Come back, Transit City, all is forgiven

Holy crap, it’s been an insanely enraging week (or month, or year) of news from the world of Toronto transit. Right now, as I type this, apparently 70 people are lined up to speak to the TTC commissioners about the proposed 10-cent fare hike. But really the increase—around the rate of inflation, thanks to TTC Chair Karen Stintz’s refusal to consider a 15-cent fare increase—is the least of a transit users’ worries.

First, the very recent news:

Earlier this week, Gordon Chong, the man hand-picked by the mayor to figure out how to give us a private-sector financed subway extension on Sheppard Avenue, told the Globe and Mail that there is no way the private sector will pay for more than 10 to 30 per cent of the cost of construction, and that to find out if we can even get that much from them, we’ll need to spend another $10 million over the next year.

Then yesterday, TTC General Manager Gary Webster told city council’s budget committee that the city will be on the hook for at least $65 million in costs simply to cancel Transit City. That was higher than the numbers previously cited, and it is mysteriously not included in the TTC capital budget currently under debate. The really troubling question about that $65 million (or more—the number has not been finalized) is that city council has never, ever authorized spending it, or agreed to spend it. City council has still never had a vote on replacing Transit City with the Ford subway scheme—the provincial agency Metrolinx has changed plans based simply on the mayor’s expressed desire, and Metrolinx and the mayor cooked up a memorandum of understanding about the change that says the province will have no additional costs related to the change and that the city will cover any sunk costs Metrolinx has already incurred related to building the original plan. The meter is still running on those costs, but so far they total $65 million.

The mayor of Toronto does not have the authority to spend that money, or to agree to spend that money, without approval from council. Hell, the mayor cannot order office supplies without seeking competitive bids, and he cannot give out or cut a $10,000 grant without getting full council approval. It’s as if he snuck out with the city credit card when no one was looking and charged an open-ended tab with Metrolinx. And the costs on that tab are the costs of not building anything. At least $65 million.

Just to make it clear: these are not costs the city was spending anyway because it planned to spend a lot more. That is arguably the case with the Fort York bridge, where we’d already spent $1.3 million and decided not to spend any more to complete the project. In this case, the city was not going to pay a single dime for the construction of Transit City; the provincial government was going to cover the entire cost. The new plan is that the province now spends all of that money on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line, and the city will now have to pay $65 million or more to cover the losses on cancelling Transit City.

It’s useful to remember here that the MFP computer leasing scandal that definitively ruined Mel Lastman’s reputation was a case where a contract went $42 million over-budget. The St. Clair Right-of-Way construction fiasco under David Miller that poisoned much of the city on the idea of new streetcars was controversial in part because the project went $58 million over-budget. So $65 million is a truly scandalous number by any definition, and the mayor has committed the city to pay it—to waste it, if you ask me, since the city gets nothing at all in return for it—without approval from city council. (You cannot really argue he had approval from the taxpayers who elected him, since this number is a big surprise, and we still do not even know what the final number will be—former TTC Chair Adam Giambrone thinks it will be closer to $195 million.)

The only way he has been able to get away with it so far is because while the mayor does not have authority to spend that kind of  money on the city’s behalf all on his own, the provincial government does. The city has no powers of any kind unless the province gives it powers. If it wanted to, the provincial government could eliminate the entire city government with a simple act of parliament (and, in a way, has done so before with 1998′s Bill 103). The province can compel the city to spend as much money as it wants to. So Metrolinx, a provincial agency, is apparently free to write a memorandum of understanding committing the city to covering these costs. It did so, apparently, because it was under the impression after last year’s election that the Mayor had popular support to change the plan. A year later, now that we have some real information about how the old and new plans compare, it’s worth revisiting that decision and talking about whether we should ask Metrolinx to reverse it.

An overview of how the new plan is shaking out:

Under the old plan, Transit City, Metrolinx was going to build new LRT lines that would be separated from traffic on Finch, Sheppard and Eglinton. The Eglinton line would run underground through the central city, and above ground in the suburban areas where Eglinton widens. (In Scarborough, it is a seven-lane road for much of its length.) Traffic would barely be affected and, in most places, no lanes of car traffic would be lost. These lines would function like subway lines, rather than like streetcar lines, as above-ground LRT lines do elsewhere in the world. Transit City would also replace the existing Scarborough RT with a new LRT line and extend the Spadina subway line to York University and into Vaughan. The Sheppard LRT, which was under construction as of late last year, would have run out to Malvern and would have opened in 2014. The Finch line would have run west out to serve north Etobicoke, and would have been finished in 2019. The Eglinton Crosstown line would have been completed by 2020. City council approved moving forward with Environmental Assessments and planning on Transit City by a vote of 37-2. The total cost of  $8.4 billion would be paid in full by the provincial government.

Rob Ford’s plan, accepted by Metrolinx, was to scrap most of that. Instead, we would bury the entire Eglinton Crosstown line, which would now run out and replace the Scarborough LRT. Then he planned to have private-sector partners pony up to extend, without Metrolinx’s help, the existing Sheppard Subway out to Scarborough Town Centre. That was the whole plan. North Etobicoke and Malvern in East Scarborough were out of luck; they’d get no new transit service. Eglinton would be completed in 2022, and Sheppard would be completed… no one’s sure yet. The total cost of the new plan is $12.91 billion, of which the province would pay $8.4 billion, just like in the old plan (except now all of it would be spent on Eglinton) and the city would find the rest for the new Sheppard subway extension. The mayor told us not to worry, because the private sector would pay the entire cost of the Sheppard line. He hired Gordon Chong to make that business-financing mojo happen.

Even according to plan, many of us thought this was a bad tradeoff. Since, despite Ford’s STREETCARS ARE EVIL fear-mongering, the new LRT lines would have been functionally indistinguishable from subways (except they would run above-ground), the old plan gave us three new lines and service to the far reaches of suburbia. The new plan gave us two new subway lines and no new service in the east and western suburban areas, for a 50 per cent increase in total cost (and an infinity per cent increase in the city’s cost, since the city’s cost in the old plan was zero). Moreover, the construction on Eglinton would be far more disastrous to traffic because whole swaths of central Scarborough and Etobicoke would need to be shut down while a giant tunnel was dug across the entire length of the city. As I say, even according to plan, many people thought we were getting screwed.

But all has not gone according to plan. It turns out that because the existing Scarbrough RT line will be retired in 2015 (it’s old) and the Eglinton line will not open fully until 2022, most of Scarborough will be without any rapid transit of any kind for four to seven years. (Possibly four because the eastern portion of Eglinton Crosstown may open as early as 2019.) The old plan would have seen Sheppard finished before the existing RT was closed, which would mean residents out at the Scarborough Town Centre and beyond into Malvern would have had a new, different line to use throughout. Now, the TTC is projecting massive ridership losses in Scarborough during the half-decade when buses will be the only transit option.

On Eglinton, there are engineering challenges with serving the mayor’s underground fetish. As mentioned above, the scheduled completion has already been set back two years because tunnelling takes so long. And, you know, how do you get under the Don Valley? Under the old plan, the transit line would easily just fit up there on the road (here’s what the street there looks like), but a foolish insistence on submersion is a hobgoblin here.

And Sheppard? Well, it looks to me like it will never be built. Gordon Chong, the mayor’s point man on free private-sector-subway construction, now says that the city will need to sink $10 million more just into exploring the option over the next year, and then the private sector might pay $420 million to $1.2 billion of the projected cost, leaving the city taxpayers on the hook for just… $3 billion to $3.75 billion. Or so. ““You will never, ever be able to get away from either government-direct funding or government backstop—ever,” Chong told the Globe.

Since the mayor and his budget committee currently insist that the city’s total existing capital debt of $4.4 billion is a dangerous outrage, I’m going to guess that they will not decide Toronto taxpayers can easily afford an 85 per cent increase on that tab. Which means no subway on Sheppard. Or, a very expensive subway on Sheppard.

That $3 billion or more in new Sheppard subway costs, plus the $10 million next year to explore incurring those costs, is in addition to whatever we’ve already given Chong for this project, and in addition to the $65 million or more in cancellation costs of Transit City. So Transit City was costing the city $0. Our waste-cutting mayor has run the cost of his alternative plan to provide less transit up to at least $75 million and perhaps as much as $4 billion.

And he did this without ever seeking approval from City Council.

Can we get a Mulligan?

So, knowing all of that, is there any chance we could, um, y’know, change our minds? Go back to the old plan? Save a ton of money and get way more and better service?
Yes. Yes, there is a chance we could.

There’s every reason to think that, because the TTC and Metrolinx spent years developing and working on the Transit City plan, they prefer it to the new plan. Especially since it is, as I note above, a far better transit plan (in my not-particularly humble opinion).

And as former Mayor David Miller noted recently, the work on getting ready to build Transit City has already been done, and in one case construction is already started. He said you could turn Transit City back on “like a switch.” And if you did, most of the $65 million or more in costs that the city is now being billed for would disappear entirely, since the spending it represents would no longer be wasted money, and the province would no longer have any reason to want it back.

It’s important to remember that the only reason the province went along with Ford and switched plans is because they were in awe of his mighty election victory (representing fewer than half of all Toronto votes). Now that public opinion has turned, and that the full folly of this new less-transit-for-more-money scheme is clear, and the provincial government has been safely re-elected (albiet in a diminished capacity) and no longer has any reason to fear the wrath of conservative Ford Nation (as proved decisively when Toronto went exclusively Liberal and NDP in the recent election), they have no reason to defer to his regrettable whim.

It would be entirely reasonable and commendable if Rob Ford were to say to Metrolinx, and to the public, “Hey, it turns out I was wrong. Now that it is clear that the new plan is actually worse than just ripping hundreds of millions of dollars into tiny pieces and eating them, I think we need a do-over. I was elected to provide excellent customer service and save taxpayers money. In this case, that mandate makes it clear that we need to change course, and get back on track. Let’s go back to the old plan.”

But if he won’t do it, Council could do it for him.

Toronto City Council voted in 2009 to move forward toward building Transit City. They have never voted to change the plan. If City Council passed a resolution asking Metrolinx to revert to the Transit City plan, there’s every reason to think that Metrolinx would bow to the wishes of Council. The mayor is not the only one at City Hall with a mandate to protect taxpayers. The members of City Council represent every single area of the city. Collectively, they are more powerful than the mayor.

Who will have the political will to bring such a motion forward and line up the votes to pass it? Josh Matlow, the vocal non-partisan, seems like he might be open to it. Jaye Robinson has previously shown she has the spine to stand up and oppose the mayor on revising carefully planned city-building projects. Raymond Cho, who represents Malvern residents, initially supported the mayor’s plan but has changed his mind now that he’s seen the facts, especially the fact that his own constituents are getting the high hard one—perhaps he could lead the charge. Paul Ainslie and Karen Stintz both voted for commencing EAs and planning on the original Transit City plan, and Stintz in particular has credibility on this file as the chair of the TTC.

This is not, it is now clear after a year of investigating the alternative, a case of partisanship. It is a case of respecting taxpayers by refusing to waste $65 million or $75 million or $4 billion of their money on making customer service on the TTC worse. It’s time for councillors to stand up and say so.

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Source: the GRID TO