City Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker is an expert in seemingly lost causes. He has spent most of his days tilting at what appears to be windmills, most of them environmental. And winning. So, don’t dismiss his latest escapade as unachievable.

But the likable politico is whacko when it comes to transit in Scarborough. He’s adopted the narrative of the disrespected and the language of victimhood. His strategy is to be over the top in his rhetoric, unyielding in his demands, and strident in his advocacy.

So far it’s working like a charm. And it will be the ruin of the very Scarborough commuters he purports to serve.

But as city council is about to debate another milestone on the path to the over-build that is the subway, De Baeremaeker displayed his expansive political skills this past week. He led the merry band of Scarborough councillors (all except Paul Ainslie) in drafting an open letter about transit in Scarborough. It skillfully lays out the case — in quiet, reasonable tones, inclusive and seemingly sensible — absent the usual bluster and woe-is-Scarborough rant.

Yes, he was urging Scarborough citizens to raise their voices in favour of the subway extension (the one-stop subway that’ll now cost $3.35 billion, and — trust me — could easily hit $5 billion or more.)

He’s urging support for the 18-stop Eglinton East LRT from Kennedy to the U of T campus at Morningside and Ellesmere (an excellent project now in jeopardy because the subway overbuild has gobbled up all the cash).

And the councillors back Mayor John Tory’s SmartTrack bonanza that is being unmasked, increasingly, as a political promise that was greatly exaggerated and, in fact, dangerous to the viability of existing projects. De Baeremaeker and the Scarborough councillors should know the truth about SmartTrack. But they have sold their political souls to the mayor in a quid pro quo that says I’ll take one subway and LRT for your SmartTrack.

But they are working for Scarborough, they say.

What’s lost is how diligently city hall has messed up transit “planning” in Scarborough.

Line 3, The Scarborough RT, is a perfectly good technology that has been allowed to fall into disrepair. The rattling, aging, almost dying version now living out its final days is the result of deliberate abandonment. Vancouver and Calgary took our technology and built shiny new lines. We made an orphan out of ours and set in motion a journey into the absurd.

For less than $1 billion we could have had Vancouver-like trains running into the Scarborough Town Centre — at no property tax cost to the local taxpayer.

For a decade the TTC advocated the RT remake into a modern system. A 2013 report, buried by mayor Rob Ford, said this: “Notwithstanding criticisms and misinformation over the years, the Scarborough RT has been the single most-reliable service operated by the TTC. The service has been very successful at attracting ridership and has been operating over capacity for a decade. For many years, it has carried daily passenger volumes of 40,000 people.”

Two years after a 2006 study showed the RT as the best option over light rail or subway, then-mayor David Miller unveiled a light rail network called Transit City. With the province picking up all of the cost for the replacement LRT, the TTC accepted it.

But, predictably, there would be more political interference.

Ford bellowed “subways, subways, subways” and turned his back on the provincial money — opting instead to tax every property owner, every year, from 2014 to 2030 to pay for a three-stop subway.

Enter John Tory with SmartTrack, an alluring idea to use existing GO rail tracks for more service inside Toronto. Problem is, the proposed SmartTrack stations duplicated stations on the subway and cannibalized ridership. But a promise is a promise.

So city staff bent themselves into policy pretzels and devised sometimes devious strategies to keep the subway (by now a provincial government promise) and SmartTrack (Tory’s must have) and the Eglinton East LRT to Scarborough U of T campus (a real need).

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Last week Metrolinx issued a report analyzing Tory’s proposed SmartTrack stations, already chopped down to six from 13, warned that three of the six stations might turn away more existing GO riders than the new ones they attract.

For example, the proposed Lawrence Ave. stop on the Stouffville GO line would take on 495 new passengers in the morning rush hour and 1,405 per day. But the added stops slow the service for passengers along the route and make it less attractive to the point that the net ridership is a loss of 490 riders a day.

Already, the subway extension into the Scarborough Town Centre was shifted east of Kennedy to avoid overlap with SmartTrack. The number of subway stops were reduced to none between Eglinton and the town centre at Highway 401. And now we find out that all the gerrymandering won’t work because the plan is built on sand. The ridership isn’t there for anything greater than what’s there, light rail.

Wake us up in 2050 and tune into the cries of, “What have we done?”

Royson James’ column appears weekly. rjames@thestar.ca

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