It’s kind of odd to see Councillor Michael Ford of Etobicoke stand up and suggest wasting more than half a million dollars on studying something we already pretty much know the answer to.

This is not to suggest the inheritor of the Ford Family city council estate in Ward 2 is not his own man — he has made some well-publicized breaks from family tradition in his brief years in the public eye.

But still, he’s so far always kept up the appearance of following in his famous uncles’ footsteps when it comes to opposing what they would have tried to characterize as the gratuitous waste of taxpayer dollars.

Those who were around at the beginning of this decade will remember how Michael’s uncle Rob Ford built a whole successful mayoral campaign on screaming bloody murder about a single $12,000 party and the salary of a $77,000 employee who watered the plants at City Hall.

These nickels and dimes matter, was his point.

And we shouldn’t be disrespecting taxpayers by sending them down the toilet.

Now, here, along comes his nephew, suggesting we flush $500,000 or more to conduct a two-week pilot study on replacing streetcars on Queen Street with buses.

For the past month, the TTC has been using buses instead of streetcars on the route due to construction.

Ford’s motion, introduced to the public works committee by fellow second-generation Etobicoke penny-pincher Stephen Holyday and passed by a 3-2 margin, suggests keeping those buses on the street for two weeks longer than planned after the construction is finished to study “apples-to-apples” how they perform compared to streetcars and to see whether they are more “efficient.”

City council as a whole will vote on going forward with the study in July.

So, one thing we know before we start is this is expensive: the cost of running buses instead of streetcars during construction is $1 million a month. So the cost of continuing to do so for two weeks longer than necessary is roughly $500,000. Add the cost of conducting the study Ford is asking for, monitoring traffic and whatnot, and then preparing the reports, and the bill for the project becomes clear.

The other thing we know is that TTC CEO Andy Byford calls using streetcars on that line “inherently more efficient” than buses, and the price tag of the pilot hints at why: you need way more buses to carry the same number of passengers, and you need to pay people to drive them all.

The difference in these costs will only escalate as the new low-floor streetcars fully roll out. Byford estimates the TTC would need three times as many buses as new streetcars on the line.

And you could add to that the cost of new buses, the gas to run them and possibly a $100-million new garage to house them.

Whatever else buses may be, they are way more expensive to run.

And we already have some independent analysis of performance that shows buses don’t really perform any better at moving people on Queen Street, either.

Without waiting for any formal pilot, transit expert Steve Munro, who might know more about TTC and streetcars than anyone else on Earth (and certainly more than anyone who doesn’t work for the TTC), has compiled detailed data about the performance of buses on that route in May with the performance of streetcars in the months immediately preceding. You can see it yourself on his blog stevemunro.ca.

His short-form conclusions are fairly simple: buses move a bit quicker — a few minutes over an hour-long segment of the route, but quicker — at times and in places where traffic is light.

When traffic is heavy, as during rush hours on Queen Street, the buses do not go faster, and sometimes go slower than streetcars do.

And at all times of day, the buses are more likely than streetcars to bunch together, running in pairs in ways that drives riders nuts.

I’d expect longer study will show much the same thing.

So: buses don’t move much faster, if they move faster at all.

And they cost oodles more dollars to run.

There are other things to consider, of course, in comparing the two options: the place of streetcars as a noteworthy Toronto tradition, for example. The fact that running more buses means there are more of them, which means people don’t wait as long at stops. The fact that a single disabled streetcar holds up the line. The fact that buses take longer to load. The accessibility of the two to people with disabilities.

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Most of these variables are well known, and they have already been factored into the decision-making that the TTC considers long-settled in favour of streetcars (as do the politicians who represent most of the wards where streetcars run).

Of course, there’s one other factor that one assumes looms heavily in Councillor Ford’s mind. That’s the effect on traffic flow for the car drivers sharing the road with streetcars. I think there’s a good chance that in most cases this balance scale also favours streetcars, as, if you need three times as many buses, and they pull in and out of the curb every block, then you have that much more traffic weaving around the road screwing the flow up for everyone.

But I also know what it’s like to be a car driver stuck behind a streetcar for blocks at a time, feeling like it’s slowing you down because you need to stop behind it every block while it loads passengers.

It’s frustrating. And without even thinking that the vehicle has more than 100 people on it, it’s easy for a single car driver to think his car ought to have right of way here.

It’s easy to think that, in your car, on the way home.

But it should be equally easy to realize, on reflection, that the big transit vehicles carrying thousands should get priority over the small personal vehicles carrying dozens . . . that, because they carry so many people at a time (people who are, thus, not in cars themselves), streetcars are a solution to traffic, not the cause of it.

It should be easy, but that is not the Ford way.

If Michael Ford could learn anything from his uncles’ example, it is that there are reliable political points to be scored in catering to the road rage of car drivers.

And that those drivers rage over nothing so much as streetcars.

No matter what common sense says.

No matter what math says.

No matter what the people who live along streetcar routes say.

No matter how much money is at stake.

In that way, Michael Ford is just building an addition to the family legacy.

A very expensive, wasteful addition.