Tag Archives: Eglinton LRT

The Nub Of It

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“Getting to the nub of it.” 16h06m at yesterday’s Executive Committee meeting, after Gordon Chong’s ‘Toronto Transit: Back on Track’ report on the Sheppard subway extension had been delivered and the debate and discussion raged, famously loquacious Councillor Michael Thompson bid everyone to cut to the chase and get to the nub of the matter at hand.

People want subways, people.

OK, fuck. You know what? You big bunch of crybabies want a subway so bad, fine. Extend your fucking Sheppard subway, east, west, both. I don’t care. You refuse to listen to reason. Hell, Dr. Chong, D.D.S., gave us permission to stop paying attention to experts which I’ll remember next I go to the dentist and am told the sharp, shooting pain in my back left molar is a cavity that needs to be fixed. Nah, you know what, doc? My gut tells me the searing sensation is more a respiratory affliction. The tooth only hurts when I breathe. Vicks VapoRub should do the trick.

It’s like dealing with a two year-old’s temper tantrum. Red faced, hands over ears, screaming at the top of their lungs, stomping both feet on the ground. We want a subway! You have a subway! Why can’t we have a subway?! We want a subway!! We want a subway!!

But here’s the deal. The Eglinton LRT stays as is according to the Transit City configuration city council voted to re-install last week. Underground where necessary, above ground where possible. That means all the way west of Keele and east of Laird above ground. To bury it all the way takes valuable transit from both Sheppard and Finch Aves. That’s a little bit selfish on your part to demand otherwise, wouldn’t you say?

Secondly, you want a subway, start talking congestion fees, tolls and all the other vehicle fees and levies that KPMG floated as possibilities (Table 26, page 85 of the report) for filling that glaring funding gap staring up at you from the pages of Dr. Chong’s report. Oh yeah, that’s right. No matter how shiny a spin he put on the concept of the public-private partnership that would build the subway for a fraction of the cost estimate delivered by the TTC, even with the bestest of best case scenarios with everything falling just perfectly into place, there was still a great big chunk o’ change shortfall. Nearly a billion dollars to be exact.

Seems Mayor Ford was a little off in promising to build your precious subway completely with private sector money. Not possible. The report from his own handpicked representative says so, unequivocally if a little sneakily.

So which promise will the mayor have to break? Not build subways or not jack up fees and charges for car owners? He can’t not not do one without not not doing the other. Or.. wait.. he can’t not do one without doing the other.. or he can’t do one without not doing..

It’s all so confusing. Is the War on the Car over or not? Because it’s now crystal clear to everyone but the most wilfully obstinate: the Sheppard subway extension can only be delivered with the help of a basketful of increases to the cost of operating a private vehicle in this city. Anyone claiming otherwise is simply being dishonest and spinning a fantasy, regaling the electorate with a fairytale.

If Mayor Ford and his subway supporters are so sure that he was elected on a mandate to build subways, that the people want subways, I challenge them to run a serious poll question. Would you prefer subways to LRTs if it meant a substantial increase in fees paid to own and operate a private vehicle? Frame it in a way that best captures the reality of the situation, that gets to the nub of it, you might say.

If a majority responds, hells yeah!, well then, we have ourselves a completely different situation than the one Mayor Ford is currently trying to convince us of, where subways can be built at no extra cost to the already put upon taxpayers of Toronto. We can all join with the suddenly Big Idea conservative caucus at city council who normally take any and every opportunity to lambast the former Miller regime for its political overreach, and build us a real, first class transit system with subways running everywhere, up and down, back and forth and beyond, even if it doesn’t make a lick of technical sense. People want subways, people. They’re even willing to pay for it.

And if they’re not? If they answer in the negative to the question, Would you prefer subways to LRTs if it meant a substantial increase in fees paid to own and operate a private vehicle? Well, sorry. You can’t have your subways. That’s not just me, a downtown, subway hoarding elitist telling you no either. Gordon Chong, his associates and the good folks from KPMG have put it down in writing. You want subways? Fine. It’s going to cost you. Until subway fans are willing to grow up and face that most unpleasant of facts, and start talking openly about new taxes and fees instead of referring to them euphemistically and obliquely (transit revenue tools) as if by not saying the dirty words out loud, it doesn’t really count, then all this is merely a diversion, a big ol’ waste of time and resources. Cheap, political grandstanding that has already set transit planning in this city back decades.

— sick and tiredly submitted by Cityslikr

Author Of His Own Misfortune

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I’m flying blind here, a patchy distant spectator to last week’s critical stage of the seemingly never-ending transit debate at city council. The Great Stintz Uprising has probably been covered thoroughly from the last train to engine. But do we here in Toronto ever tire of talking transit planning? My educated guess is that this will hardly be the last word on the matter.

The near perfectly played Stintzinian Manoeuvre should hardly have come as a surprise although Mayor Ford certainly reacted like it was. Among the chattering class here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke, we had long pondered what she was doing, a relatively moderate right of centre councillor, fraternizing with the hardcore conservative ideologues that make up the mayor’s club. There were mayoral ambitions on her part to be sure, dating back as far as 2006. Perhaps the goal all along was to use a very high profile spot like, say, TTC chair to mount an insider coup. Work with Mayor Ford for a bit, play the good, faithful soldier until the time was right, and when and where the mayor appeared weak, boom. Hey. I tried working with these guys but they’re deaf to compromise, unwilling to listen to any other voices except their own. Transit intransigent.

By breaking so publicly with Team Ford, on such a highly charged item like transit, Councillor Stintz helped isolate them, reinforcing the ‘radical’ tag council’s left guard had been touting since the new year. In fact, Team Ford wasn’t at all the reasonable, responsible types they claimed themselves to be. The TTC Chair offered up the Sheppard subway in return for keeping the Eglinton LRT above ground eastward from Laird Drive and they wouldn’t budge. Not even an inch. She was the voice of moderation, the true fiscal conservative of the bunch. Karen Stintz for Mayor in 2014!

Or maybe that’s all too Machiavellian, too fiendishly scheming to be true outside of a tightly scripted political narrative. Maybe the councillor accepted the position as TTC chair hoping to exert a moderating influence on the Ford administration. Knowing the mayor as she did from his days on council, Stintz felt she would act as the voice of reason on the transit file that, despite the mayor and his supporters’ insistence that he was elected to build subways, had always been an after-thought to him, a campaign throw-in that seemed to emerge only when he was pushed to answer how he was going to handle transit if elected mayor. When it became clear that, in fact, he was going to good and truly cock things up with his harebrained No Streetcars On My Watch pursuit, Councillor Stintz had to make a stand. Not only for the good of the city’s transit future but, quite possibly, her own.

Until she writes her biography or announces her intention to run for mayor in a couple years, it’ll be nothing more than a guessing game, armchair quarterbacking. In fact, the bigger head-scratcher about all this should be Mayor Ford’s actions. How did he get so badly played or whatever exactly it was his TTC chair did to him. What does it say about his approach to governing that he was overwhelmingly outflanked?

Councillor Stintz had been publicly uneasy with his insistence in burying all of the Eglinton LRT for a few months prior to last week’s showdown. She’d openly expressed her concern about ‘unresolved technical issues’ of crossing the Don valley underground. Red flag, Mayor Ford. Red flag.

Then came the last TTC commission meeting where the Chair asked for a staff report exploring various options including keeping the Eglinton line pretty much like it was in the thought to be deceased Transit City plan. Underground where necessary, above ground where possible. The commission beat that one back but the die was cast. The Chair was going rogue and the mayor was either unable to do anything about it or unconcerned that he would have to. Mayors simply don’t lose on matters of this import.

He was right about that. Mayors don’t lose on issues that big. It just seems Mayor Ford didn’t understand why which may explain how he lost the lead on transit.

It’s almost as if during his 10 years on city council, Ford looked on as both Mayors Lastman and then Miller implemented their respective mandates, relatively unscathed, and concluded that if he just became mayor, he too could push his agenda through. Just like that. Become mayor, rule the city.

Certainly he’d operated that way since assuming office. Decree this, declare that. Who dares defy me! Taking no notice of some surprising setbacks along the way including about $19 million worth in this year’s budget, the mayor blustered on, wilfully ignoring the notion of negotiation that his predecessors had engaged in in order not to be caught flat-footed in council chambers. Being elected mayor gave him an unfettered mandate apparently.

And his reaction and that of his ardent supporters to the defeat at Wednesday’s special council meeting only serves to further underline his regal and shockingly anti-democratic pretensions. Lose big at council? Irrelevant. His mandate would not be derailed merely by a council vote. Hadn’t the 27 councillors who voted against him been listening to his voters? They wanted subways. Subways they would have.

No retreat. No surrender. No compromise. Evidently, a mayor’s vote and the votes of those who voted for him count for more than the councillors who opposed him and their voters. Mayor Ford appears oblivious to how the system he was elected to lead works. He seems incapable or unwilling to abide by the rules and protocol, learning how to play nice, opting instead to bludgeon on, convinced that a big stick is all he needs to beat enough of council into submission.

Divide and conquer propelled him into the mayor’s chair and got him nicely through his first year or so in office. But is that all he’s got in his tool box? A plan B certainly isn’t obvious. There is no finesse. Only rage, indignation and narrow minded resentment.

Such a limited repertoire gets old awfully quickly. Wednesday’s special meeting and vote shows opponents will figure out how to successfully contest it. In this simple bifurcated world Mayor Ford thrives in, an us versus them scenario, all that needs happen for it to falter is there to be more them than us. The mayor has made it very easy for previously stalwart allies like Councillor Stintz to change teams. It’s hard to see how, without some sort of 180-degree turn in approach, he’s going to get them back on side again.

— back in the saddlely submitted by Cityslikr

You Can Have Your Subway, Sir. But It’ll Cost You.

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Pssst. Residents of Scarborough. You’re not falling for it, are you? He’s the Little Engine That Could. Mayor Ford (Secretly) Loves Transit City.

This story is so fucking messy and convoluted, 2 parts farce and 1 part tragedy, I don’t even know where to begin. It’s all stop, start. A good idea followed by a dud but then upon reflection, hey, that’s not too bad either. To paraphrase Gordon Chong, I have to confess that over the last few moments I have gone from optimism to deflation about this post but now I’m back on track.

Unlike transit planning in Toronto. Ba-dum-tsssh! I got a million of them, folks.

Watching Mayor Ford’s Scarborough press conference yesterday where he basically announced he would be no longer listening to his handpicked TTC chair, I couldn’t help wonder just how much gullibility remained in the pool of support Scarborough residents had toward the mayor. The former east side municipality showed a lot of love for candidate Ford in the 2010 municipal election, voting overwhelmingly for him. While such heady numbers have slipped in recent opinion polls, the mayor is still more popular in Scarborough than anywhere else in the city.

Despite reneging on at least one of his major campaign platforms (“No Service Cuts. Guaranteed.”) that has hit Scarborough particularly hard, Mayor Ford was there with his Grey Cup, just one of you folks’ football jacket to express solidarity with his peeps and let them know that he would not fail them on the matter of subways. He said he would rid their streets of the scourge of streetcars, and that’s what he was going to do. Subways were the only way to go, the only form of rapid transit according to the mayor. So burying all the Eglinton LRT was the only sensible, reasonable thing to do.

And with all the savings that wouldn’t be seen doing that, he would build the fine taxpayers of Scarborough a real, honest to god subway by extending the Sheppard subway east to the Scarborough Town Centre. I love you, Scarborough! Thank you and g’night!

Before all the sceptics out there could finish their first eye roll and mumble something about pixie dust, Mayor Ford had the hard facts to prove that his transportation plan was ‘doable’. Excerpts from the long awaited report from former councillor and both TTC and GO Transit vice-chair, Gordon Chong, began leaking out. Hells yeah, we can build the Sheppard subway extension. The private sector was chomping at the bit to get the party started. They might even pony up as much as 50, 60% of the cost in return for three to decades of air rights and such. Come on. What are you waiting for?

That only leaves, what, 40-50% left over for the city to pick up since the province has washed its hands off any involvement in a Sheppard subway. No problem, right? We’ll just start levying tolls, congestion fees, hiking parking rates, maybe get us some municipal sales taxing powers.

Wait, what? Where the hell did all that come from? Isn’t that kind of talk a little, I don’t know, war-y on the car? I thought that had been declared over and done with.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I would love to have that conversation but if we’re going down that road (or tunnelling under it to reduce the traffic), it changes everything. LRTs versus subways, where and how many. It’s, what do they call it? A game-changer.

If the mayor really wants to open that discussion, I’m all ears. But until he does, until he comes right out and says, yeah, I’m willing to talk about road tolls, then Gordon Chong’s report is an absolute non-starter, meaningless, not worth the paper it’s written on and certainly not worth the money paid to Mr. Chong to write it.

And how exactly does Mayor Ford approach that subject? Remember when he told us the city didn’t have a revenue problem, it had a spending problem? Remember how he championed the removal of the vehicle registration tax? Remember?

Now he’s going to turn around and try to persuade all those he’d convinced on the campaign trail that they were over-taxed and under-serviced that if they really wanted that subway he promised wouldn’t cost them an extra cent, well, they were going to have to chip in a little more to help out. And oh how they will look back on those wistful, innocent days of paying the VRT, and laugh and laugh at how they’d been fooled into believing the city didn’t have a revenue problem. Your basic case of lying to Peter to pay Paul.

But what’s the alternative for the mayor? Rejecting the notion of any additional revenue generation from private vehicle use leaves him with no ability to pay for a Sheppard subway extension into his beloved Scarborough. That means all he’s accomplished is unnecessarily burying the eastern portion of the Eglinton LRT while depriving many of the neighbourhoods of additional new transit lines.

At which point, many transit users in Scarborough would be right in asking, so why bury the Eglinton LRT? It won’t be the first time the question’s been asked. Certainly it’s one Councillor Karen Stintz, the TTC chair, wondered out loud. By any measure, Mayor Ford’s transportation plan without at least the eastward Sheppard subway extension amounts to less new public transit for Scarborough. No road tolls, congestion fees etc. means no Sheppard subway. There’s no getting around that fact.

And if the mayor can’t guarantee Scarborough anything other than a buried Eglinton LRT isn’t resurrecting Transit City from the dead the next logical step? Hey. It ain’t subways but it’s a whole shit load better than what’s there now, folks.

This is what you might refer to as being between a rock and a hard place for the mayor. By building a subway, he’s going to have to find a way to re-define the so-called war on cars. Failing that, he faces becoming the poster boy for a transit plan he unilaterally tried to kill, doing what its supporters failed to do properly way back when. Promoting and championing it as a doable, more affordable way to get better transit to those lacking it.

— Barbarinoily submitted by Cityslikr