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No more backtracking on LRT

Metrolinx has rendered its final decision on the subways-versus-LRT debate, and it’s light rail transit all the way on Sheppard and Finch and along Eglinton, just as council said it should be when it beat back Rob Ford’s Sheppard subway fantasy last month.

The mayor figures he’s still got time to kill this LRT business, since construction of the Sheppard East LRT isn’t slated to begin until 2014 and not until 2015 on Finch West.

Ford is already recruiting a slate to run in 2014 against councillors who defied his scheme to bury the Eglinton LRT east of Laird and extend the existing Sheppard subway from Don Mills to Scarborough Town Centre. Of course, we’ll be occupying a different political reality by then, one Ford is out of step with.

In the meantime, it’ll be a couple of years before the tunnel-boring machines now cutting under Eglinton get to Leaside, where the LRT is supposed to come above ground. We could conceivably have a whole new government in charge at Queen’s Park – and, seeing as the pendulum is swinging to the left, not necessarily the PCs Ford’s banking on.

The one big proviso: the cost of building these lines is going up thanks to the delays Ford caused when he unilaterally declared Transit City dead. But the $8.4 billion allotted to the projects is a hard number, which means it ain’t going up.

Metrolinx’s report refers to its staff working with the federal government “to seek additional P3 Canada Fund support for these projects.”

It would be stupid to turn the clock back now on building light rail. We simply can’t afford the costs of congestion. But in Toronto, politics can get in the way of transit planning. We’ll see.

Cities in North America that once looked to Toronto for guidance on public transit, in particular our surface rail system, have since surpassed us. Call it The Toronto Tragedy.

That’s the title Montreal author Taras Grescoe chose for his chapter on the Big Smoke in Straphanger, Saving Our Cities And Ourselves From The Automobile. He was in Toronto to promote his book and took part in a NOW Talks at the Drake on Tuesday, April 24.

Grescoe, who travelled the planet to study the transit systems of more than a dozen cities, asks: “How did a city that used to work so well end up so broken?”

He tracks transit’s demise to Mike Harris and amalgamation, which did away with the Metro level of government responsible for regional planning. Metro’s disappearance sent low-density sprawl on the fringes of the city into overdrive, the results of which we’re seeing today in longer commutes from the 905.

The halving of provincial subsidies to the TTC by the Harris gang compounded the congestion problem by making transit a less viable option for commuters in the inner burbs.

And then along came Ford with his “war on the car” rhetoric and what Grescoe describes as Toronto’s “catastrophic derailment.”

“After having its autonomy and power usurped by Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution, the urban area that is the economic engine of Canada finds itself a slave to the ideology of suburbia.” I’d assign Grescoe’s book as required reading for city councillors. Not sure if TTC chair Karen Stintz has her copy yet, but she did request a meeting with Grescoe.

But back to Metrolinx’s decision. Before Ford, Toronto was on the cutting edge of a streetcar renaissance, expanding its system into the largest in North America while other cities were abandoning their surface lines. The CLRVs based on Swiss prototypes championed by Toronto developed into the sleek LRT vehicles running on dedicated lanes we see today in European and American cities – and Vancouver and Calgary – but not T.O.

In fact, as far back as the mid-1970s, streetcars were being touted as the preferred transit mode in North America, filling the capacity niche in areas too dense for buses but not populous enough for subways.

A 2004 report presented to the city opined that the rail revolution Toronto was instrumental in pushing showed no signs of letting up and was indeed accelerating.

By that time, we had working examples of LRT’s predecessors: streetcars along dedicated lines on Spadina and Queens Quay. The St. Clair right-of-way was on the drafting table, too.

On streetcar rights-of-way, Toronto was way ahead of the curve. The original St. Clair streetcar ran in a dedicated lane between Yonge and Caledonia when it opened in 1913. It was removed between 1928 and 1935, first to make room for more autos, then as a make-work project during the Great Depression.

Arguably, our streetcars saved the city, its ridership comparable to that of subways in some American cities and, more than any other mode of public transit, making Toronto the city of neighbourhoods it is today.

The old burbs of Moore Park, the Beaches, Danforth, Bloor West, Long Branch and St. Clair West, to name a few, owe their unique emergence to the streetcars that used to serve them, and in the case of Long Branch, St. Clair and the Beaches, still do to this day.

Transit City was supposed to be an extension of Toronto’s streetcar renaissance, the next generation that would propel our system into the future, connecting the burbs via modern streetcars, aka light rail vehicles.

Contrary to Ford’s suggestion that surface rail causes traffic hang-ups, light rail in dedicated lanes actually reduces conflict with cars.

Vancouver got the message. Calgary, too. Both embarked on light rail construction and have surpassed us when it comes to light rail in dedicated lanes.

Melbourne, another city to which Toronto is often compared, has a downtown and inner burbs almost exclusively served by light rail on dedicated rights-of-way.

Although our streetcar system carries more passengers than any other on the continent, it’s given the lowest priority, stuck in mixed traffic, to everyone’s chagrin.

We once led the way on the rails.

Metrolinx’s announcement this week confirming council’s decision puts us back on the right track. We hope.

enzom@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/enzodimatteo

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