[URBAN NOTE] "The Agony of Watching Toronto’s Transit Planning Unfold"

[rfmcdonald]

There is humour to Tricia Wood's Torontoist article on the absurdity of Toronto transit politics, but I wonder. Theatre reviewers who see this, how would you rate this ongoing drama?

I’m starting to think the Scarborough transit extension plan has the City stuck inside an absurdist play. Every time we’ve convinced ourselves we know what we are doing, someone tells us up is down or less is more.

Every shiny thing must be chased. Let’s see where this path goes! We think we’re getting somewhere, but it’s the train beside us that’s moving. It’s just an optical illusion.

[. . .]

The Toronto Star’s Jennifer Pagliaro, has been digging into the details of the long (long, long, long) process of how City Council turned Transit City, a broad LRT network, into a one-stop subway extension to the Scarborough Town Centre.

Combing through almost 4,000 pages of documents obtained through freedom of information requests, Pagliaro discovered that TTC spokesperson Brad Ross emailed a briefing note to the mayor’s office in June, with a confusing estimate of costs for the Scarborough LRT.

Both the process of circulating the memo to the mayor and its content appear a bit out of the ordinary. It nearly doubled the cost of the LRT (from $1.8 to $2.97 billion) by putting its start and completion date years later than they would have been, making those cost figures larger than they would be.