The propaganda offensive to save his subway ahead of yesterday’s (Wednesday March 21) council vote has been nothing short of breathtaking in its audacity. Witness the bafflegab at Monday night’s meeting of Ford front group Subways Are for Everyone (SAFE) at Scarborough Town Centre.
If I had to come up with a title for the night, it might be something like Rob Ford And The Death Of Reason. Who needs transit science when hysteria will do?
Ford has been busy using his weekly radio show to play divide-and-conquer, trying to convince Scarborough residents that LRT is a plot concocted by downtown lefties to saddle them with second-rate transit.
That sentiment was in ample evidence at Monday night’s meeting.
The literature being handed out was enough to make you wonder if riding LRT is a death trap: flyers with info culled from a quick Google search or two about teens killed by LRT in Edmonton in 2010 and three crashes of the Seattle LRT before it even opened in 2009. Ooh, scary.
This disinformation failed to mention that motorists were at fault in the crashes. And that the Edmonton accident had little to do with LRT, and more with a couple fooling around and getting killed in the process.
The negative LRT framing didn’t end there. The canard of subways being “world class” and LRT not (tell that to the Europeans) was summed up in a neat little chart in one pamphlet. It compared the length of track in Toronto’s subway system (70 kilometres) to New York (337 kilometres) and Chicago (360 kilometres).
Missing from that is the fact that those two cities began building subways at or around the turn of the last century, more than 60 years before Toronto even started thinking of subterranean travel.
Inside the council chamber filled to overflowing, the pro-subway panelists were knee-deep in BS.
Gordon Chong, the mayor’s point guy on the transit file, was in full fulmination, at one point suggesting council would be “stupid” to endorse an expert panel’s recommendation in favour of LRT.
People would be smart, he said, to use “common sense” (where have we heard that term before?) and reject what the professionals are saying about LRT being superior to subways. To Chong, a Sheppard subway is a “no-brainer.” Curious conclusion for the guy who had more than a year to find investors for Ford’s plan and fell a bil or two short. It’s a bit of a surprise to hear a self-described fiscal conservative espousing the build-it-and-business-will-come idea when it comes to subways.
Check the 1992 enviro assessment that pro-subway types love to quote to make their case for Sheppard. It projected 65,000 new jobs in Scarborough, but by 2010 only 14,700 had materialized. Instead of the 95,000 jobs forecast for North York, only 39,000 have turned up.
Sadly, no one among the panelists countered the perjury. Not even TTC commissioner Peter Milcyzn, sitting in for TTC chair Karen Stintz (who declined an invitation) could summon the courage to set the record straight in that pressure cooker, and he’s supposed to be a planner.
Scarborough Councillor Norm Kelly chimed in to suggest the LRT would end up like the mess of the SRT. He forgot to mention that it was a conservative provincial government that screwed that one up (and buried the Eglinton subway back in 95, it should be noted, to build the existing Sheppard subway line from Yonge to Don Mills that’s costing us nearly $10 million a year more than it’s bringing in from the fare box.) And here we go again, repeating history with a bunch of conservatives pushing another harebrained subway. Sometimes the synchronicity is too much to take.
Most disconcerting of all in this whole subway versus LRT debate has been the message from Scarborough councillors (here’s looking at you, Norm Kelly) that residents would prefer nothing to LRT. Talk about a cop-out.
Truth is, there’s more anger and confusion than pro-subway sentiment in Scarborough. You need only to have been at one of a number of community meetings on transit in recent weeks to understand that.
Politicians have talked to them about building transit since the 70s, only to be disappointed every time. You might even say they’re used to rejection. So when they’re told by Ford’s crew that downtowners don’t deem them worthy of subways, and that streetcars cause traffic chaos, you can understand why they might get a little pissed. When the LRT option is explained, however, it’s the clear choice.
That proposal would take transit to Morningside, passing through six priority neighbourhoods along the Sheppard East corridor where the poverty rate in some parts reaches a quarter of the population. Check out the McD’s at Warden if you want a glimpse of what I mean. Ford’s subway veers off at Agincourt, missing Malvern altogether.
Almost half of all those who take transit along Sheppard don’t have cars, which means they have no choice when it comes to transport.
Apart from Consumers industrial park, the densities are markedly slim for the kind of development that would fund subways.
The prospects of the Scarborough of two decades ago no longer apply. Surface rail provides the best opportunity for reasoned growth and a variety of development types that’s more conducive to economic stimulus.
At NOW press time Wednesday, the defeat of Ford’s subway seemed a foregone conclusion. Those councillors who supported LRT on Finch West and bringing the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown back above ground from Laird to Kennedy, contrary to the mayor’s plan to bury it, understood when they voted back on February 8 that killing the Sheppard subway was part of the endgame.
But anything is possible when politicians are trying to save their hide. A few conservativos among them could still shake loose to vote with Ford. James Pasternak’s name has been mentioned. Jaye Robinson seems to be leaning as well. Arms were being twisted.
The rumour mill has also been churning out tidbits, including efforts to defer the subway vote. Then there are the councillors who’ve been toying with the idea of other revenue tools to raise cash for the subway.
But a subway would be a 50-year financial commitment. That’s a scary proposition even with the rosiest of economic forecasts, a mug’s game to begin with.
There was much talk during the election about the isolation felt by the suburbs. Not building LRT now would continue to relegate those communities to the periphery of city life.
Original Article
Source: NOW
Author: Enzo Di Matteo
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