Mayor Rob Ford is wasting money through his insistence on burying large parts of the new Eglinton light rail transit line, says former mayor David Miller.

Miller criticized Ford, the Liberal provincial government for going along, and Liberals on city council for supporting the new mayor.

Ford’s decision — with the province’s blessing — to kill the Finch and Sheppard LRT lines was “extremely unwise,” he said in an appearance on Newstalk 1010 Wednesday morning.

Miller said the “genius” of his Transit City plan is that it’s much cheaper and can be built much faster than subways, which Ford supports as a way to separate transit from cars.

The entire Transit City network could have been delivered by 2020 with the first line ready by 2015, Miller said. But it’s not too late to turn back.

“The plan is there, the environmental assessments are done. You could turn it on like a switch. If you wanted to, you could start construction on Finch in about two months and Sheppard probably next week.”

Subways don’t work in many neighbourhoods because there aren’t enough riders, he said.

“We’d love to have a subway in every neighbourhood but, (a) you can’t afford it, and (b) very few neighbourhoods in this city have the (population) density that justifies it.

“That was the genius of the light-rail plan; we could build a generation’s worth of infrastructure in a few years.”

Miller praised the provincial New Democrats for promising to restore a funding formula that had the province paying half of the TTC’s operating subsidy every year.

A return to that formula would see more than $200 million a year flowing to the city to help pay transit operating expenses.

Miller chided Liberals on city council for supporting priorities of Ford that provincial Liberals don’t support.

“I think it’s time for them to stand up,” he said.

“They should be voting for the kind of Toronto that they purport to believe in, which is one where everybody has a real chance, where we support people that need a hand up and where we help grow the economy through things like significant investments in public transit.”

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Shortly after winning office in October 2010, Ford pronounced Transit City dead. In April, he and Premier Dalton McGuinty announced a new plan to devote the $8.2 billion previously pledged to Transit City to a fully underground Eglinton line.

Any provincial money left over — up to $650 million — could go to Ford’s Sheppard subway extension plan, but the mayor first has to find $4 billion in private funding to extend the line east from Don Mills Rd. to the Scarborough Town Centre and west from Yonge-Sheppard to Downsview station.