[URBAN NOTE] Two more links on the Scarborough subway extension

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's Fatima Syed wonders why Tory introduced the race card into his discussion of the Scarborough extension.

“[M]any of the subway’s loudest critics do not live or work in Scarborough, where more than half the population is born outside of Canada,” wrote Tory. “When they say this is too much to spend on a subway, the inference seems to be that it’s too much to spend on this part of the city.”

These two lines, near the end of the editorial, read like seemingly nonchalant remarks, sandwiched between comments about how to pay for transit and the city’s greater transit expansion strategy that includes the Scarborough subway.

You can almost bypass his comment, until you realize what he didn’t address: what does immigration have to do with transit? And why is the mayor of a city with the world’s highest proportion of foreign-born residents making such a comment in an op-ed about a subway system the municipality keeps failing to fund properly?

I don’t doubt these sentiments exist — actually, I’m positive they do. But as mayor, Tory shouldn’t have left his statement hanging. As a self-styled advocate of Toronto’s much-vaunted diversity, he has a responsibility to strongly oppose those who claim that anti-immigrant sentiments are driving in transit policy. He had a responsibility to prove those arguments wrong.

Instead, his silence reads like a betrayal to immigrant communities across the city. He is allowing the transit debate to turn into a very ugly matter of race and identity. That it hasn’t is a testament to the city itself, and makes me question how many anti-immigrant transit opponents there even are among us.

Edward Keenan in the Toronto Star notes that there is a case for the extension, but also notes that the politicians in support of the extension aren't big on the sorts of long-term thinking needed.

[W]hat the city’s staff were saying — emphatically — on Tuesday is that the subway stop is not a plan that can or should be considered in isolation. [City planner Jennifer] Keesmaat emphasized that the extension is part of a proposed network, and if you removed any single part of it, you’d need to scrap everything and go back to planning square one.

That network includes the SmartTrack version of GO’s express rail plan, with five stops in Scarborough (including one in a neighbourhood the LRT would have served), with trains arriving every 8.6 minutes during rush hour. And there’s the 19-stop Eglinton East LRT extension from Kennedy station to U of T Scarborough, which will provide good, high-order local service to central Scarborough. There’s also the relief subway line Byford insisted remains the TTC’s highest priority, necessary to open up space on downtown-bound trains across the whole system.

If you build that network to serve a variety of local neighbourhoods and open up subway capacity, then the main job — the one job — of the Scarborough subway extension is to provide fast travel to and from one neighbourhood. And more precisely, to re-invent that neighbourhood.

Scarborough Town Centre is a mall with easy highway access, bus connections to other cities and some nearby government administrative buildings. It has a lot of parking. But there are only a few residential and office buildings within what you could call walking distance.

As Keesmaat said, the existing streetscape is full of flyovers and highway off-ramps and wide high-speed roads. The formerly industrial area doesn’t right now offer property values that make it worth developing. “The market isn’t yet ready for intensification,” she said.