three) subway stations while adding $1 billion to taxpayers’ bills, all without a shovel breaking ground.

Last decade at Queen’s Park as opposition leader, Tory would have railed against such awful decision making. Last term on Newstalk 1010 as a radio talk show host, Tory would have said such waste should cause heads to roll. Now, at City Hall as mayor, Tory insists, “We just need to build something,” and major transit projects devolve into retail therapy, using my credit card.

Edward Keenan at the Toronto Star notes the profound lack of economic sense behind the project should kill it.

If you were intent on spending $2.9 billion to serve Scarborough and the city, what could you do?

Well, you could take $900 million to buy a fleet of 50 Russian Mi-26 troop transport helicopters, capable of carrying well over 7,500 people an hour from Scarborough Town Centre to Kennedy station in less than two minutes, or all the way to Toronto City Hall in under five minutes. And then you could use $625 million to alsobuy every single person who lives in Scarborough a pony. And then with the $1.375 billion you have left over, you could halve the Toronto Community Housing repair backlog, to ensure 5,000 units of affordable housing aren’t condemned.

Don’t the long-suffering people of Scarborough deserve helicopters, ponies, and housing?

Does that sound absurd? Well here’s the really absurd part: you could do all that for the newly announced price of building a single one-stop extension to the Bloor-Danforth subway line.

On Friday, it was revealed that now that people have studied actually tunnelling and constructing the six-kilometre Scarborough subway extension — rather than just working from the hazy crayon line drawings on which the project was approved by three levels of government and on which tax increases were imposed — the price will now be in the range of $2.9 billion, and almost one-third increase on the previous guesstimate.

This number should kill this project. Period. There is no way to justify spending that much money to serve this few riders.