Mayor John Tory says people are being misled on the subject of Scarborough’s controversial subway extension — and he’s absolutely right. Only he’s the one “not properly informing the public” by insisting that this misbegotten piece of political pandering is worth $2 billion of taxpayers’ money.

Revised projections, disclosed at a public meeting in Scarborough earlier this week, indicate that by 2031, at its busiest hour, in its busiest direction, the subway extension is expected to carry a mere 7,300 riders.

The generally accepted figure, to justify the immense cost of building a subway, is at least 15,000 riders. The proposed Scarborough subway extension was never expected to move that many people. But city council approved a three-station subway option, and killed a far-superior light-rail line, on the basis of claims that the underground route’s ridership could hit 14,000.

Critics had always suspected that this ridership estimate had been grossly inflated to justify former mayor Rob Ford’s mindless commitment to build “subways, subways subways.” Toronto’s chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, admitted last year that the process producing this number had been “very, very chaotic” and “suboptimal.”

To save an estimated $1 billion, the Scarborough subway was subsequently trimmed to a one-stop extension, pushing the Bloor-Danforth line out to Scarborough City Centre. Peak-time ridership on this shrunken route was pegged at about 11,000 passengers per hour. But even that proved over-optimistic.

News that only 7,300 peak-hour riders would be using the Scarborough subway should trouble anyone interested in providing optimum transit to Toronto commuters and ensuring that taxpayers’ money isn’t wasted.

Scarborough councillor Paul Ainslie quite rightly described the revised ridership figure as “a huge concern.” But Tory appeared undismayed by the shaky case for the subway.

“I continue to be very committed to it,” he told reporters on Wednesday. Armed with his own set of figures, Tory noted that what’s planned is simply a one-stop extension of an existing route, and end-of-the-line stations typically don’t carry huge passenger loads.

Kennedy station, for example, at the eastern end of the Bloor-Danforth route, moves 7,000 peak-hour riders — 300 fewer than the proposed Scarborough City Centre stop. And Kipling, at the opposite end of the existing line, handles 7,200.

According to Tory, judging by this “rational comparison,” the Scarborough subway extension is a good deal. But here’s what his comparison omits: the 1980 two-station extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway, to Kennedy and to Kipling, together cost about $110 million. Yet his plan to push the line just one stop further is pegged at an extraordinary $2 billion.

Adding this single station costs as much as an entire subway line. (Building the five-stop Sheppard subway, for example, cost about $1 billion.) Yet Tory has the effrontery to accuse critics of “misleading” the public when they point out the folly of such an investment.

Unfortunately, new ridership numbers revealing the inadequacy of the Scarborough subway extension are unlikely to derail the project because it was never primarily about serving this city’s public transit needs. It’s about pandering to Scarborough voters who favour underground transit over a light rail line.

Ford has been replaced by Tory. But the fact that commuters will be bound to a bad transit investment for decades to come, and taxpayers will be stuck with the bill, still doesn’t carry much weight at Toronto city hall.

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