Metrolinx has a "bold" plan for the GTHA involving "Big Moves". At lest that's what it is selling.
Mississauga thinks that it is a yawner. And now that the province is broke, it's going to be time for broken promises, starting with running a deficit.
I spent all day Wednesday at the stakeholder meeting hosted by Metrolinx, where the special focus of the discussion was the financing. $50 billion is a lot to talk about!
Much of what is in the Metrolinx plan is stuff that was already being worked on, proposed, or was stuff previously cancelled. "Bold" and "Big Moves" are not what I'd have called it. But then "Better Late than Never" does not have the same hopeful, happy ring.
Let's start with where will the money will be coming from: right now only the provinces and municipalities are on board. The province has motioned that it's willing to put in $2billon/yr for about 15 years, or about $30 billion dollars of the capital costs. The share that municipalities are on the hook for was not explicitly mentioned, but Metrolinx is hoping to hit up the feds for about $6billion to help top up the capital investments. "Three P" and other "alternative financing" plans are being looked at. These are schemes to get private money to augment the public investments, but there are risks and costs, as well as other issues that have to be looked at. How much of our public space are we willing to pimp is going to be an ongoing battle, especially along political lines.
Then there's the other elephant in the room. How will the financing of the operations costs occur? Operating costs are the costs to run the lines after they've been built with the capital funding. Who will pay for that and how. Mississauga is getting a couple of LRT lines, but they can't even run the busses that they currently have and had. Are the new lines going to be “White Elephants” for municipalities and transit operators?
Nobody in the room had the answers, and that’s very worrying.
Also, it was admitted that Metrolinx has very little information about goods movements in the region. As we are talking about the movement of people and goods, the fact that Metrolinx has no data on the movement of goods on which to base their plans is extremely worrying. A transportation plan that wants to be comprehensive must accommodate for goods movements, as well as the movement of people.
But the worries of the people who came to the open house and public meeting at the convention centre in the evening were as equally unresolved as the finance discussion from the day's meeting. The Metrolinx plan has a strong emphasis on regional transit, and it also has GTAA’s Pearson Airport as both a major destination and a major hub.
Why is an emphasis on regional transit worrying to the people downtown? Because we can already hear the sucking sound of more jobs leaving the core for the 905. Toronto is already a bedroom community in so far as more people commute out of the city for work than commute into the city for work. Rather than leveraging and rewarding the current density in the city of Toronto, our tax dollars will be subsidising people who (for instance) live in Peel and work in Durham. This is not a sustainable solution, people need to live much closer to where they work, which means that work should be close to where people already live. The density of people already living in Toronto’s core should be rewarded with better infrastructure and more work there. This plan, however, will only continue the “flight” of jobs from the core to the outer regions.
Why is the Pearson Airport as a destination so worrying? - Because airlines and flight travel are also not sustainable modes of transport, and the airline industry is already in decline because of rising fuel costs. Why would we build strong connections with an industry in decline? There are other environmental reasons why we should not over-emphasize air travel.
The one important part not brought up in any detail at all during the presentations about it’s plans was cycling and active transportation. The “sexy” public transit routes were the only things being discussed. Lip service was paid to active transportation and was quickly put aside for the discussions of “real” transit solutions, i.e. public transit. I hope that this was a mere oversight, but I am starting worry that Metrolinx' true colours are starting to show by the small mention so extreme that I really had to listen for it -- kind of like driving through Centralia; blink and you’ve missed it.
I hope that your experiences at the meeting were different than mine. I’d love to hear what you thought of the meetings, and what you think of the Metrolinx plan.
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