W. K. Lis
Superstar
The Star has an article on Transit half-step no cause for celebration, at this link.
The negative would be that after branching off at Ellesmere (or nearby), the headway service would be halved. For both those going on the branch to the Scarborough Town Centre, and those continuing on the branch going north.
Wake up, people!
Pay attention, please. A billion dollars of our tax money — maybe $2 billion — is at risk, and nobody seems to give a damn.
Have we all lost our minds?
This past week, the city politicians and sycophant citizens congratulated themselves at city hall as city staff lucked into saving us $1.1 billion on the Scarborough subway. The money fell into their laps.
The saving didn’t result from any council vote, action, request for study, demand for due diligence, insistence on the application of planning principles to proposals. No. It came about because chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat could not sign off on the proposals Mayor John Tory and Scarborough politicians insisted on promoting.
The approved plan — an expensive subway right next to an expensive SmartTrack — made no sense. Still, the politicians persisted. There was talk of Keesmaat being fired. Keesmaat and her staff found a fix.
Her version is better and smarter. It’s something she can support, finally, ending the war with the mayor’s office. It saves the subway and SmartTrack. And it saves about $1 billion.
That’s a testament to how atrocious a plan the mayor and city council had sworn by — the one they insisted must not be amended for fear of delays.
Now, there they were again, at executive committee Thursday, shameless, no sign of remorse, embracing the Keesmaat fix as unassailably brilliant, better than their own paper-thin, original bauble.
Still, anyone who offered another possibility found himself at the end of noses that wiggled disdain, dismissing the dissenter as a nuisance. In tone and attitude (some of the politicians have not even looked at the Keesmaat compromise, so committed they are to any plan the mayor backs), this was the message:
Keesmaat’s changes are great. Let’s move on. No need to look back at how we might have made such a horrible mistake.
But wait, Keesmaat’s compromise is not necessarily the best. She was just trying to broker a deal between bad options. Don’t you want her to do better? Give you her best? There may even be another billion dollars to save.
Well, no. Cut our losses, er, our gains. We’re good. Build, build, build.
I wish I were exaggerating. Bolstered by a debate-weary public and a co-opted and distracted media, the guardians of our tax dollars behave like drunken sailors when dealing with the transit file.
City council approves $3.56 billion for a subway, minus study and due diligence. John Tory adds potentially another billion to the cost by inserting SmartTrack in the same corridor. And when city staff this week saves their bacon because the approved plan does not work, there is no hell to pay. Nobody is held accountable. Media and citizens join the back-slapping and praise service, thanking Keesmaat, the deliverer, for redemption.
Keesmaat deserves praise. At least she offered some resistance to the runaway train that was the transit plan for Scarborough. But, with a little more prompting, a bit of a push and the tiniest of desire for the best plan at the best price, we might do so much better.
Here’s one idea floated to the executive committee: Don’t build the one-stop subway from Kennedy and Eglinton up to Scarborough Town Centre, a distance of about six kilometres and costing $2.6 billion. (This Keesmaat option deletes stops at Lawrence and at Sheppard and saves $1.1 billion.)
Instead, use the GO corridor, with the very trains that SmartTrack will run, to provide the service. Metrolinx would run its planned trains every 15 minutes to Unionville. Concurrently, Tory’s SmartTrack service — as frequently as five minutes, as envisioned by Keesmaat — would branch off at Ellesmere and run into the Town Centre.
Call it SmartSpur. Or SER, for Scarborough Express Rail.
Cost: At the most, $1.1 billion (if you keep the Scarborough RT running), says Karl Junkin, the railway designer who researched and authored the report for Transport Action Ontario in 2013.
So, add up the savings. The $3.56-billion Rob Ford subway morphs into the $2.6-billion Keesmaat subway. And, maybe, all we need is the $1.1-billion SmartTrack surface subway, as Junkin envisions.
It’s brilliant, if it can work. From the Town Centre, passengers can travel the near 22 kilometres straight to downtown every five minutes: one seat, no transfer to the Bloor-Danforth line (unless you wish to). And we save $2.5 billion in all.
This spur line from the Stouffville GO corridor, already being upgraded by Metrolinx to allow 14 trains per hour in each direction, could go to Centennial College at Progress, and up to the real Malvern corridor, as earlier envisioned, for the same price.
Keesmaat has the authority to study this. But there was no champion at the executive committee, just some quizzical faces and weird statements suggesting fears that this proposal might work. (Because, of course, if it does, some would argue Scarborough isn’t getting the “subway” the politicians promised.)
Now that we have opened up the Scarborough transit plan that Tory fretted about amending, consider all the options, please.
Pay attention, please. A billion dollars of our tax money — maybe $2 billion — is at risk, and nobody seems to give a damn.
Have we all lost our minds?
This past week, the city politicians and sycophant citizens congratulated themselves at city hall as city staff lucked into saving us $1.1 billion on the Scarborough subway. The money fell into their laps.
The saving didn’t result from any council vote, action, request for study, demand for due diligence, insistence on the application of planning principles to proposals. No. It came about because chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat could not sign off on the proposals Mayor John Tory and Scarborough politicians insisted on promoting.
The approved plan — an expensive subway right next to an expensive SmartTrack — made no sense. Still, the politicians persisted. There was talk of Keesmaat being fired. Keesmaat and her staff found a fix.
Her version is better and smarter. It’s something she can support, finally, ending the war with the mayor’s office. It saves the subway and SmartTrack. And it saves about $1 billion.
That’s a testament to how atrocious a plan the mayor and city council had sworn by — the one they insisted must not be amended for fear of delays.
Now, there they were again, at executive committee Thursday, shameless, no sign of remorse, embracing the Keesmaat fix as unassailably brilliant, better than their own paper-thin, original bauble.
Still, anyone who offered another possibility found himself at the end of noses that wiggled disdain, dismissing the dissenter as a nuisance. In tone and attitude (some of the politicians have not even looked at the Keesmaat compromise, so committed they are to any plan the mayor backs), this was the message:
Keesmaat’s changes are great. Let’s move on. No need to look back at how we might have made such a horrible mistake.
But wait, Keesmaat’s compromise is not necessarily the best. She was just trying to broker a deal between bad options. Don’t you want her to do better? Give you her best? There may even be another billion dollars to save.
Well, no. Cut our losses, er, our gains. We’re good. Build, build, build.
I wish I were exaggerating. Bolstered by a debate-weary public and a co-opted and distracted media, the guardians of our tax dollars behave like drunken sailors when dealing with the transit file.
City council approves $3.56 billion for a subway, minus study and due diligence. John Tory adds potentially another billion to the cost by inserting SmartTrack in the same corridor. And when city staff this week saves their bacon because the approved plan does not work, there is no hell to pay. Nobody is held accountable. Media and citizens join the back-slapping and praise service, thanking Keesmaat, the deliverer, for redemption.
Keesmaat deserves praise. At least she offered some resistance to the runaway train that was the transit plan for Scarborough. But, with a little more prompting, a bit of a push and the tiniest of desire for the best plan at the best price, we might do so much better.
Here’s one idea floated to the executive committee: Don’t build the one-stop subway from Kennedy and Eglinton up to Scarborough Town Centre, a distance of about six kilometres and costing $2.6 billion. (This Keesmaat option deletes stops at Lawrence and at Sheppard and saves $1.1 billion.)
Instead, use the GO corridor, with the very trains that SmartTrack will run, to provide the service. Metrolinx would run its planned trains every 15 minutes to Unionville. Concurrently, Tory’s SmartTrack service — as frequently as five minutes, as envisioned by Keesmaat — would branch off at Ellesmere and run into the Town Centre.
Call it SmartSpur. Or SER, for Scarborough Express Rail.
Cost: At the most, $1.1 billion (if you keep the Scarborough RT running), says Karl Junkin, the railway designer who researched and authored the report for Transport Action Ontario in 2013.
So, add up the savings. The $3.56-billion Rob Ford subway morphs into the $2.6-billion Keesmaat subway. And, maybe, all we need is the $1.1-billion SmartTrack surface subway, as Junkin envisions.
It’s brilliant, if it can work. From the Town Centre, passengers can travel the near 22 kilometres straight to downtown every five minutes: one seat, no transfer to the Bloor-Danforth line (unless you wish to). And we save $2.5 billion in all.
This spur line from the Stouffville GO corridor, already being upgraded by Metrolinx to allow 14 trains per hour in each direction, could go to Centennial College at Progress, and up to the real Malvern corridor, as earlier envisioned, for the same price.
Keesmaat has the authority to study this. But there was no champion at the executive committee, just some quizzical faces and weird statements suggesting fears that this proposal might work. (Because, of course, if it does, some would argue Scarborough isn’t getting the “subway” the politicians promised.)
Now that we have opened up the Scarborough transit plan that Tory fretted about amending, consider all the options, please.
The negative would be that after branching off at Ellesmere (or nearby), the headway service would be halved. For both those going on the branch to the Scarborough Town Centre, and those continuing on the branch going north.
