{"id":53960,"date":"2016-01-20T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2016-01-20T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=53960"},"modified":"2016-01-20T09:21:01","modified_gmt":"2016-01-20T14:21:01","slug":"the-smart-track","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2016\/01\/20\/the-smart-track\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Which track is Smart Track on?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"feature-lorinc\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the enduring features of Toronto\u2019s so-called transit debate is the uneven and treacherous information terrain that ordinary citizens are forced to navigate if they aspire to crazy goals, such as trying to make sense of the endlessly shape-shifting discussion about competing options.<\/p>\n

Almost two years after city council voted to commit itself to the $3.5 billion Scarborough subway extension despite a shameful dearth of even cursory analysis, the City continues to crash along with that doomed scheme. While the City is readying itself for a bevy of environmental assessment (EA) reports on that line, there\u2019s still nothing in the public domain by way of rigorous land-use analysis of the proposed routes, any sort of financial due diligence, or even ridership projections that weren\u2019t plucked out of thin air. The City hasn\u2019t released any kind of granular analysis about the projected cost, even as that other train wreck \u2014 the York-Spadina subway extension \u2014 continues to deliver stunning cost over-runs.<\/p>\n

Then yesterday, as if to counterbalance the information vacuum on one big project, the City executes an impressive data dump<\/a> with the other one \u2014 in this case, Smart Track \u2014 or Son of Smart Track \u2014 or whatever we\u2019re now calling this project that is meant to carry the full freight of John Tory\u2019s political legacy.<\/p>\n

The data arrived in the form of a detailed usage scenario analysis done by the University of Toronto\u2019s Transportation Research Institute, which is headed up by civil engineering expert Eric Miller, a renowned authority on trip modeling.<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s group used an elaborate forecasting model, built and updated over many years, to estimate the ridership on various Smart Track permutations by using a range of long-term economic and land-use development assumptions that run from stagnation to hyper-growth. Miller\u2019s scenarios tested various pricing options \u2014 TTC rates vs. more costly GO fares \u2014 as well as various service levels, with trains running at head times ranging from 5 to 15 minutes.<\/p>\n

The study includes forecasts like this: if Toronto\u2019s population rises slowly but the region experiences mid-range employment growth, and the Smart Track corridor (heavy rail to Eglinton, and then an LRT from Mt. Dennis over to the Mississauga Airport Corporate Centre, all running at five-minute intervals) itself attracts new development, then daily boardings, circa 2031, will be in the vicinity of 336,702, which represents almost 55,000 new riders on the TTC every day. Follow?<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s report included a range of less rosy permutations, but City officials, the mayor, and of course the news media have glommed on to the most optimistic scenarios, despite overwhelming evidence that optimistic scenarios tend not to be a sound basis for transit planning.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, his super-detailed evaluation raises as many questions as it purports to answer, largely because all that forecast data is decontextualized (that\u2019s not Miller\u2019s fault; the blame lies with the City, whose planners and politicians refuse to deliver complete analyses, preferring instead to subject the public to a drip-feed of teasers that render decision-making that much more bewildering). Consider:<\/p>\n