Why is the Board of Trade shilling for The Big Doug?

There are so many sensible reasons to not build a Toronto by-pass tunnel — what we at Spacing have dubbed `The Big Doug’ after Boston’s Big Dig — that it’s scarcely worth the time to itemize them all. But besides the cost — staggering! — and the inevitable induced congestion — crushing! — a few that haven’t been bruited in the past few days do come to mind:

• A public works project of this scale will sponge up such an enormous portion of the region’s construction resources — everything from bulldozers to concrete mixers to dump trucks to construction crews — that it will drive the prices of such goods and services through the roof for decades, with the knock-on effects felt by housing developers, other public agencies, taxpayers, businesses, etc.
• The tunnel will disgorge a veritable Mount Everest of clean and not-so-clean fill, and we can reasonably ask where all that soil, some of it contaminated, should go. And while we’re here, maybe we can ask what the years of the pounding of heavy dump trucks will do to our already congested roads.
• No GTA community is going to want to live next to the very large and very noisy air intake and exhaust stacks in perpetuity, although they’ll definitely have to surface somewhere.
• On and off ramps that, likewise, will have to surface somewhere, all of them giant and unwelcome space hogs.
• Carbon. So. Much. Carbon.

The point, of course, is that there’s no point. But the point of this column is not about the absurdity of Doug Ford’s idea but rather the vacuousness of the Toronto Region Board of Trade’s advocacy in favour of it.

Late last week, TRBOT’s president and CEO Giles Gherson shilled for the tunnel scheme as an instance of outside the box thinking. “Solving congestion is going to take many different actions,” he said during a radio interview. “Some of them are fairly conventional, and some of them will have to be big and bold.”

TRBOT has long had an open file on traffic congestion in Toronto, and once upon a time this venerable business lobby group actually advocated for the kinds of solutions that do lead to improvements: more and better transit, funding ideas to pay for said transit, etc.

Likewise, TRBOT for years has sought to remind GTA politicians and residents alike that congestion isn’t free: the current estimate (which is basically a projection of the cost of delayed shipments) is $11 billion a year. That number has crept up — the first time I encountered a Board of Trade estimate on the cost of congestion, the figure was only $6 billion. This sum surely doesn’t account for the full (human) cost of congestion. However, it’s worth putting the figure into its proper context: the GTA’s GDP is about $440 billion (20% of Canada’s total), so congestion’s toll, so to speak, is about 2.5% — not nothing, but neither the crushing burden it’s made out to be.

My quibble isn’t about this particular talking point. Rather, I fail to understand why the region’s most influential business lobby would set fire to its credibility by touting a scheme that not only makes no fiscal and logistical sense whatsoever, but also seeks to solve today’s problems with an infrastructure black hole that won’t be viable for decades.

Tellingly, Gherson — a former business journalist whose eyebrows would surely have left his forehead had he been reporting on this kind of announcement — talked about the 400,000 jobs in the vicinity of Pearson, and the fact that many of those workers commute by car from the eastern reaches of the GTA.

Is that pattern a static condition?

No! Cities and urban economies don’t work that way, as he of all people should know. In the years it would take to build this monstrosity, labour markets and land use will change, as will vehicle technologies and industrial technologies. Perhaps in three decades, the workforce in that Pearson mega-zone, with all its light industry, back-office and fulfillment services, will have shrunk considerably because of automation and AI and who knows what else.

Maybe many of those people working in the eastern GTA will have decided to find better located jobs, either within the GTA or elsewhere in Ontario or Canada — dare we say, exercising their own market power. Maybe smart employers will relocate in response, reckoning that it makes more sense to hold on to their workers than to hold on to a generic office complex near the airport.

So many maybes.

In the face of days of scathing criticism, I imagine that Gherson and his board will retreat to that rickety rhetorical redoubt in justifying their advocacy of a dumb idea — `We’re just trying to spark a debate, etc.’

Well, I could decide to spark a debate about congestion by advocating that all households be given their own helicopter. It’s Bold! It’s New Thinking! But, well, it’s also stupid.

I’d much prefer that an influential organization with the ear of the premier present ideas that not only have a chance of coming to fruition, but won’t produce the kinds of unintended consequences (costs, impact on budgets, delays, etc.) that will cause its own members to balk.

So, for Gherson’s benefit, here are a few ideas that might be more, well, grounded:

• As early as the next fiscal year, the provincial government could, if it so chooses, zero-rate the tolls for all truck traffic that uses the 407 and negotiate a bulk payment deal with the 407’s owners by way of compensation. The TRBOT’s preoccupation, after all, is shipping delays, so anything that incentivizes trucks to get off the 401 and onto the 407 would not only make sense, but could also be achieved quickly.
• More ambitiously, the provincial government could embark on negotiations with the owners of the 407 to buy out that ridiculous lease once and for all. It would cost a bundle, true, but surely less than a tunnel, and with results in the foreseeable future as opposed to some distant point on the horizon. This one would sell well with voters, I’d reckon.
• Last, TRBOT could lean in to some advocacy that pushes for much more east-west transit service north of the 401, e.g., new express GO bus service, or a rapid transit corridor situated in the vast hydro corridor that runs alongside the 407.

Ultimately, Gherson et al could, uh, boldly choose to speak truth to power instead of pandering to a premier with a fetish for highways and burrowing.