[URBAN NOTE] "A Brief History of SmartTrack, so Far"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's David Fleischer explains the backstory behind SmartTrack, Toronto's latest foolishly half-hearted flirtation with ambitious mass transit plans.

As a branded proposal, SmartTrack is just over two years old, but writing a “brief history” of the transit proposal first launched in May 2014 is daunting.

What is SmartTrack? Where does it come from? Where is it going (literally and figuratively)? These are some of the great questions of our age. There’s great analysis of them here and all around by Steve Munro and others. We’re going to try to sum up the history of what is, for better and worse, Mayor John Tory’s signature transit policy.

Working backwards to find SmartTrack’s Ur-moment—the point at which it crawled out of the primordial ooze onto the land of transit-planning reality—is tricky, but it definitely doesn’t start with John Tory and the 2014 mayoral campaign.

[. . .]

Since they first hit the rails in 1967, GO trains have operated (especially outside the Lakeshore lines) as little more than one-way, rush hour-only service for commuters. That changed with the announcement of Metrolinx’s The Big Move in 2008; this included plans to replace the existing diesel GO vehicles with electric trains that would provide all-day, two-way service. It’s the sort of thing that has long existed in actual “world class” cities, like Paris and New York. It’s called—brace yourselves—Regional Express Rail! (RER for short, obviously.)

Metrolinx began studying how to turn this idea into reality a few years ago and has had a real plan [PDF] since 2014. The short-term upshot was to first electrify the Lakeshore line. New stations, twinning of rail lines, expanded parking lots (of course); it’s all happening over the next 10 years.