Tory Sale

We’ve been sold, down the river, and up the creek. We’ve been sold out by our Mayor. This in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Transit Planning is the euphemism for the current screw up. We have a history of doing this in Toronto.

First example, the Sheppard subway (Stubway to its detractors.) Four stops. Running special short trains to make the emptiness a bit less obvious. A billion dollars at the time of its construction.

Second classic, the UPX. (Union – Pearson Express train.) Done in time for the Pan AM games, this train runs from the airport to south-central downtown. Designed for executive travellers on expenses who don’t like cabs, for some reason.
It cost about twenty bucks and had a ridership a third of break-even. So the geniuses that thought it up decided to cut the price by half or more.
A small calculation shows that now we need six-plus times the ridership to break even. We got a small ridership increase.

What these two ‘proven track record’ projects show is this:
– pandering for votes causes bad transit investment choices
– bad transit investment choices later prove themselves in low usage and high subsidies and/or losses
– bad transit investment choices waste critical resources: money and time.

Now we have a much more egregious pandering for votes in a bad transit investment choice: the one-stop Scarborough subway.

Seven stops of LRT would have been paid for by other governments.
Seven stops of LRT would have had higher ridership than a one-stop subway.
Seven stops of LRT would have servedĀ  more higher-density neighbourhoods.
Seven stops of LRT would have made sense.

Amazingly, it is brilliant to replace a not-overloaded LRT with a definitely underloaded subway. It is even more brilliant to reduce that subway to a single stop. It is even more brilliant to pay for that subway with magical thinking, ‘paying it forward,’ and eventually higher taxes.

The real brilliance will turn up when the subsidy for this subway becomes public. I’ve seen it said that maybe eighteen dollars per ride will be required. From us, the idiots in Toronto outside of Scarborough (and outside of City Council) who have to pay for this in increased taxes. While we get nothing; actually less than nothing.

We pay for this in the loss of projects that could have been done with the extra couple of billion dollars.

And we wait for those projects while the arguments finally cease. And while the stupid project gets resources.

This is about John Tory. The only decision of moment he made in recent memory, this one is also his albatross. He got council onside in this stupidity. I suspect it took magnificent, Machiavellian manoeuvering to get more than half of council to bend over. I suspect that pet projects were either enabled, or suddenly not threatened with being disabled, in several councillors’ ridings.

Finally, let me apologize for the title of this blog entry. Tory Sale is a poor anagram for
Sorry Tale.

You’re looking for the dumb question? This is it:

are we Torontonians, voters and citizens, as dumb as our Mayor and City Council?

We must be. They’re getting away with this anal product.

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