It’s amazing what passes for good transit news these days.

Last week, Mayor John Tory announced that he and Premier Doug Ford had hammered out a deal. If approved by Toronto city council, the agreement will see the city reallocate about $3.8 billion in federal funds toward priority projects in Ford’s transit plan: the Ontario Line and a three-stop subway extension in Scarborough.

In return, Queen’s Park will back off on taking ownership of the TTC subway system and release Toronto’s government of any obligation to contribute funds toward the building of those transit projects.

While getting Ford to backtrack on his campaign promise to snatch the subway system is a win — it avoids a messy divorce — letting Toronto off the hook for funding these transit lines is the more significant move. The transit projects in Ford’s plan will only get more expensive. With Ford signalling the provincial government will shoulder that burden, city hall can redirect municipal cash toward maintaining the existing system.

Given the circumstances, it’s a good deal, and one Tory and council need to take.

But here’s the thing: the circumstances suck.

This new transit accord was driven by politics, not planning. It didn’t emerge because transit experts suggested a change to the projects underway before Ford was elected. Instead, the change is prompted by the weird urge that a lot of politicians get to put forward their own unique transit map, existing plans be damned.

Ford’s Ontario Line tosses aside millions of dollars of work done by the TTC on a relief line subway, in favour of a new plan for a longer line using smaller vehicles. Could it be a better, more cost-effective plan? Nobody knows! Most of the important details — like, say, a realistic opening date — are still TBD.

The new change to the Scarborough subway extension plan is even more egregious.

A relatively straightforward plan hatched more than a decade ago to replace the aging Scarborough RT with a longer light-rail transit line has become a prolonged mess. At one point, a new LRT was on track to open in 2015.

Under the new deal, which adds two stations to the one-stop subway plan endorsed by Tory, Scarborough residents shouldn’t expect new transit until 2029 or 2030.

That’s a potential 15-year delay for a transit project that is expected to attract only 11,000 new daily transit riders by 2041. The city’s population is expected to grow by just under a million people over the same time.

That’s a long wait for a project that will barely make a dent in the city’s transit needs, because politicians can’t stop meddling.

Picture a world where the construction and maintenance of any other public utility was treated like this.

For example, take water mains, those giant pipes buried under streets that carry water to your tap. If they were politicized like transit, not only would there be water shortages all the time, but every few years politicians, would stand up and propose their own colourful water main map.

Then, after almost every election, actual experts would need to throw out a bunch of work they had done on future water main construction, so the new map could be implemented.

Occasionally, people would ask the sensible question: “Hey, uh, do these politicians even know anything about water mains?”

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And the answer would be no, not really. Hell, it’d turn out most of them don’t even use water from the municipal supply. They’d be out there drinking bottled spring water while making proclamations about the municipal water system based on gut feelings and grudges.

Now imagine this had been going on for so long that people were numb to it. That expecting any better seemed naive.

I fear that’s where Toronto is with transit — celebrating victories in a politicized environment that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Even when the players announce good news, we should still hate the game.

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