Not too late to really talk transit in Scarborough: Keenan

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to avoid writing so much about the Scarborough subway debate. Various incarnations of an LRT-versus-subway discussion have been a major subplot of Toronto politics for the past five years, and I am as tired of rehashing the fine points as anyone. Mayor John Tory campaigned on the premise that the debate was in the past, and it was time to start building the three-stop subway extension.

It’s settled, then. Right or wrong, rational or not, the decision has been made: people want a subway.

Or do they?

It turns out that if they’re asked a straightforward question honestly comparing options for spending transit dollars, people don’t choose the subway.

I first got sucked back into writing about this a couple of weeks ago when Scarborough councillor (and deputy mayor) Glenn De Baeremaeker started talking about adding $100 million or more to the subway budget to add a fourth stop. This would bring the proposed budget to over $3.15 billion (you can now make it more than $3.2 billion, including the cost of cancelling the LRT pencilled into the proposed city budget being considered now).

I wrote that if we’d been debating spending more than $3 billion on Scarborough transit at the start of the debate, we could have looked at an option much bigger than the seven-stop LRT line the subway is supposed to replace. Reallocating that full Scarborough subway budget, you could build a whole network of LRT lines that have been proposed in Scarborough: extend the Scarborough RT replacement line out to Malvern, extend the Sheppard LRT line out to the zoo, and build the once-proposed 20-stop Scarborough-Malvern LRT along Eglinton and Kingston Road and past the U of T Scarborough campus.

More than 30 LRT stops in a network covering much of Scarborough, or a three or four-stop extension to the existing subway. Each would cost roughly $3 billion. I thought it was a shame we didn’t know the real alternatives when we were being asked to decide on the subway approval.

Forum research, it turns out, was curious too. In a poll conducted January 24 and 25, they asked 843 randomly selected people, “Which would you prefer overall, a four-stop subway or a 30-stop LRT network across Scarborough, if each cost the same?” Fully 61 per cent of people chose the LRT network — a two-to-one majority over the 29 per cent who said they prefer the subway. Even among those in Scarborough, where the pro-subway sentiment is thought to be indomitable, a majority chose the LRT network, beating the subway alternative by 18 percentage points. The poll is considered accurate within 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Maybe the general public isn’t as tired of the topic as those who work at and around city hall. Or maybe people are surprised to hear what alternatives such a large investment could fund. Either way, it’s reassuring to hear the public isn’t as ridiculously blinded by tunnel vision as our politicians take them to be.

It’s not clear this information about public preferences will lead to any change in course. We’ve debated and re-debated options for transit building in Scarborough so many times that the fear now becomes we will never, ever, stop talking about this and actually build something.

If city council did change its mind (again), it wouldn’t necessarily delay action. The plan for the Scarborough LRT — still officially in place — is ready to build, and could be finished faster than the subway. Environmental assessments and planning for the other lines and extensions could begin right away, and those lines could well be in service ahead of when we’d expect a subway extension to open, too.

But council would need to act quickly. The city hasn’t yet approved the payment of $75 million to $85 million in cancellation fees to kill the LRT deal, but they’re scheduled to do so in March. The city hasn’t approved any formal plan to build the subway extension, but is negotiating with the province to do so now.

So in fact, if city council acted now — and if the federal and provincial governments would agree, as they have before, to respect the will of council to spend on the priorities the people of Toronto want — the 30-stop LRT network might well be entirely finished ahead of the schedule we have for that three-stop subway idea.

But the window for action is closing. In the minds of decision-makers, it may already be too late. It would be a shame if that’s the case, because this poll lends credence to my suspicion that if we had an honest debate about options, people would choose to build a great network of transit in Scarborough.

On the other hand, at least, if our politicians decide to ignore this public preference, I can get back on track to keeping my New Year’s resolution.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues; ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire