Metrolinx report leak shows its failure to grasp
JOHN BARBER
jbarber@globeandmail.com
January 20, 2009
Poor Metrolinx, whatever it is. It gets no respect.
As an agency established by the provincial government to oversee all aspects of regional transportation in Greater Toronto and Hamilton, this expert outfit should be on deck barking orders as the ship of state navigates the treacherous straits of infrastructure. Instead, it is skulking below decks, complaining that it has nothing to do.
Metrolinx malaise turned to comedy last week when its officials first published and then frantically suppressed an especially petulant outburst masquerading as a sober discussion of fare integration. A report intended for discussion at last Friday's board meeting, it was no sooner out than it was gone - deleted simultaneously from the agenda and the agency's website amid a chorus of "no comments."
But while it existed, last week's "progress report" revealed all.
To understand, it helps to recall the creation of Metrolinx three years ago, which former transport minister Harinder Takhar announced against a backdrop of buses from the fleets of nine different municipal operators. The new agency, he promised, would replace the balkanized status quo with "seamless transit" from one end of the city region to the other.
Since then, Metrolinx has drawn attention mainly for its role as a planning agency, a kind of halfway house where former provincial bureaucrats and their favourite consultants can devise pie-in-sky policy the government remains free to reject. The peek-a-boo progress report documents the agency's failure to achieve even its most modest operational goals - in this case, solutions to long-standing problems on two borderland bus routes.
The suppressed report declaims indignantly about the injuries done to "the universal taxpayer" when Mississauga buses drive past Toronto customers on their way to Islington Station, and when empty York Region buses shadow crowded TTC buses on Route 196 to Downsview Station. These are ancient irritants, indeed, the two most obvious examples of the problems Metrolinx was set up to fix.
But after three years of negotiating, it failed to achieve the slightest change in the status quo. Predictably, the report blames the TTC for finally putting an end to the long, tiresome process. The fact is that Job One produced zero results. The impediments to seamless transit, mainly a matter of union rules, remain firmly in place.
But the revealing part is the conclusion Metrolinx draws from this abject failure. Inspired by frustration with two minor technical problems, the suppressed report recommends the provincial government give the agency sweeping powers to dictate transit fares and routes throughout the urban region. Rather than admitting its failure to rationalize fares on two bus routes, the suppressed report transforms its embarrassment into a jurisdictional casus belli.
The best you can say about these guys is that they had enough sense to pull the curtains when they did, lest more of the public be exposed to their naked thoughts.
But who are they? Former Burlington mayor Rob MacIsaac, original Metrolinx front man, had the good sense to resign after the big plan was done - and oblivion beckoned. Disregarding all the signatures at the bottom of mysteriously suppressed reports, it is now a leaderless bureaucracy floating in limbo. Its signature initiative, an all-system fare card, is going nowhere as fast as TTC riders on Burnhamthorpe.
But at least it isn't running GO Transit, as Mr. Takhar et al once promised it would.
