They came to the table because Toronto had a plan and it was appropriately pitched to a government that was supportive of transit as a social service and economic development method. Other governments less committed to transit will pay for transit that must be built due to overloading, but it takes a government that believes in transit to come to the table for a "transit for everyone" program. That money would be wasted on a DRL when even a conservative government and conservative mayor would be convinced to fund that.
I'll agree that McGuinty's was the first re-elected government to support local Toronto transit at a decent level since the Bill Davis years, but they have repeatedly said that they will fund any projects to the tune of $8 billion as long as it is the will of Council. As long as we weren't proposing anything frivolous (clearly not applicable to the DRL), they could care less about the details, other than, apparently, having Metrolinx involved. And I seriously doubt it was our having a plan that spurred the Province into action, especially since the Big Move was an Ontario-wide initiative.
It's hard to get my head around anyone say that building our number one local transit priority would be a waste. If Eglinton and the SRT rebuild are already eating up about 75% of our allotted $8.4 billion funding, how exactly would $3B for the first phase of a DRL (in place of Eglinton for the sake of argument) have been in violation of "transit for everyone"?
You can't operate a city where the priority gets all the focus, and the other services are forgotten. When you look at transit as being a tiered service there are layers such as metro, LRT, and bus (others handled by the province), and there are geographies. You can't leave one part of the city or one part of the system with nothing because something else has been deemed a priority. To take it to an extreme you could say we should stop paying for surface routes and focus on the DRL. It is the same argument used against art spending, economic development, tourism, etc because there is problem ____ in the city where the money should be spent instead. A city doesn't work like that, the whole city needs to be able to grow, become more efficient, and have economic development. A subway extension was already under construction, no LRT was being built and streetcars were old, and bus service needed improvement. With a subway under construction the focus was on the other two services which serve more NEW riders per dollar. The DRL was still on the radar as Bloor-Yonge was nearing capacity, but the DRL is primarily a "RL", a relief-line, whose purpose is not to bring new riders but to deal with capacity and as such when the requirement for the DRL arrives there will be little challenge getting funding as compared to service improvements elsewhere. The bus service improvements Miller implemented have already been clawed back by the current administration because as long as a service has some capacity it is possible to claw it back and let end users suffer with lower quality of service. It is a lot harder to push back on a situation where on a daily basis people are not able to fit on the vehicle. Once the DRL is in the news as a requirement to keep the city running there will be no issue getting funding for it, and Transit City's east-west routes combined with York Region's priority Yonge extension will bring that money to the table quickly.
Nice speech and all, but you also should not operate a city where the priority gets NONE of the focus. Miller and Giambrone, after careful consideration, deemed a DRL not only to not be a high priority, but no priority at all. They had a blank slate, and billions in the pipeline from a friendly provincial government, yet they completely ignored it. That oversight is impossible to ignore.
In the past we've built lines, added to them incrementally, while at the same time increasing service on bus and streetcar lines. Ford aside, I fail to see how a DRL would have changed that. There's nothing in a DRL that says we would have to ignore surface routes, otherwise why build it at all?
As for clawing back some bus service, that's an operational and budgetary issue at the city level. Saying a DRL would cause us to neglect surface routes is a ridiculous as saying those bus reductions should be blamed on building Eglinton.
I also challenge the contention that there will be no issue getting funding for a DRL whenever we want. There will in fact be a massive challenge. The idea that the extra stress put on Yonge due to the new LRT lines will force the Province to come to the table is risky at best, and totally foolish at worst, especially if the Province is still running up big deficits. Never mind the small issue of inconveniencing people using our busiest line for many more years to come.
Not buying that a DRL would just be a relief line, or that it would not attract new riders. But even if those were true, it's still our main priority, and one that could have and should have been addressed by M&G under conditions where their goal of addressing other parts of the city was still feasible.
