[URBAN NOTE] Torontoist on the Yonge and Scarborough subway extensions

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist is unflattering in its description of John Tory's defense of the Scarborough subway extension.

Yesterday was a victory for John Tory and his Council allies. At long last, the mayor passed a series of motions about the future of Toronto’s transit network, and he got what he wanted. This includes Council support for the one-stop, 6.2-kilometre subway extension in Scarborough that will cost $3.2 billion. At the same time, Council voted down a proposed seven-stop LRT in lieu of the one-stop subway, although the LRT would have cost less money, carried more passengers, and would operate sooner.

Although Tory was on his way to certain victory, that didn’t stop critics of his transit plan from taking a stand to articulate their opposition. And just before Council voted to approve the plans, when Tory responded to questions from Josh Matlow (Ward 22, St. Paul’s), the mayor didn’t look good.

Before the exchange between Tory and Matlow, the mayor gave a speech about honest debate, why he supports the one-stop subway, and the mandate for his mayoralty.

“I really believe that a big part of the job that I was elected to do,” Tory said, “is to bring the city together. I really believe that’s fundamentally important.”

Tory then argued that Scarborough residents don’t have the same opportunities as other parts of the city. He mentioned that 40 per cent of downtown residents can walk to work. “Why don’t we want to have a number that even begins to get close to that in Scarborough,” he asked rhetorically. He went on to say that this is “in the interest of the environment, in the interest of fairness, in the interest of opportunity on the part of those people.”

While Tory made an appeal to unify behind the Scarborough subway extension, the underlying facts to support the argument are questionable at best, and flat-out wrong at worst. The one-stop subway extension will decrease job accessibility by 0.7 per cent compared to the existing SRT, according to the staff report. A seven-stop LRT would have served 8,000 people during the peak ridership hour compared to 7,300 for the one-stop subway, and more than 10 times as many people (47,000) would be in walking distance of transit. The LRT route would also better serve the Neighbourhood Improvement Areas that Tory invokes.

It gets worse.

Elsewhere, David Fleischler defends plans to extend the Yonge subway line further north into York Region, on grounds of plausible future demand.

While the Scarborough subway circus is in full bloom, you may miss the hullabaloo surrounding another suburban plan, the Yonge North Extension. It would take the Yonge subway seven kilometres north from its current terminus at Finch, across Steeles Avenue and into York Region. While the subway “to Richmond Hill” does terminate just inside the town’s south border, it mostly runs through Willowdale and then Thornhill, which is divided at Yonge Street between Markham and Vaughan. After a decade of near stasis, York Region politicians are starting to ruffle some feathers. They requested infrastructure funding from the Prime Minister, and now they have launched a petition and website designed to rally support.

[. . . Only the Yonge extension is (condtionally) approved by city council, its Environmental Assessment has gathered dust since 2009. The projected costs are around $4 billion and, as with the DRL, no source is earmarked. Unlike that other suburban subway, the extension is expected to add so many new riders that it will potentially push Yonge-Bloor past the breaking point and overwhelm the system.

[. . .]

Toronto has a series of legitimate concerns, but let’s take a deep breath and try to see things from York Region’s perspective for a minute.

The provincial planning regime emphasizes intensification and Markham, Vaughan and Richmond Hill are among the few municipalities to treat the mandated 40 per cent intensification minimum as something other than a maximum. So, York Region is doing precisely what the province requires, and with less infrastructure than promised. When it comes to the touchy capacity issue, they hang their hats on a Metrolinx report that showed there’s a sliver to exploit, if other things are done correctly.

Whereas Scarborough has precisely zero new residential units planned and whereas even Jennifer Keesmaat proclaims it “isn’t yet ready” for intensification (though the city designated it a node in 1981), plans are already in place along York Region’s subway corridor for more than 50,000 new residents and (hopefully) jobs to match. Markham and Richmond Hill brought in world class urban design firms to harness a unique convergence of transit and create precisely the sort of transit- and pedestrian-oriented centres we say we want to see in the suburbs. Toronto is also updating its Secondary Plan for the area, making this arguably the single biggest potential intensification corridor in the region.

Condo developers are taking advantage of the new zoning rather than waiting for the subway. In response to this demand, 2,500 buses rumble through the corridor every day, spewing fumes, chewing up the roads and making travel awfully inefficient for local transit users. Indeed, for all the concerns about how the extension will make it easier for 905ers to take seats away from downstream 416 riders, there are already thousands every day biking, busing and especially driving to Finch Station already.