It’s supposed to be a lakeside jewel of sustainability where thousands of residents and workers won’t need a car to access the city from their waterfront condos and offices.

But Toronto’s failure to deliver the streetcar promised along Queens Quay east of Yonge St. is a growing concern among developers and politicians who say it threatens the future success of the east lakeshore communities.

Castlepoint Realty president Alfredo Romano says Waterfront Toronto’s plan to boost TTC bus service while it waits to build a streetcar “is a joke.”

“How can you convince the investment community to believe in your acceleration of the Port Lands when you can’t even get the transit to Cherry St.,” he said.

Councillor Pam McConnell (Toronto Centre-Rosedale) said developers are “apoplectic” about the lack of an East Bayfront light rail line. On Wednesday, she persuaded East York Community Council to ask the city to make waterfront transit a funding priority.

“We’ll have 10,000 people down there in a few years and we’d better have a way to transport them,” she said. “We have many developers who are in the process of final planning or land acquisition and they were promised there would be rapid transit. You can’t build neighbourhoods that are divorced from the transportation system.”

Waterfront Toronto, the agency in charge of developing the lakefront, has hired a consultant to look at eight potential “interim” transit solutions for the next five to 15 years until there are more people living and working on the waterfront.

President John Campbell said a streetcar line has turned out to be about three times more expensive than the $90 million budgeted. He’s willing to spend that money now, however, if the investment lays the foundation for light rail later when the need will be greater. Dedicated bus lanes, for example, would preserve space for a streetcar right-of-way.

Campbell stressed, however, that the sustainability agenda of the new waterfront communities and their ability to attract jobs depends on transit. Toronto tends to wait until there’s a demand before it adds service.

“If you wait for three or four years for demand to build up, people have already established their habits and you can’t get them out of the car. What we want to do is get transit in there very early so people don’t buy a parking spot. On the commercial side it makes it harder to lease. There’s no doubt about it. One of our objectives is to bring jobs down here,” said Campbell.

A strong connection to the subway is critical when developers are trying to build communities that aren’t car dependent, said Castlepoint’s Romano.

Waterfront Toronto should put a streetcar connection at street level at Union Station or connect it to the PATH if there’s no money to tunnel another portal to Queens Quay east of Yonge St., he said.

“There’s nothing terribly wrong with buses except you’re creating a high density environment that calls for this kind of transit to move 4,000 to 5,000 people an hour and buses can’t do that without creating havoc. At some point we have to get serious about bringing streetcars at least to Cherry St. so we fulfill the area’s potential,” Romano said.

“Now you’ve got almost all of the land between Cherry and Yonge in the hands of developers who have invested tens of millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions, and (there is) no rail, no LRV.”

In February, a group of 10 developers, as well as Corus Entertainment and George Brown College, which has a new waterfront campus near Lower Sherbourne, sent city council a letter saying lack of transit threatened the waterfront.

But Lorie Shekter-Wolfson, George Brown’s assistant vice-president, waterfront development, said this week she didn’t expect light rail would be in place on Day 1. She is satisfied for now with a plan to extend TTC buses to the new campus when it opens in September.

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Likewise, Great Gulf senior vice-president Alan Vihant said his company is fine with buses for its Monde condo building near Sherbourne Park.

“The site can be served by buses provided that the service is frequent enough to meet demand. Over time, Waterfront Toronto’s East Bayfront will be a mixed use and high density development, and this amount of development justifies a dedicated LRT. In the interim, while development is ramping up, a dedicated bus-transit strategy is acceptable,” he said.

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