A four-stop Scarborough subway misses the real point: Keenan
In the least surprising news of the year so far, a Mainstreet Technologies poll released Monday showed that 53 per cent of Torontonians — and fully 67 per cent of those in Scarborough — favour a four-stop option over a three-stop plan for the subway extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line. Apparently they feel that if we’re spending $3.05 billion or more on a subway extension anyway, we might as well spend $3.15 billion and add a stop at Danforth and Eglinton, one of the busiest and highest-trafficked intersections of the route. Of course they do.
Given enough time in Toronto city council transit debates, all things become not just possible, but reasonable. A fourth stop makes sense if we’re building the subway option. No one wants to argue about this any more (least of all Mayor John Tory, who has pledged not to reopen the subway debate on this line) but here we are, courtesy of Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker’s Stone-Soup Method of transit approval.
You may be familiar with the story of stone soup — strangers come to town and tell the suspicious villager that they can make soup with nothing but water and stones. Then, one by one, they trick the villagers into supplying them with hearty ingredients by insisting the bare soup is great but would be perfect with the addition of one more little thing.
In 2012, De Baeremaeker and then-TTC chair Karen Stintz suggested replacing the fully funded, fully grade-separated Scarborough LRT plan that was ready to build with a subway extension, saying they’d learned it would cost just $400 million more than the $1.4 billion LRT. To which the skeptical villagers of Toronto said, “Really? Well, let’s have a look at this.”
From there, we learned that it would just maybe need a few carrots from the federal government, some good soup bones from property taxpayers, a dash of this and that development charges, and after an election and a couple years of bitter, resentful simmering, we now have an approved plan for a three-stop subway costing over $1.6 billion more than the original plan. But the subway broth still seems a little thin, so Chef De Baeremaeker is back asking for one little thing more.
On the limited question at hand, De Baeremaeker is right. Four subway stops are better than three, even if it means increasing the budget of this decade-long building project by 5 per cent.
But if we’re going to debate this yet again, we should do it honestly. And if we’re honest, De Baeremaeker and the pollsters are asking the wrong question. Because when this Scarborough soup was first proposed as an incremental series of this-or-that propositions, no one envisioned a $3 billion-plus commitment to building rapid transit in Scarborough. If that’s what we’re talking about, the three-stop (or four-stop) subway extension could be compared to a much different plan.
With the same money, we could build the functionally subway-like seven-stop LRT, but extend it several more stops (as originally envisioned) into Malvern and extend the planned Sheppard East LRT line out to the zoo and build the once-proposed 20-stop Scarborough-Malvern LRT along Eglinton and Kingston Rd., past the University of Toronto Scarborough and up into Malvern.
If we’re reopening the debate to include that, pollsters could ask: “For the exact same cost, do you prefer a four-stop subway extension in Scarborough, or more than 30 new transit stops in a fast-rail network across much of the former municipality?”
It’s possible to make stone soup palatable, and it will always seem reasonable to add one more item to the pot to make it better. But if you know the ingredients you’re working with before you start cooking, you can decide to make something far better. And in this case, spending more than $3 billion in Scarborough, we could build a transit buffet.
Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire
