Quay to the City shaping up to be a $1-million mirage
JOHN BARBER
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Last week's narrowing of Queens Quay along the central waterfront, with long strips of sod and geraniums framing a new bicycle route on the southern half of the roadway, is such an easy and obvious improvement it should be permanent.
It fills a critical gap in a hugely popular route that is now almost completely continuous for more than 40 kilometres across the front of the entire city. It pushes cars, which clearly don't need all the space currently allotted to them on Queens Quay, away from the waterfront. The temporary boulevard where they once roamed south of the streetcar tracks, currently staked out by grass and flowers, could be a double row of tall trees. It is a classic "just do it" proposition.
Alas the current promotion, put on by the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp., is only a tease -- maybe even a mirage. The new configuration will be gone by the end of the week and the TWRC will return to reality: looking for the extra $30-million it needs to build the imagined boulevard. Given a long history of grand waterfront plans that raised expectations enormously, only to be abandoned when the time for writing real cheques came and went, one can only be wary of the current 10-day wonder, called Quay to the City.
But learning that it cost $1-million to produce is almost alarming.
The corporation defends the spending as being roughly equivalent to what the city spends on its Yonge Street festival every year. What riles some observers is the correspondingly stingy amount the city spends on permanent improvements. While grand plans unfurl amid much hoopla -- as part of Quay to the City, the TWRC has gone so far as to "wrap" a streetcar with coloured renderings of its waterfront dreamscape -- spending on actual improvements is minuscule.
"It is galling to see this kind of splurge when Toronto's parks department is so starved for funds that it takes years of begging to get a single park bench installed, young trees watered, or a ravine slope protected," former Metro councillor and current midtown activist Ila Bossons wrote recently. "We can't even water the plants we've got -- and down there they're doing make-believe."
Because TWRC projects are cost-shared by three governments, our friends elsewhere in Ontario and the country are paying for most of Quay to the City. On its own nickel, however, Toronto spends a paltry $1.5-million a year on "civic improvement" -- enough to pay for a few new handrails, drinking fountains and the like. That is the reality -- and the TWRC, which is spending two-thirds of that amount on a 10-day suggestion of a major improvement, one that is fairly begging to happen, is hardly exempt.
Like its predecessors going back to David Crombie's Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront and beyond, the TWRC is becoming expert at raising expectations in order to bring pressure to bear on always reluctant governments to realize their expensive plans. The problem with the strategy is that it has never worked.
But who knows? This time could be different.
In some ways it already is. Despite its early wallowing, the TWRC has since completed popular upgrades to York Quay and John Quay. Further west, the city's new HtO park at what used to be called Maple Leaf Quay is going swimmingly -- two years late but looking great. East of Yonge Street, a robust condominium market is promising to help return a long-standing waterfront dead zone to active public use.
But there are too many environmental assessments and funding crises ahead to suggest anything like clear sailing. The TWRC estimates it will need $60-million to rebuild Queens Quay between Yonge and Bathurst streets, as per the plans suggested by Quay to the City, of which only $30-million is currently "identified." And rebuilding Queens Quay is only a tiny part of the work called for in the central waterfront plan it released this spring to great acclaim.
If wishing worked, it would all be real -- and permanent.
jbarber@globeandmail.com
