Chris Selley: Politics get in the way of proper transit planning in GTA

Written by: Chris Selley

TORONTO — Consider Lawrence East station, on the Scarborough RT near Kennedy Avenue. In 2015, on a typical workday, an average of 8,133 sets of feet touch down on its platforms. Under the current plan to replace the SRT with a one-stop extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line to Scarborough Town Centre, people who use Lawrence East as a transfer point — especially those heading to Scarborough Town Centre — may end up somewhat inconvenienced. It shouldn’t be a huge deal, but some people will come out on the losing end of the deal.

Scarborough Transit Action (STA), a group that supports an endlessly debated light rail replacement for the SRT, chose Lawrence East this month to mount a protest. It claimed 80 per cent of riders they surveyed didn’t even know the station would disappear. “The news hasn’t talked about the fact that people are going to lose their stations,” Moya Beall of the STA told CBC.

Fact check: the news has certainly talked about that. Ad nauseum. For years. Every time city council debated it, every time it changed its mind, every time a new report cast doubt on ridership projections, we talked about it. No one who doesn’t go out of her way to avoid the news could have missed this. But in any event, Beall thinks pressure will build at city hall to revert to the LRT option, which is vastly cheaper and would serve more people, once the reality sets in.

Assuming the one-stop subway wins the day, however, Mayor John Tory and Premier Kathleen Wynne have a consolation prize to offer Lawrence East commuters: a new GO train station nearby would, in theory, offer a fast, no-transfer trip downtown for the same price as a TTC fare. That was Tory’s SmartTrack pitch, anyway; the details are very much in flux, as Metrolinx deliberates incorporating it into their existing plans for frequent, all-day, electrified GO service throughout the GTA.

Writ large, it’s still a good pitch. But when Metrolinx ran the numbers, it found Lawrence East didn’t mesh well with its regional plans. “Despite having the potential to replace transit service for residents that would be lost with the removal of the SRT, the station could result in a net ridership loss on the Stouffville line (because of) increased travel times,” the agency reported last year.

The Metrolinx boffins nixed other stations, too, including one proposed for the intersection of Keele Street and Kirby Road, on the GO line to Barrie in Vaughan. Most people who would use the station already use others, analysts found, and the overall person-hours wasted would vastly exceed those saved.

Metrolinx being the arm’s-length body tasked with making GTA transit decisions logically and dispassionately, you might think that would be the end of that — or you might if you were one of those people going out of her way to avoid news. The day after the Metrolinx board voted (in secret) not to proceed with the Lawrence East and Kirby stations, the Toronto Star reported this week, the agency was informed that Transport Minister Steven Del Duca intended to soon announce that both were to be approved.

A monsoon of emails and meetings between Metrolinx and government officials ensued, and then — presto, change-o — the board met in public and came to the opposite decision.

Why the political pressure? Far be it from me to speculate. Some cynical wags have noted the Kirby station is in Del Duca’s riding, and that Lawrence East would be useful in maintaining good relations both with Tory and with the aforementioned Scarborough transit riders. Such coincidences happen an awful lot when it comes to transit planning, it must be said — not least in Scarborough, where the Liberals have (for now) shamelessly hopped aboard the highly dubious subway plan.

These not-so-shocking revelations have elicited calls for reform — perhaps even a wholesale reorganization of way Metrolinx is governed, to shield billions of dollars’ worth of transit decision-making from cheap, short-term politicking. It’s a charming idea, and a perennial one. Political meddling in transit is as old as transit. But that’s the problem: if the government were remotely interested in independent transit decision-making, its transport minister wouldn’t have stuck his fingers in the pie to begin with.

This is what Ontario governments do. You might as well ask a pack of koalas to outsource collective decision-making on eucalyptus leaves. And if you have been paying attention to the Scarborough transit debate all these years, you know the worst part: compared with Toronto city council, Metrolinx and Queen’s Park are fonts of sober wisdom.