The Soberman Report
G&M
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Traffic crisis looms, report warns
GTA has no plan to address extra crush of swelling population, consultant says
JEFF GRAY
Think traffic is bad now? Just wait till 2031, a new report warns, when morning rush hours will see 100,000 extra cars jam Toronto's roads and 50,000 new riders crowd onto its public transit system as the region's population swells to eight million.
And to begin preparing for what could be a transportation mess, the report suggests, it may be necessary to show some politicians the door.
The study, commissioned by a construction industry coalition and led by respected transportation consultant Richard Soberman, criticizes the provincial government for having no plan to deal with the coming crush of cars and people.
"The hard, cold facts of the matter are that today, there is no such thing as a GTA transportation plan," Dr. Soberman, an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto, told a news conference at Queen's Park yesterday.
The study also suggests that politicians, who come to the table with inherently "short-term" outlooks, should have a reduced role in running transit agencies such as the Toronto Transit Commission or the province's new Greater Toronto Transportation Authority.
"There's nothing wrong with elected officials, but they are not necessarily the people who can take the hard look at needs and priorities and spend money in the proper fashion," Dr. Soberman said.
The city councillors that sit on the TTC are too focused on the next election, he argued, and are unlikely to support good ideas that are unpopular in their own wards.
He said the move to put more politicians on the TTC in the 1990s was partly responsible for bad decisions that have seen public transit stagnate in Toronto, even more than a lack of funding from provincial and federal governments.
And if the GTTA is to succeed in co-ordinating public transit and major roads across the region, he argued, it has to be a politician-free zone, too.
"The mayor of East Gwillimbury is going to be voting on whether the TTC is going to have new buses. And that's no way to run a railroad," Dr. Soberman said, adding that the province must also give the new body dedicated funds.
Failed mayoral candidate Jane Pitfield raised the idea of reducing the role of politicians on the TTC during her campaign, but Mayor David Miller rebuffed it.
TTC chairman Howard Moscoe says stripping the TTC or the GTTA of its politicians is a bad idea.
"The problem that the TTC had, was that it was not political, and its board was made up of so called citizens appointees -- you can read that as patronage appointments," he said, pointing out that Jeffery Lyons, the lobbyist involved with the city's computer-leasing scandal, was once an appointed TTC commissioner.
Mr. Moscoe was accused of "political interference" in TTC labour relations and its recent purchase of 234 subway cars through a $674-million sole-source contract with Bombardier.
With politicians making the decisions, voters have more control over their public services, he said: "Our boards of directors are elected, because we're a democracy."
Dr. Soberman's report also takes issue with the City of Toronto's Official Plan, saying road expansion will be necessary, despite the plan's emphasis on addressing future growth with only public transit.
"Without any road construction any place in the City of Toronto 25 years from now, you're either going to see very, very acute congestion and frustration, or the city is not going to achieve its aspirations for employment growth," Dr. Soberman said. "New employment is going to go someplace else."
The report says the lack of a long-term transportation strategy has led to a piecemeal approach to funding public transit, which makes it impossible to plan for the future.
"We really have to put a stop to the kind of funding that is very short term, and which picks particular projects that make great photo opportunities," Dr. Soberman said.
His study, funded by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance, took the province's population growth plans for the next 25 years and looked at where jobs were likely to locate in order to project what rush hour would look like in 2031, assuming current travel patterns continue.
The report predicts more travel between Toronto and its exploding suburbs, and between suburbs, as jobs and people remain dispersed.
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National Post
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Traffic woes will get much worse
study: Hundreds of thousands of more cars expected in next 25 years
Katie Rook
National Post
Friday, November 17, 2006
Your daily commute is only going to get worse, a new study warned yesterday, with hundreds of thousands of more cars expected to clog GTA roadways during the morning rush hour in the next 25 years.
Residents of high-growth areas without comprehensive transit systems, such as Brampton, are likely to suffer the worst, said Richard Soberman, lead author of the study, commissioned by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario.
"Those living in places with projected employment and development changes are likely to be in the most trouble, unless transportation systems are implemented," he said.
More than $1-billion must be spent on GTA transportation infrastructure immediately, he said.
The study, Transportation Challenges in the Greater Toronto Area, was released yesterday. It targets the City of Toronto's official plan, which promotes transit, not new roadways.
''Companies will be forced to leave the downtown and move to the 905 area to be close to their workers. Toronto can probably kiss its aspirations for employment growth goodbye,'' he said.
Using development and population growth patterns outlined by a recent Ontario government report, Places To Grow, the study anticipates a GTA transportation infrastructure ill-equipped to handle swelling populations.
By 2031, about 146,000 Markham commuters will flood the roadways during the peak morning commute, joining an additional 80,000 Vaughan commuters and 154,000 from Brampton, the study finds.
The influx will cripple already-congested transportation routes, which TD Bank Financial Group estimates is already costing the GTA $2-billion annually.
The study predicts that over the next two decades, the Brampton 407 area will see an increase of about 140,000 jobs, while Markham and other communities along Highway 404 will host more than 120,000 additional jobs.
Despite considerable growth, Brampton, for example, is poorly served by transit, and is centred among a maze of already-congested highways and roadways, he said. Those who live in such a place or commute to it for work will become stranded.
"Even though most of the growth is occurring outside downtown Toronto, the city is still dominant in terms of work and therefore the people that are going to have the greatest difficulty are people going downtown who don't live in locations that have rail," he said.
Simply moving near your workplace is not enough in an era where people switch jobs often, he said.
"The argument can be that, 'Well, so what, the guys who live in 407 Brampton [area] will work there, they'll live there. It's not a big deal.' But the world has changed ... today people change jobs every four to five years, it's a whole different kind of economic base," he said.
His report recommends GTA municipalities consider public-private partnerships to expand transportation infrastructure, and dismisses the environmental assessment process as ''one of the surest means of ensuring nothing gets done.''
And it calls on the provincial government to declare transit an essential service, prohibiting strikes and lockouts in favour of binding arbitration.
Mr. Soberman harshly criticized the new St. Clair Avenue streetcar right-of-way in Toronto, saying the city badly needs more subways.
"We need to have underground construction because the streets simply won't take it," Mr. Soberman said. "The problem we've had in the last two decades is that we insist on building subways where the people aren't. The people happen to be on Queen Street, on King Street, on Eglinton Avenue."
New roads must also be built, he added, because many people travel from suburb to suburb not connected by bus or rail.
"We all love transit, but it's just not going to do everything for everyone, we're going to have to build some roads," Mr. Soberman said.
The Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario is compromised of labour and management groups in the construction industry.
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Long-term funding needed, author says
Put experts, not politicians, in charge: report
Katie Rook
National Post
Friday, November 17, 2006
A better commute begins with better management of the GTA's transportation system, a new report from urban planner Richard Soberman says.
The study -- Transportation Challenges in the Greater Toronto Area -- says the new Greater Toronto Transportation Authority should be stacked with experts, not politicians.
And it should be given real power: control over provincial and federal funding.
The $6-billion in recent government investment has focused on short-term projects, leaving the GTA without any long-term, predictable funding, the study finds.
"We need to put a stop to funding which is very short-term and picks particular projects, which provide great photo opportunities and there is no long-term commitment. There are also a lot of announcements, which are exactly that announcements and the funds never appear," Mr. Soberman says.
"No organization can function if it doesn't know what its future revenues are going to be or what they're like to be, it doesn't matter what kind of organization you have."
The McGuinty government this year created the GTTA, and named outgoing Burlington mayor Rob MacIsaac as its chairman, aiming to co-ordinate transportation policy across the many municipalities of the sprawling region.
But Mr. Soberman said the process must be depoliticized.
"It's all pointless because you don't have the right guys making the right decisions," he says.
"There is nothing wrong with elected officials but they are not necessarily the people who can take a hard look at needs and priorities and spend money in the most proper fashion. For one thing, they are elected for a short period of time ... they have obvious conflicts of interest."
The GTTA should look at implementing a single smart card covering the TTC, York Region Transit, Mississauga Transit and GO Transit, the study finds.
). "Poor" land use means lots of opportunity for easy redevelopment, or even acquiring the land and running a subway at grade for a while.