{"id":55310,"date":"2016-06-20T11:48:18","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T15:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=55310"},"modified":"2016-06-21T09:08:02","modified_gmt":"2016-06-21T13:08:02","slug":"bait-and-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2016\/06\/20\/bait-and-switch\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: A city that doesn’t learn from transit mistakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

How many times do we have to bang our heads against the wall before we finally get the message?<\/p>\n

Apparently, based on Friday\u2019s little news nugget about the Scarborough subway\u2019s inflated cost, that number is not a small one.<\/p>\n

In this city, we don\u2019t learn from our mistakes. Rather, we learn only how to make them again, and again, and again.\u00a0As the old saying goes, history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. But Toronto needs a third phase, because we\u2019re now out there in post-farce terrain.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s really only one thing\u00a0to say\u00a0about John Tory\u2019s insistence on pressing ahead with\u00a0a $2.9 billion, one-stop subway extension that will serve fewer people than many of the city\u2019s bus routes and cost 45% more than initially projected?<\/p>\n

How, Mr. Mayor, can the City\u00a0be so ignorant? Or fiscally irresponsible, for that matter?<\/p>\n

There are other secondary criticisms to make, naturally.<\/p>\n

At the risk of saying “we told you so,” well, we told you so. Spacing<\/em>\u2019s 2014 investigation<\/a>, based on extensive freedom of information requests, unearthed a Metrolinx memo warning that the cost for an earlier version of the Scarborough subway could rise by 40 to 50%. I regret to report that we nailed that prediction two years out, although I\u2019m guessing the price of this boondoggle will continue to rise.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another: how is it that council continues to approve mega-projects before they have been properly costed out, in effect selling taxpayers on one bill of goods after another? Surely, after years of this particular form of perfidy, you\u2019d think council would offer only conditional approvals pending more detailed budgets.<\/p>\n

After all, no one buys a house without making the final sale conditional on a thorough inspection and a legal assessment of whether the property is unencumbered by liens and so on. That\u2019s how you pay for expensive purchases: you do due diligence. Except, it seems, for Toronto council, and its enablers in the provincial cabinet, who collectively encourage voters to believe the fantasy figures that inevitably prove to be utterly baseless.<\/p>\n

And a last one: after we all went through the elaborate public consultation process (charade?) earlier this year that played out in the wake of a council-Queen’s Park compromise about rapid transit in Scarborough (a scaled back subway, with the balance of the available funds going to finance a wider network of LRTs, including the Crosstown East, that would together have created a genuinely connected system in the east end), Tory\u00a0now turns around and effectively flips the bird at all those expectant residents in Scarborough’s south-east neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n

Why? Because, hey, it seems like there\u2019s simply nothing more important than for the mayor to be able to say, two years hence, that he\u2019s building a subway in Scarborough. Even if it\u2019s a subway that will make the Sheppard line look like a paragon of savvy planning. Even it doesn\u2019t make one damn bit of difference to local transit service in the long run. Nope, Tory is going to get that wretched thing built, even if he has to waste every last dollar the city has to spend on such investments. In for a penny, in for a billion, and all that.<\/p>\n

Yet apart from all the policy slings and arrows, the truly perplexing aspect of Tory\u2019s stance is how it reveals a certain political amnesia, or at least a troubling inability to learn from the recent past.<\/p>\n

When I ponder this latest twist in the Scarborough subway melodrama, I find myself casting back to that very ripe moment in early 2012, when a growing contingent on council had become increasingly uneasy about then-Mayor Rob Ford\u2019s bullying and his absurd fictions about building cost-free subways in Scarborough.<\/p>\n

In the wake of some backroom deal-making between the centre and the left, then-TTC chair Karen Stintz led a council insurrection against Ford\u2019s transit gambit, re-establishing (albeit temporarily) much of Transit City. (Stintz, of course, later learned that the Scarborough subway is the proverbial third rail of Toronto politics.)<\/p>\n

Although the circumstances are not identical for all sorts of reasons, I\u2019d say that Tory has blithely wandered to the very edge of a political precipice, and clearly has no clue about what could happen with the next step. Will a Stintz-like ring leader emerge on council and wrest the transit steering wheel from Tory\u2019s hands?<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s becoming an entirely plausible scenario. After all, Tory is increasingly tainted by a run of super costly decisions and non-decisions alike, including, in this latest instance, a $900 million+ outlay to build a project that seems to serve no purpose other than providing him with a talking point if<\/em> Doug Ford runs for mayor in 2018. Beyond that, he doesn\u2019t know how to pay for even a scaled-back Smart Track. He hasn\u2019t done much to wrestle the out-of-control police budget to the ground. The capital budget contains a $1 billion hole, but likely more. And the mayor has mostly rejected his own top bureaucrat\u2019s advice to find new revenue streams or face the prospect of the sorts of service cuts he came into office vowing to reverse. Poor judgment, remember, is his Achilles Heel.<\/p>\n

Had Tory paid attention to the history of Toronto council politics between 2010 and 2014, he\u2019d know that mayors can and do lose power between elections. If he\u2019s not careful, that absurd six-kilometre tunnel could become his political grave.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

photo by wyliepoon<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  How many times do we have to bang our heads against the wall before we finally get the message? Apparently, based on Friday\u2019s little news nugget about the Scarborough subway\u2019s inflated cost, that number is not a small one. In this city, we don\u2019t learn from our mistakes. Rather, we learn only how toContinue reading “LORINC: A city that doesn’t learn from transit mistakes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":55318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transit"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: A city that doesn't learn from transit mistakes - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2016\/06\/20\/bait-and-switch\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: A city that doesn't learn from transit mistakes - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"  How many times do we have to bang our heads against the wall before we finally get the message? 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