A year of lost opportunity on public transit: Editorial
A year that was supposed put public transit in gear and on the move has, instead, seen it stuck in neutral and even rolling backward. A Toronto light-rail line was axed at tremendous cost. Key provincial decisions have been shunted off to 2014, and may not happen even then. And a new study cast serious doubt on some long-held transit assumptions.
All this doesn’t bode well for future commuters.
In Toronto a chant of “subways, subways, subways” trumped sound transit planning, leaving Canada’s largest city stuck with a $3-billion underground route it doesn’t need. To help cover that bill, the average local household will now pay $1,200 in extra property tax, even though it could have had better public transit for free.
The province was expected to select new “revenue tools” to help fund a bold $50-billion expansion of transit and transportation dubbed “The Big Move.” Instead it kept dithering and studying options. Nothing is expected now until next spring and there’s a good chance inaction will continue even then.
Finally, a thoroughly researched report published by a non-profit foundation questioned the value of some existing transit planning, leaving people wondering if we’ll ever get this right. And we won’t, as long as self-serving politicians keep meddling in transit to advance their own narrow agenda.
Toronto’s ill-judged approval of a three-stop Scarborough subway expansion is a case in point. Scarborough’s existing rapid transit line, an out-of-date relic from 1985, sorely needs replacement. The original plan approved by city council called for construction of a seven-station, ultra-modern light-rail line running along the existing rapid transit route. Better yet, it would be entirely funded by the province.
But that didn’t jibe with Mayor Rob Ford’s unthinking dedication to subways. With an election year looming, he managed to sway enough city councillors to kill the light-rail plan and back a three-stop underground route that will cost more than $3 billion.
Among those who flip-flopped was Toronto Transit Commission chair Karen Stintz, now running for mayor and on the hunt for Scarborough votes. Even more disappointing was the province’s backtracking to accept the subway option — just in time for a Scarborough byelection which the Liberal candidate won.
This collective pandering for votes has meant the loss of more than $100 million in public money already sunk into the light-rail option.
Every nickel of that waste must be covered by Toronto property tax payers. But wait, it gets worse. To fund the city’s share of new subway costs, the average Toronto household will need to pay at least $1,200 in additional property tax over the life of this project. It will surely be more because that doesn’t include interest rate hikes or construction cost over runs. Local ratepayers are on the hook for those too.
There was further disappointment after Metrolinx, the agency in charge of co-ordinating transit through the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton, produced its long-awaited list of funding tools to pay for the Big Move. The recommended options were fair, balanced and the product of years of study. So, naturally, Premier Kathleen Wynne responded with, drum roll please, a call for more study.
She set up a task force, headed by Anne Golden, to again look at available options. That panel issued a report two weeks ago calling for a big jump in fuel tax, topping out at an extra 10 cents per litre. Recommendations also included a small increase in the province’s corporate tax, and shifting a bit of money over from what’s already raised through the HST.
The Toronto area is in vital need of transit upgrades to ease gridlock that’s already sapping the economy and costing jobs. The panel’s proposals should be welcomed as a fair and balanced way of generating necessary funding. But there’s a problem. All these measures would apply province-wide, and that makes them an exceedingly hard sell.
Only money raised within the GTA and Hamilton would go to the Big Move, with other jurisdictions free to spend their windfall on local infrastructure needs. But that’s not enough to make the proposal welcome in places like northwest Ontario, where folks already gripe about gas prices considerably higher than to the south. They will strongly resist paying more. And so, it seems, will people in the GTA. A recent Toronto-area poll found that 73 per cent of respondents disapproved of the proposed fuel tax. And these are people who would benefit from the Big Move.
Instead of acting on the new report, Wynne punted the issue yet again. This time, to next spring’s budget. But with an election looming after that, and given the deep unpopularity of Golden’s proposals, expect these “revenue tools” to stay hidden away in government’s tool box for some time to come.
Clouding matters further, on the day before Golden produced her report, a Toronto-based non-profit think tank called the Neptis Foundation issued a well-researched report criticizing aspects of the Big Move and warning these mistakes could “set transit back 25 years.” The report had a particularly harsh opinion of a proposed downtown subway relief line — a top priority of the TTC.
The Big Move is more than five years old and the research that went into it dates from well before that. So this long-range transit plan can surely be improved upon. The Neptis Foundation’s views should be welcomed with that in mind — as a basis for fine-tuning. There’s a danger its report will be used in an attempt to attack Metrolinx and torpedo the Big Move, and that would be a disaster.
With 2.5 million more people expected in the GTA and Hamilton in coming decades, bringing a million additional cars, it’s imperative that governments at every level do a better job on transit. We can’t afford more years of lost opportunity like 2013.
