Transit City: Yet Another Failure

Toronto's track record with grand transit projects has been dismal. Why did anyone think this one would be different?

For many, the recently announced delay (some would say death) of Toronto’s Transit City light rail plan is a cause for celebration. For others, grief.

Whatever you think of Transit City, the entire situation begs the question: What exactly is the state of large-scale transit planning in Toronto?

Large-scale planning, it seems, just doesn’t work.

Remember, Toronto’s been down this path before. In the mid-90s, the Eglinton subway line had shovels in the dirt but was cancelled in favour of the much-maligned and voter-friendly Sheppard subway. Look back a little further and you discover Toronto’s Network 2011 plan. This never-realized 1985 concept included the near-mythical downtown relief line as well as an Eglinton subway line. Go back even further and you find remnants of the Queen Street subway line, a concept abandoned in favour of the Bloor-Danforth line.

What’s most shocking about the demise of Transit City is not that it happened, but that most people were surprised it happened. Given past experience, shouldn’t Torontonians have expected this? Toronto has never seen a project as grand as Transit City realized. What made us think this time would be different?

To realize a plan of this magnitude required city hall to forget about the big picture and focus instead on the small details. City hall needed to plan and build one transit line, not seven. And they needed to execute that plan quickly and perfectly. Had they done that, there would’ve been all the political and public support necessary to finish the job. Instead, city hall spent the better part of the last decade planning Transit City’s gargantuan scale. The vast majority of energy, it seems, was spent on the politics. And now that the socio-political and economic climate has changed, that plan is in tatters.

So long as the time it takes to plan and implement a project is longer than the business or political cycle it was crafted in, there’s no reason to believe this won’t continue. The only way around that problem is to act with speed and precision, two things grand planning is terrible at.

Toronto transit advocates will make the case that the issue here is not with the size of the plan but with the money available to build it. Toronto, after all, receives limited subsidies from senior levels of government. With said subsidies, the argument goes, the TTC would be free to expand as they see fit. But if that were true, why did the TTC suffer through similar episodes when they did receive provincial subsidies?

The truth is, this has little to do with subsidies. The Metro De Medellin in Colombia, for example, is in a near-constant state of expansion and relies on zero subsidies from senior levels of government, despite being a public entity. Fully 100 per cent of its revenue comes from the fare box and the system posts a minor profit most years. It also happens to be one of the cleanest, most well-run transit systems you’re likely to encounter.

The Metro De Medellin is also aggressively apolitical, something Toronto transit planning is not. Relying on subsidies makes transit dependent on those who choose whether or not to dole it out. When transit becomes politicized, it becomes subject to all the things politics are subject to: tax revenue, party affiliation, business cycles, political cycles, and elections.

As it is highly unlikely that the TTC will forsake provincial subsidies and even more unlikely that city hall and Queens Park will forcefully separate politics and transit, there’s really only one good solution left.

Plan small and be quick about it.