Toronto’s Transit Priorities

The City Needs Maintenance AND Expansion

At a recent meeting, City Council considered a report prepared by staff regarding the prioritization of higher order transit planning.  For the most part, the report was about re-evaluating the priorities currently in place in the City’s Official Plan and in broad terms consider how improvements to surface routes – new and existing could make travelling on transit more efficient and attract more riders.  It also sought to align transit planning with several overall City objectives including finance, equity, climate, crowding and congestion and critically, accommodating housing and employment growth and intensification.

“Developing complete communities around transit stations and corridors with higher density employment and residential development supports the City’s housing, economic and social development objectives.”

From our perspective, the City has already prioritized the Sheppard corridor for higher order transit because it has been in the Official Plan for decades, and more directly, because City Planning has been approving high-density residential developments all along the corridor that are already built, approved or proposed – from Downsview to McCowan.  In order to accommodate all this growth and actually encourage approved residential housing to get built sooner, a firm commitment from the three levels of government that the Sheppard Subway Extension is going to happen within a certain timeframe is needed.  When all three levels of government are wringing their hands about the housing crisis and promoting the need for high-density Transit Oriented Communities, the Sheppard Corridor is already a prototype in development.  The current and projected population within 800m of every existing and likely subway station along Sheppard is greater than almost every other station stop outside the downtown core and North York City Centre.

However, the City staff report largely ignores the Sheppard Subway due to its expense and because subway planning and development has been uploaded by the Provincial Government.  Therefore, it would seem reasonable for the City to direct its attention and resources to areas where it can and should deliver given its mandate and funding sources.  However, this does not exempt the City from advocating for that subway extension, especially when it has approved significant growth along the Sheppard Corridor with significantly large numbers of residential units currently in the planning pipeline.  A Sheppard subway commitment will quickly unlock thousands of new residential units.  At the same time, failure to provide that higher order transit along Sheppard will ensure that the high-density nodes that already exist will become clusters of isolation linked by congested and inadequate transportation infrastructure.

A significant theme in the report and in subsequent discussion that followed centred on the need to properly maintain the existing TTC network and focus on its State of Good Repair (“SOGR”) program - which is reported to require billions of investment over the next 10 years.  This is reasonable and should be the focus of City transit expenditures.  However, it was disappointing to see some self-proclaimed transit advocates admonish those Councillors that spoke about the need to expand the transit network because the existing system is in disrepair.  This either/or dichotomy is extremely disappointing.

The fact that the existing system needs attention should of course be a priority, but so should expansion if this City and region is to avoid the mistakes of the past.  There are a number of proposed transit expansion plans being forwarded and most or all of them are needed to address the very criteria used by City staff in their evaluation framework.  Until the Ford Government took the plunge to invest billions into the new lines under construction, that SOGR vs system expansion mantra got us into the situation we are in today – with too little effort expended on either.

The City is growing at a rapid pace and the existing transportation infrastructure is woefully inadequate to service the residents that are already here – that is fact.  If we are to add more housing, address inequities, reduce congestion and meet climate-related objectives, we desperately need to tackle both maintenance AND expansion and all levels of government need to do their part.  For Toronto Council, that may mean more funds for SOGR, but is also means working with and persuading the other levels of government that if they want to build more housing and intensify the existing urban fabric, transit expansion is just as important as maintaining the system for those that it already works for – because for many parts of the City, slower train travels on Yonge street are the least of their worries when it takes them an hour or more just to get to a Yonge Line train in the first place – or whether they even try to.

As the City directs its limited funds towards maintenance and improvements to the existing TTC Network, it should also be forcefully telling the senior levels of government that transit expansion is required if all three levels of government want to achieve their housing, equity and climate objectives with sustainable intensification.