A lot has been said, and written, about the proposed Lawrence East SmartTrack station in Scarborough. Public hearings opened up last week on John Tory’s proposed additions to the provincial GO Regional Express Rail plan, and the politics of the approval of that particular station have been in the news for months — the auditor general is investigating the decision to place a station on Lawrence.

Much, but not all, of that discussion revolves around how many people are expected to use that station, if and when it ever opens. And while I think it’s good that authorities investigate and debate the questions that have arisen properly, I also think it’s worthwhile to note that a couple of key variables will to a large extent determine the ridership and usefulness of that station. These are variables that still haven’t really been sorted out to anyone’s satisfaction: bus service, and fares. These are going to be a bigger determinant, I think, than potential development at the station. At least in the short term.

“Shoshanna Saxe, an assistant professor of civil engineering and a member of the University of Toronto’s Transportation Research Institute, said there’s only so much the government can do. She noted the area has had a rapid transit stop in the Scarborough Rapid Transit station for more than three decades and development remains low,” a story in the Star read this week. “Demand is something that the city and the province can try and nudge, they can try and inspire, but if the market isn’t there, that’s not within the city’s control,” she went on to say.

I think she’s certainly right that the station there, like most SRT stations, has not generated development around it. But my experience tells me that doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the demand and potential demand for service there. And not just because SmartTrack/RER promises a one-seat trip to Union Station in about 17 minutes, whereas making the same trip today starting at Lawrence East SRT would require changing trains twice and take half an hour. It’s something more than that.

As it happens, I lived in Scarborough, between Markham Rd. and Bellamy, south of Lawrence, for much of 14 years, and in that time I did not have a driver’s license. I took the TTC every day, including downtown to Ryerson for the years I attended school there. During that time, Lawrence East was the closest transit station to my house. And during that time, I may only have set foot inside that station half a dozen times.

That’s because the two bus options close to my house went directly to Warden subway station, which was twice the distance away. The bus trip to Lawrence East, if I were to make it, required a transfer, and would take just as long or longer than the one-bus trip to Warden.

My own experience wasn’t some weird quirk. Almost every north-south bus route in Scarborough feeds people to one of a few stations: Scarborough Town Centre, Kennedy, or Warden. Not surprisingly, those three stations have tremendously high ridership.

Warden station, with eight different bus connections, saw almost 30,000 passengers a day in 2015. Lawrence East, with one single bus line connection, attracted only 8,130.

The passengers go where TTC buses or streetcars take them. It isn’t some oddity of Scarborough, either. Chester subway station is a short walk from both Broadview and Pape stations along the Danforth. Those three stations are in the same neighbourhood — the development and population density around those three stations is the same. And yet: Broadview, served by two streetcar lines and four bus lines, serves over 33,000 passengers a day. Pape, fed by four bus lines including the mighty Don Mills, serves 28,700 passengers a day. And Chester, served by zero bus connections, is among the TTC’s least-used stations, serving only 7,700 per day — less than Lawrence East SRT!

Outside of the downtown core, where the massive office density makes stations like St. Andrew hubs of walk-in or walk-out traffic, it’s the same across the system. Royal York Station, served by four bus routes, sees 20,000 passengers per day, while a kilometre away Old Mill has only one bus connection and serves only 6,600 passengers.

Glencairn station has no bus platform and only one connecting bus route and serves only 5,700 passengers, while Lawrence West and Eglinton West immediately north and south of it each have four bus routes coming into their platforms, and serve roughly three times as many passengers each.

If you want more passengers at Lawrence East, whether it’s an RT, LRT, subway, or GO station in the end, you just need to run the buses from the surrounding area into it. To some great extent, at least.

But if it’s a GO (RER or SmartTrack) station of some kind, you need something else, too. You need the fare to be the same as for transferring to a TTC vehicle. Back when I lived in Scarborough and travelled to Ryerson every day, my bus to Warden station travelled directly past two different GO stations. Transferring onto the GO train would have cut my commute time significantly. But my TTC transfer was no good there. I would have had to buy a GO ticket (about double the price of the TTC fare on its own) and then because of the TTC’s transfer rules, I also would have had to pay an additional TTC fare to take a subway from Union up to school. So my options were to pay quadruple the price to take the GO train or ride twice as long on the TTC. I was a broke student. Like most Scarborough to downtown commuters, I stayed on the bus.

Now, service at a TTC fare was part of MayorJohn Tory’s promise for SmartTrack. And the SmartTrack website today claims that these stations, though they will be operated by GO Transit, will be served by TTC buses. But I haven’t heard with any certainty that TTC fares will be honoured (Metrolinx makes frequent reference to “fare integration,” which sounds like wiggling to me), and I have seen no detailed plans for how SmartTack and the one-stop subway plan do or don’t change the bus-feeder network.

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My sense, based not on expertise but on experience, is that the potential usefulness — and business — of a station like Lawrence East will depend directly on those two things. If we’re talking about that station, then alongside the behind-the-scenes intrigue and the talk of development potential, we should be talking about buses and fares.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire

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