If you’re ever in the market for a choice example of bureaucratic obfuscation, look no further than the following section in the slightly amended version of city council’s newly unified transit vision, which was approved last week, and will be returning to the executive committee in June in a somewhat more detailed guise.

Appropriate sequencing of the range of projects will be the subject of further analysis. The resulting outputs will need to be further consulted upon with the TTC, Metrolinx and the public. This includes determining where there is alignment between the City’s priorities and Metrolinx’s regional planning and prioritization [italics added by me].

Three passively constructed, cryptic sentences which, when read together, point ever so delicately towards the gaping chasm that lies between all the beautiful maps and an action plan that actually begins to deliver a more coherent vision of rapid transit in Toronto.

Most observers believe the looming psycho-political hump has to do with financing and revenue tools. Indeed, there’s no doubt in my mind that the near unanimity we saw in council last week will erode noticeably when the members get down to the hot potato work of figuring out how to pay for all these projects.

But the element in all this visioning that is consistently AWOL — or at least is kept hidden from public scrutiny in a basement vault marked “radioactive” — is any frank discussion of prioritization.

The map comes with many new lines, and about ten of them, City staff readily concede, are more important than the others. The City and/or Metrolinx can’t build all of them at the same time, nor, indeed, should they. Some are critically important, in terms of the health and viability of the network, while there are others that, if built first, could serve to exacerbate the crowding pressures we all know exist.

In short: must haves and nice-to-haves. Let’s build them in order, in the way that the TTC and the City now prioritize capital projects (e.g., state of good repair, regulatory or statutory improvements, service expansion).

Maybe I’m asking for the impossible, but I have not yet seen a staff document that clearly states the order of importance of the proposed lines and provides a clear rationale based on an evaluation of what happens as different routes come on line.

Alternatively, I haven’t seen a document that compares scenarios — here’s what happens if we do things in order A, compared to order B or order C. Rather, we’re expected to play along with the fiction that the high priority lines will all be built in the next 15 years, and that Toronto, circa 2031, will have some variation of the Network 2011 transit plan that Metro Council approved in 1985, almost half a century earlier.

I understand the three bureaucratic sentences above were written by worldly mandarins who know perfectly well where their work ends and where the politicking begins. I also realize that the very difficult discussion about how to fund all these projects is intimately connected to the question of prioritization. The men and women at City Hall need to think about elections and providing their constituents with hope that the world, or at least their corner of it, is improving.

Yet it seems to me that City and TTC staff, at some point, need to provide both the public and their own political masters with a rigorous technical analysis that openly tackles the question of prioritization, or at least provides some options and a means for council to judge. It’s a report that should identify the points in the system that show the greatest degree of vulnerability, as well as opportunity, and then offer three or four explicitly phased build-out strategies that, if implemented in order, would systematically move the city towards a more sustainable network.

By dancing around this problem, the City’s bureaucrats are leaving the field open to the kind of horse-trading that allowed us to spend almost a generation tied up with subway extensions leading to nowhere instead of building lines that relieve pressure on the over-taxed sections of the network with measures that go beyond productivity enhancements (signal replacement, re-jigged trains, etc.).

The City has extensive forecasting and modeling capabilities, so council should know what happens if we build the east and west extensions on the Crosstown LRT, for example, before the Relief Line. Or what happens if the City does Smart Track before the Scarborough extension. And so on. These phased scenarios, of course, are dynamic, because it’s possible that one project will render another one less urgent or (perish the thought!) unnecessary. It’s also possible that funding will dry up mid-roll out, so surely it makes sense to start with the projects that provide the most high impact solution the soonest.

The phasing also has a bearing on future financial discussions. After all, if we prioritize lines that will get relatively little ridership early on (which can last for decades, as the Spadina subway has shown), the increased burden on the TTC’s operating budget will factor into subsequent debates about how much the City can borrow or levy for later projects. Again, a highly dynamic scenario.

I have not a shred of doubt that the senior planners tasked with stick-handling this epic undertaking through city council are acutely aware of the phasing and prioritization issues. But rather than hide from this most critical part of the debate, I want to see the City’s planners and technical experts present council and the public with competing scenarios and the network/ridership implications for each one.

Everyone knows that at some point, city council will have to choose an order. The onus is on the City’s top officials to impose some order on the debate about order.

photo by Chris Porter