Fifteen years from now, if people in Scarborough Village are going to U of T Scarborough on the Eglinton East LRT, and commuters from Don Mills are taking the Relief Subway Line to jobs downtown while residents of Mount Dennis and Agincourt meet them at Union after hopping on local SmartTrack GO trains for a TTC fare, and Rexdalians are getting around on the Finch West LRT, and people can ride the Eglinton Crosstown all the way from Yonge and Eglinton to the airport — if those options all exist in 2030 or so, in addition to what we have now, and in addition to the subway extensions to the Scarborough Town Centre and to York University (and beyond), and in addition to the Eglinton Crosstown underground LRT through the heart of the city — if all of that is completed as Mayor John Tory claims it can and will be…

Well, if that’s the case, all these people saying the mayor is screwing up transit planning or selling out to the province or whatever will look pretty silly in retrospect. I mean, we’ll still be able to quibble about how the tab was split up between various governments or which technology was used where — Toronto: Intractable Wailing About Transit Minutia Our Strength — but if all that stuff Tory says is the plan is built, getting around this city will be a lot faster and easier and just plain better than it is today.

If, though. Lots of ifs. Big, big, ifs.

On the other hand, if all we have to show for this in the ’30s is six newish GO stops, a single-stop subway extension to a mall in Scarborough, and a smoldering crater where our budget used to be, well then Tory may have been the one who doomed us.

Trying to take the long view, what to think about this week’s installment of the transit debate depends a lot on which of those possible futures you expect this to lead to.

Much of the immediate debate, on the report on the mayor’s flagship campaign SmartTrack transit plan and how to proceed with it, focuses on more immediate questions.

Many critics point out that the plan in front of us, in virtually every detail, differs substantially from what the mayor promised on the campaign trail. His Eglinton West heavy rail spur has been replaced with a revived David Miller plan for a separate LRT line. The rest of the plan is now boiled down to six new stations in Toronto on GO Transit’s Regional Express Rail corridors. His promise that this would all be accomplished through the magic of TIF — tax increment financing — without need for any other money, is exposed as unworkable. Tory admits he has changed his notions to conform to a newly revealed reality, but what most galls his opponents is that they foretold all of this — pointed out reality all along — and when they did he accused them of unproductive negativity.

The report at hand outlines the deal with the province to build the revised plan and share costs. Basically, the city will pay for everything that could be called the SmartTrack plan: the construction and operation of the LRT portion, the new stations, and the incremental cost to provide operation to those stations.

Immediately, the cost of the six stations on the GO lines sticks out: $1.25 billion ($835 million to be paid by the city, assuming the Trudeau government picks up the rest). These are above-ground, presumably outdoor railway platform stations, projected to cost over $200 million each. It is hard to see, at a glance, what Trumpian flourishes each of these stations will require to wind up costing roughly the same to construct as did the 27-story hotel being finished now on the CNE grounds.

The operating cost of SmartTrack service on GO lines is also a potential concern: right now, each passenger on GO transit costs over $10 to carry, while on the TTC the cost per passenger is just under $3. The operating costs here could be far higher than what the TTC is used to. And they remain unknown for now.

The cost in and of itself seems like a relative detail (in the funhouse-mirror view of transit project costs, $835 million as the city’s share of a large project seems small). The biggest argument put forward against this plan is that building this instead of the Relief Line or the Eglinton East LRT is a huge mistake. In response, the mayor, with backing from Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat and others, insisted there was no such “instead” involved. Planning and design work on both those other projects proceeds apace — a pace more advanced, and better funded than at any point in the past.

This conflict in interpretations takes us away from these specific SmartTrack trees, and back out to view the forest of the whole transit picture, and actually the entire landscape around the forest that is the city’s government under Mayor Tory halfway through his term.

Tory has repeatedly said this year that it is not an either/or game he’s playing: that the city will build the relief line and SmartTrack, the subway extension and the Eglinton East LRT, and virtually every transit project proposed by anyone in the past decade. And not only that, he has said, but he will also rebuild highways and build massive new parks, repair public housing and implement an anti-poverty strategy. And so on. It is not a matter of this or that, he said in a speech last month. It is this and that and that and that, too.

Many of his critics simply don’t believe him. They point out that if you tally up the bill for all these things, you’re at dozens of billions in capital costs upfront, and many hundreds of millions in annual operating costs on top of that. And that while the mayor has been making speeches, he’s had the government’s staff in all departments rifling through couch cushions for loose change and scanning the flyers for coupons to scrounge up the dough just to keep the lights on. They say he’s likely to try to sell off Toronto Hydro, which might pay for SmartTrack and little else and limit future income, and call it a day.

To which the mayor has been responding that in just a couple of weeks, staff will be releasing a report on possible new revenue sources, and he will be championing some of those sources. Enough, he certainly suggests, to realistically build and serve the city in the way he envisions building up.

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We’ll know soon enough. If the mayor is willing — and importantly, able, since it’s uncertain whether the city council that has followed the mayor in running up the bill has the stomach to follow the mayor if he proposes paying it — to generate the cash for all the plans he has on the drawing board, then his choice of emphasis at press conferences today will eventually seem less relevant. If he doesn’t, or can’t, then the debate clearly becomes either/or, and those choices he has already made will be limiting, and defining.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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