In private conversations and online, this is hardly an unusual descriptor for any number of debates in Toronto politics, perhaps trailing only "shitshow" and the elegant simplicity of "mess." Its use, however, is especially apropos as an encapsulation of the city's transit planning woes and our leaders' terminal inability to chart a course based on policy instead of populism.
But such bluntness, on the record, is rare for a key person who helped shape the current situation – who stood by the side of the Rob Ford-era TTC chair, Karen Stintz, watching in dismay and then disgust as hard-won victories were sacrificed to electoral ambition.
At this point, however, Jean-Pierre (JP) Boutros has nothing to lose. He wants people to know why we are where we are, and how easy it would be to set things right.
"Ultimately, this is about bad decision-making and political expediency, and it's not what any government official should engage in, but it turns out the people in power tend to," the former senior adviser to Stintz told NOW in an extensive interview at an Annex restaurant earlier this year. "I didn't see it first-hand until mid-2012, and it's disheartening, and that's why our city atrophies."
Boutros was chiefly referring to the Scarborough Subway Extension and the way his ex-boss fought for that unnecessary, costly piece of infrastructure for the sake of her impending mayoral bid, contrary to her own earlier and apparently principled position that a light-rail line – that would run 30 per cent further for half the cost, with twice as many stations within walking distance of twice as many people – made far greater sense.
Although he worked for Stintz from late 2010 until she stepped down as TTC chair to run for mayor in early 2014, their personal and professional relationships disintegrated as their views on Scarborough transit drifted further apart.
Even Boutros's LinkedIn profile passive-aggressively alludes to this: "There is virtually nothing I wasn't privy to and had to advise on, whether advice was accepted or not."
"Anyone with half a brain would choose Transit City," he says, referring to the 2007 deal former mayor David Miller forged with then premier Dalton McGuinty to build a network of light-rail lines crisscrossing Toronto at the province's expense. "It was the uploading we needed."
Upon taking office at the end of 2010, subsequent chief magistrate Ford scared the province into backing away from surface-based transit routes, because of well-known pathologies that we won't explore here.
On February 8, 2012, city council, led by Stintz, wrested transit planning away from Ford, who'd been unable to come up with the billions in private-sector funding he believed he could raise to bury the lines, and effectively revived Transit City.
But what seemed to be the conclusion of Toronto's transit chaos turned out to be just the beginning when Stintz's priorities suddenly changed and she decided she needed to deliver a subway to Scarborough.
"You had a deal," says Boutros, recalling her change of heart. "You spent all that emotional capital on securing that deal, getting pilloried by Rob Ford, friends and stuff, and you do all this. And then literally, before the ink is dry on the master agreement, you try to change the deal."
Stintz may not have been elected mayor, but we've been left with the legacy of her ambition. And not only did mayoral victor John Tory decide a subway would still be the way to go, he had some new ideas of his own.
***
If we wanted to be charitable about Toronto's transit planning, we could say the city is blessed to have so many projects in development that it takes nearly 100 foam-core presentation boards to explain them all.
This past June, the City of Toronto, the TTC and Metrolinx held a series of joint public consultations on four projects: the Scarborough Subway Extension, which would see the TTC's Line 2 extended northeast from Kennedy Station to Sheppard via the Scarborough Town Centre on a corridor to be determined (estimated cost: $3.6 billion, to be borne primarily by a city tax levy); Regional Express Rail (RER), which would see three GO corridors electrified and service increased (estimated cost: $2.8 billion for the portion in Toronto, borne by the province); SmartTrack, which would see the city add new stops along the RER routes as well as a new heavy-rail corridor to the west (estimated cost: $8 billion minus the RER funds, mostly borne by the city and theoretically to be raised through tax-increment financing); and the Relief Line, a new subway line running east from the Financial District through Riverside and/or Leslieville, then north to the Danforth (estimated cost: $3.5 billion, borne by anyone who steps up).
At the Scarborough Civic Centre on June 24, the atrium is flooded with options. Staffers apparently adjust the focus of each community consultation depending on its location, and this night there are nine display boards devoted to SmartTrack, 32 to the Scarborough subway, 14 to RER, and 23 to the Relief Line (plus seven others with more general information).
A less charitable way to look at it is that Toronto is respectively examining one project that hasn't been approved, one that could (and should) be reversed, one that will happen when and how the province says so, and one that everyone agrees we need but no one seriously plans to build. The one sure thing is that the absence, presence and details of each would affect one another to varying degrees.
A staff report on SmartTrack and RER is heading to the October 20 meeting of council's executive committee, with a Scarborough subway report to follow shortly after.
Council will have to make tough choices soon.
***
"SmartTrack actually is the same thing as Regional Express Rail," Tim Laspa, Toronto's director of transportation planning, explains in the formal part of the meeting.
RER is the provincial government's plan for GO trains to run every 15 minutes on certain corridors, transforming the service from a commuter-rail workhorse to something closer to conventional public transit. The idea behind all but the Eglinton West part of SmartTrack is to piggyback on RER, adding local stations along existing GO routes.
"So if you can imagine a GO train," Laspa told the crowd of 40 or so, "a GO train would also be a SmartTrack train. And really what we're looking at is a level of service that is magnified on three of the GO corridors: the Stouffville corridor, the Lakeshore East corridor and the Kitchener corridor, where we would be looking at enhanced service, which the mayor has termed through his concept 'SmartTrack.'"
The big selling point of the mayor's flagship policy is that it, like RER, contemplates service frequency of "15 minutes or better."
But because the trains can't pass each other, are we to take this to mean that SmartTrack and GO's RER would each run every 15 minutes, such that different kinds of trains would be arriving 7.5 minutes apart? Or does that mean 15-minute spacing would apply to all trains, such that you could be waiting half an hour or more for the one you want?
Blogger and activist Steve Munro – who probably knows more about transit in Toronto than any other individual who's ever lived – put these questions to Metrolinx's chief planning officer, Leslie Woo, earlier this summer. In a response he posted to his eponymous site, she told him it's the latter case: the headway (space between trains) would be 15 minutes for both services combined, meaning each would come less frequently than that. (Though she also pointed out that trains are already more frequent where the Kitchener, Milton and Barrie corridors converge around Dundas and Lansdowne.)
If SmartTrack – Mayor Tory's $8 billion pledge originally pitched as a "surface subway" and substitute for a proper relief line – would really run only every half-hour, that'd be a significant dent in its appeal.
Asked by NOW to confirm that that would be the case, Metrolinx's answer boils down to "Not necessarily, but maybe."
"The RER program announced by the province on April 17th provides for electrified rail service every 15 minutes throughout the day, evening and weekends on the Stouffville and Kitchener corridors between Unionville in Markham and Bramalea in Brampton," spokesperson Alex Burke wrote in an email. "SmartTrack builds on the GO RER program. SmartTrack, which is still in the process of being developed, proposes additional stations and services, such as better integration with local services and a new corridor along Eglinton Avenue West. Therefore, trains would come every 15 minutes."
SmartTrack, she added, is still the subject of city studies that "need to be concluded before we can determine how SmartTrack contributes to the network."
So you're saying trains would run on the RER corridors every 15 minutes, but it's too early to say what proportion of those might serve the additional stations proposed by SmartTrack?
"As SmartTrack is still in the process of being developed," Burke explained, "it is too early to tell how many trains will stop at each station."
That sounds like a yes. Unless RER corridors are turned over to SmartTrack exclusively – dragging out commutes for 905ers – passengers could potentially find themselves waiting half an hour to board SmartTrack vehicles at least some of the time.
So even if SmartTrack's "15 minutes or better" promise is more likely to be "15 minutes or worse," might it at least serve as a relatively low-cost source of relief for the suffocating Yonge line?
Nope. A recent Metrolinx study [pdf] determined that enhanced RER would not in fact divert enough rush-hour passengers from the Yonge line to have any meaningful effect.
"The degree to which the advocates and 'planners' for SmartTrack didn't do their homework is quite breathtaking," Munro says in an email. "If this were a TTC project, Tory and [Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong] would be calling for many heads to roll for such a sloppy job.
SmartTrack – which the mayor aims to have up and running a little over six years from now – is a decent enough idea but has so far been unable to become more than that, as its logistical and financial details haven't fared well under scrutiny.
***
Council's approved alignment for the Scarborough Subway Extension, and the most clearly popular one at the June 25 meeting, runs up McCowan from Eglinton to Sheppard. But the existing GO corridor that SmartTrack would use is just 2.1 kilometres to the west, and moving the subway farther away would, as the Star has explored, add hundreds of millions to its cost and take it through an even lower-density area.
At the meeting, a display board pronounces the separation to be "adequate," but there's still concern that each line would eat into the other's already tenuous ridership.
"What is adequate?" asks a Post-It affixed by one consultation participant.
"Adequate? In a suburban wasteland? Low density," adds another, emphasizing "low" with two underlines.
"You can't fund SmartTrack, and justify SmartTrack, and the Scarborough subway at the same time. You just can't," says Boutros. "Not fiscally, not operationally. So at some point, [Mayor Tory's] gonna have to fish or cut bait on this."
***
The Scarborough subway burst from the chest of the TTC at the end of its October 2012 commission meeting, when vice-chair Glenn De Baeremaeker moved a surprise motion, supported by Stintz, asking staff to report on it. It carried.
That caught most everyone off guard, including Boutros.
Leading Stintz back to her office and away from the post-meeting chaos, Boutros says he asked her, "What the hell was that? Come on. What are we doing here?"
He says that upon hearing this, De Baeremaeker – Stintz's office neighbour – pulled him aside to admonish him: "You are not an elected official. You're an adviser. Know your role."
In July 2013, council approved the subway in principle, subject to a number of conditions, one of which was that the province would kick in $1.8 billion. Boutros found he could live with that, but when Stintz decided to forge ahead that fall despite the province offering less, he decided he was done with it.
"I was like, 'No. You're not with the program any more. This isn't what you told me,'" he remembers saying to her. "'This isn't what you assured me you were gonna do. You're not thinking about TTC riders any more. It makes no sense. This subway makes absolutely zero sense at this point.'"
They more or less stopped talking in person after that, and when he ran to succeed her on council, she declined to endorse him. He finished fourth in a field of 16, with 10.7 per cent of the vote; Christin Carmichael Greb, whom Stintz endorsed at the last minute, won the Ward 16 (Eglinton-Lawrence) seat with just 17.4 per cent.
He thinks the last time they talked was shortly after she launched her mayoral bid, when she called him up, asking if she could deposit an undated $2,500 cheque he handed her in mid-2012, in the wake of their biggest transit victories, made out in the name of a future mayoralty bid.
"Tory inherited this," Boutros says. "He rightfully could say whatever the hell he wants and it wouldn't hurt him. It would be the right thing to do. But again it's that same trap, the same trap of 'I can't lose votes' instead of doing the right thing. And that is so wrong."
Original Article
Source: NOW
Author: JONATHAN GOLDSBIE
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