Mayor Rob Ford’s plan to cancel Transit City, which would have seen seven light rail lines built along Toronto’s busiest bus routes, in favour of replacing it with a paltry, though worthy eastward extension of the Sheppard subway line, is foolish and bears little resemblance to the responsibility which he preached during his campaign. Though Transit City’s overall budget would be larger than Ford’s subway plan, it would do far more with far less money per kilometer of transport. No transit proposal currently on the table is better suited to the age of municipal austerity and restraint, which Ford promised prior to his election this autumn.
Despite the fact that the replacement of Transit City with the Sheppard extension would be bad policy, such a move would be consistent with Toronto’s traditional narrow-mindedness on transit issues. Though municipal and provincial politicians have long paid lip service to the idea of linking the city together with new rapid transit lines, these plans have long been treated as luxuries rather than the necessities that they are. Toronto is like a small town trapped in the body of a large city. Its thinking has not yet expanded to meet the scale and scope of its challenges.
It is this narrow-mindedness that has kept Toronto from expanding and improving on the enviable transit system that it had built by the mid 1970s. If Toronto had followed through on half the proposals made by transit planners since this period, it would have at least two additional lines. One would run along Eglinton from Scarborough to the airport, while another would replace the King or Queen streetcars to provide much needed relief to the overcrowded Bloor and Yonge-University-Spadina lines. The Sheppard subway might be extended both eastward and westward to provide a fourth east-west connection. A third north-south line might be in the works.
The fault for Toronto’s arrested transit development is not solely a consequence of its narrow-mindedness, but because the municipal government is chronically underfunded. While Toronto is required to run a balanced budget and generally manages to do so without imposing too many significant cuts, it has little capacity for spending beyond ordinary operational expenses. This leaves the funding of large capital projects, such as transit, at the mercy of the federal and provincial governments. Unlike most cities of similar size in other countries, Toronto has little capacity to raise money, either through borrowing or taxes.
As Alan Broadbent argued in Urban Nation it is time that we let large Canadian cities like Toronto raise their own money for big projects by allowing them to raise a greater variety of taxes and to issue bonds; something which even small towns in the United States take for granted. The need for greater spending capacity at the municipal level does not mean, however, that the federal and provincial governments should be allowed to shirk their responsibilities towards big cities. Unfortunately, the current financial climate makes an infusion of federal or provincial money unlikely, despite it being long overdue.
If Toronto cannot expect the support it needs from other levels of government and is prohibited to seek it alone, then it cannot hope to construct the transit infrastructure which a city of its size needs. The result is continually increasing car traffic, which contributes to the decreasing air quality of the city as well as to climate change, but also valuable hours of productivity lost to commuting. Though budget hawks like Mayor Ford are right to ask whether Toronto really has the means to make its transit plans into reality, they would do well not to ignore the consequences which not doing so might have.
Likewise, pro-transit activists are right to seek improvements to Toronto’s transit infrastructure, but they cannot ignore the challenges that improving the aging system will present. Chief among these challenges is that Toronto might need to get creative to make up for shortfalls in federal and provincial funding. This means opening up new transit development to partnerships with the private sector, including real estate developers who would benefit from subway lines being built near their developments. While the city should be careful not to allow private participation to distort transit development, it should not close off the possibility of cooperation outright.
Torontonians face an increasingly stark choice about their transit future. Either we can continue to run an atrophied and outdated network, supplemented by stop-gap measures like Mayor Ford’s Sheppard extension and the new subway trains due to enter into service this winter, or we can get serious about transit and start to create a modern, efficient, and interconnected system to bind Toronto together. Neither will be easy, but it is clear that the first choice can have nothing but negative consequences, except perhaps for the city’s chequing account. And if that is all that matters to Torontonians anymore, then we must be reminded of the difference between a corporation and a government.
