Time for some transit realism

Though questions remain, Wynne’s funding plan is welcome while the opposition keeps offering magical solutions

When politicians talk about transit, what they don’t say matters more than what they do. On Monday, we heard from both Premier Kathleen Wynne and Opposition leader Tim Hudak about their plans to bring transit in the Greater Toronto Area into the 21st century. Though Wynne said much more about how she will raise the $29 billion she committed to transit over the next decade, Hudak continued his fiction that the money can be found by waving his magic Tory wand. Wynne was cagey in a speech given to the Toronto Region Board of Trade this week, but did promise a portion of the gas tax, green bonds and other revenue sources that will be outlined in the upcoming budget. Given the amount of money needed, however, and the growing transit deficit, the time for vagueness is over.

Neither Hudak nor NDP leader Andrea Horwath deserves to be taken seriously; their insistence that transit can be built without new money is nonsense.

Wynne, the only provincial leader who has broached the subject with any degree of honesty, brings so much gas-plant baggage to the debate she has little room to manoeuvre.

And even if the funding issues were settled, there’s still the question of what to build and where. Rob Ford’s Scarborough subway is a crass political ploy. The one scheme everyone agrees would help most, the downtown relief line, remains years away.

There are also concerns about Finch, Sheppard and the Queens Quay East LRT promised years ago.

Looming over everything is Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency unable to fulfil its mandate.

In the meantime, we have heard from other experts who argue that the best return on investment is to be had from GO, whose lines have huge capacity to grow. Londonbased Michael Schabas suggests the relief line could run on GO tracks at a fraction of what a subway would cost.

By coincidence, respected U.K. transit consultant, David Quarmby, came to town recently to extol the virtues of creating an uber transit authority with power over everything from subway lines to street parking.

Certainly, Toronto and the GTA suffer from lack of leadership. Without a shared vision, transit gets pushed in a different direction with each new regime. When elected, Ford killed Transit City, a fully planned and funded program. When Wynne loses, her successor could well decide to start from scratch. Let’s not forget, Hudak was a member of the Mike Harris cabinet when he killed the Eglinton subway in 1995 after construction had begun.

Clearly, transit needs as much distance as it can get from politics. The region has been poorly served by the sort of logic that leads officialdom to choose a Scarborough subway over the DRL, diesel over electrification, ridership over capacity, etc. In every case, the city, province and their agencies have made the wrong choice.

None understands the difference between expenditure and investment. And in a world where almost nothing matters to the political classes but lower taxes, transit is anathema. It costs a lot and takes forever to complete, which makes it problematic for those who see no further than the next news cycle.

And so Quarmby’s mega-authority grows more attractive with each passing decade of inaction. Thanks to Ford, Toronto has just squandered another four years.

Some things are too important to be left to the vagaries of a political system that makes winners of losers while ignoring most of us. It may be called democracy, but it has little to do with the people. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca