There’s no gravy train in the City of Toronto, but there is a wrecking ball and it’s aimed directly at our transportation system. Since taking office last fall, Mayor Rob Ford has consistently shown a disregard for any notion of evidence-based planning of the city’s road and transit networks.

His bias against both streetcars and light rail transit (LRT) flies in the face of the fact that our current streetcar system carries many more riders a day than the entire GO Transit system and is essential to the daily functioning of the Toronto downtown.

One of the critical factors in making the central city world-renowned as a vibrant, attractive place is that in the 1960s when North American cities were replacing streetcars with inferior bus services Toronto decided to keep its streetcars and to reinvest in them as a key part of the plan to grow the downtown while maintaining its liveability.

Combined with the subway and GO rail lines, our streetcars provide the downtown with high-quality transit that carries over 50 per cent of all morning peak-period commuters entering the downtown. Without this transit network, the downtown simply could not function. Replacing our streetcars with buses (as has been suggested by the mayor on several occasions) simply makes no sense. Unit for unit, streetcars carry about 50 per cent more people than buses, and the resulting loss of capacity would lead to more people driving, making congestion worse, not better.

The problem with streetcars is not that they get in the way of cars, as the mayor clearly believes, but the reverse: currently streetcars carrying 70-plus passengers are seriously impeded by cars containing one or two persons. What we need to do is give greater priority to streetcars so they can play an even greater role in moving people efficiently into, out of and through the downtown.

The same argument holds for LRT and bus rapid transit (BRT) on suburban arterial roads. A well-designed LRT line can carry 5,000-15,000 passengers per hour (BRT typically will carry a bit less). One lane on Sheppard Avenue can carry about 900 cars, or about 1,100 persons, per hour. This means that an LRT running on a dedicated surface lane has the potential to replace four or more lanes of traffic. Taking a lane for an LRT line thus has the potential to remove far more cars from the roadway than it displaces, thereby reducing congestion levels for the remaining drivers, improving transit service and greatly increasing the capacity of the roadway to move people.

This, of course, is what the transportation system is all about: moving people, not cars. What people need is mobility, the ability to move freely and cost-effectively around the city. Cars are the primary means by which most of us accomplish this. But we have neither the space nor the money to build major new roads within the city and, even if we could, roads alone cannot meet the demands of our growing population and economy. BRT, LRT and even the occasional subway (which can carry 35,000 persons an hour or more) are required if the city is not to be mired in hopeless gridlock. The best friend that a car driver has is a high-quality comprehensive transit system that ensures that not everyone must use their car for every trip.

The extremely high cost of putting transit underground can only be justified in two cases:

• For subways in which the very high volumes and the need for unimpeded operations makes the investment cost-effective.

• For other high-order transit when street-level constraints make an underground alignment necessary, despite the cost (such as in the central section of the proposed Eglinton line).

Putting transit underground simply for the sake of “getting out of the way of cars” is not a good use of taxpayers’ dollars, for two reasons. First, as already noted, transit can more than justify its use of road space. Second, with limited money available, far more “bang for the buck” in terms of network coverage and frequency of service (absolutely critical factors in determining transit effectiveness) can be achieved by building many more kilometres of surface transit than could be constructed underground.

The mayor’s insistence on sinking whatever money can be scrounged into the Sheppard subway extension is a non-starter on all fronts. Within any reasonable planning time frame, there is not sufficient demand within the Sheppard corridor to justify the capacity and associated expense of a subway relative to LRT. There is no need to insist that the transit line must be underground over its entire length. And blowing the entire budget on a single transit line will not address the travelling needs of either transit or car users.

There is a desperate need in Scarborough and elsewhere throughout Toronto’s suburbs for improved transit service. What is needed is an improved network of local buses feeding higher order transit lines that truly improves transit services for the majority of suburban trip-makers and thereby offers options to beleaguered commuters.

After 30 years of very little investment in the transit network, catching up is going to be very difficult and expensive and will involve staying the course over many years. But it is absolutely essential if Toronto is to continue to be a city worth living and investing in. We need to begin now, first by taking time to reassess what we are trying to accomplish, what the full slate of options are, and what resources we are willing to invest to achieve our goals.

If we do not do this, and if we continue along the current path of ideologically driven planning by decree, then, at best, we are facing another three years of acrimonious and fruitless debate and, at worst, a commitment to extraordinarily expensive projects that will do little to solve our transportation problems. Either scenario guarantees that we will be worse off three years from now than we are today.

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Torontonians need and deserve better than that.

Eric J. Miller is director of the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto.