Politics ruins transit planning. We all know this. Everyone complains about it all the time.

So getting politics out of transit planning is a popular concept. In general, in theory. Until you start to really think about what it might mean, in practice.

The thing is, transit planning is inherently political. That’s maddening, sometimes, but I don’t see a good way around it. Which doesn’t stop people from trying.

A few times every year, some well-meaning politician or think tank or civic organization comes out with a suggestion for how we can take the politics out of transit, usually by some sort of shuffling of the organizational structure. Most recently in the news, we have the Toronto Region Board of Trade with a proposal for a “Superlinx” Toronto-Hamilton-Waterloo area transit agency that would take over responsibility for all of our commutes. They made the suggestion in a report last year, but this week released a poll showing a big majority of the general public supports the idea.

On the specifics of the proposal, I’ll say it’s one of those things that makes all kinds of sense in theory, but seems sketchier in practice. First of all, the TTC leaves many of us wanting in many ways, but it is undeniably excellent at moving people. It dwarfs all of the other transit agencies it would be merging with — TTC buses alone carry more than five times as many passengers per day than the entire GO bus and train network. The TTC carries 2.76 million passengers per day, to GO’s 250,000. Taking control away from their management and putting it in the hands of provincial appointees who have never had to run such a large organization seems like a recipe for failure.

But it’s not just that I don’t trust the province to put the right people in charge (they could, after all, put the TTC in charge of the whole new Superlinx). It’s that whoever is in charge will face the new politics of a regional transit system. The politics don’t suddenly disappear, they just get more complicated.

Note that Metrolinx, the existing GTA regional transit agency, was supposed to take the politics out of transit planning when it was created, and anyone who has followed it closely will automatically note that if anything, it has been more subject to the blowing of the political winds (both municipal and provincial) than the TTC.

I don’t think those politics favour good local service. I mentioned the massive reach of the TTC buses. Their ability to move people reliably, especially in the inner suburbs, through their frequent-service schedules and integration with the subway system, has long been considered a phenomenal transit success story by observers across North America. Part of how it achieves that is by providing regular service even in places where it loses money — where ridership doesn’t seem to justify the level of service. It provides this service across the city, and people from across the city pay for it (and, I’d argue, benefit from it).

But if you’re a transit service with a regional mandate, now how do you try to justify every-five-minute service on Midland Ave. when riders in Newmarket are looking at service every 35 minutes in rush hour and once an hour on the weekend? If you think the political debates about who “deserves” a subway line near their house (and which “elites” should shoulder how much of the costs) in Toronto today are insufferable, just wait until they take place across an entire suburban-urban-rural megalopolis of dozens of municipalities.

(You want a case study? New York state took over North America’s biggest and proudest subway system, in New York City, in 1968, and have famously managed to run it almost into the ground. Upstate voters, it turns out, don’t see maintenance of the big-city system as that high a priority.)

Local service has to remain under local control. Regional planning should involve regional co-ordination, for sure, but we have to be careful not to ruin what’s already working when we go about restructuring.

And those insufferable debates are pretty much unavoidable. Much as we complain about it, “politics” is just the term for the process we use to make decisions together. In our system, we make those decisions through elected representatives who answer directly to us.

The fantasy of a panel of benevolent-dictator experts who are above politics is attractive to indulge, until you realize that means someone spending your money to transform your neighbourhood without any accountability to you.

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I cannot imagine that we would take responsibility for decisions about hundreds of billions of our dollars and massive city- and region-defining transportation infrastructure projects and somehow hive it away from the control of the people we elect to represent us.

I mean, they screw it all up, frequently. But only because we want them to. I mean, we must. We elect them to do it. That’s politics. And yes, it’s the worst, except in comparison to the alternatives.

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