I was recently in Vienna, the capital of Austria, trying not to be boggled by its astonishingly impressive transit system.
When urban fantasists burble about “carless communities” and “walkable cities,” this must be what they’re dreaming of: an efficient, interconnected network of trams, subways, bus routes, rail lines, bike lanes and pedestrian paths that change the question from “should I buy a car?” to “why would I want one?”
It’s affordable, goes everywhere, is easy to navigate and based on the honour system. There isn’t a gate in sight (though in a week of regular usage I was only once asked to show my ticket, and that was on the express train to the airport.)
Bikes get as much leeway as cars, with lanes marked for cycling and pedestrian paths, and are extensively used — to the extent that there’s an ever-present danger of being mowed down by the ubiquitous, silent, electrified food delivery scooters zipping past unwary walkers with little if any warning.
The obvious attractiveness of the system made me think of dear old Canada, where we couldn’t complete a transit project to save our lives. Vienna’s population is almost exactly identical to Toronto’s, which has been debating ways to clear its clogged roads and get people onto trains, buses or subways since Anne Murray was in go-go boots, and little has changed in the interim.
The most recent iteration of Toronto’s never-ending compulsion to propose ambitious plans that never come to fruition is Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s sudden, out-of-the-blue declaration that he’s dead set on building the world’s longest road tunnel under Highway 401, the eternally gridlocked expanse of pavement — at least 14 lanes wide in some places if you include feeder lanes and entry ramps — that runs across the northern part of the city and is regularly cited as North America’s busiest and most congested freeway.
No one is quite sure where the premier got his idea, though it’s not unheard of for Ford to make surprising, off-the-cuff comments. He couldn’t say what it would cost, how long it would take or why an underground highway would be any less clogged than the one above it.
Ontario’s premier, however, rarely lacks certainty in his assertions.
“If they’re telling me 30 kilometres is X, 40 kilometres is Y and 70 kilometres or 60 kilometres is another cost, let’s take a look at it,” he said. “That will determine the length of this tunnel and that’s why we’re doing the feasibility study. But we’re going to get the job done, mark my words.”
If anyone outside Doug Ford thinks his project will really happen, they haven’t made themselves known. The city has a reputation for fouling up big projects and has plenty on hand to occupy itself with, including an east-west light-rail line that’s been in the works since 2007 and is so far behind schedule and over budget, the provincial agency in charge has given up guessing when it might be finished or what it might cost.
“By starting to speculate about dates, you create fictitious sort of deadlines and the like,” project boss Phil Verster admitted the last time he was asked.
One thing about Canadian transit disasters, though, is that they’re a national phenomenon, stretching the length of Canada’s original great national project, the Canadian Pacific Railway, which took a mere four years to build in the 1880s.
Calgary wrote a new chapter in the history of failure this month when city council threw up its hands and voted to abandon the much-heralded Green Line LRT proposal, 13 years and $1.3 billion into a scheme that will cost an extra $850 million to not complete. “We now have spent $2.1 billion literally on a train to nowhere, zero kilometres,” lamented Coun. Kourtney Penner.
Maybe it’s just coincidence, but the sudden plunge in Quebec Premier François Legault’s once-stellar popularity rating coincided with his flip-flopping over whether to build a tunnel under the St. Lawrence River connecting Quebec City with the city of Levis on the south shore.
First he was against it, then he was for it, now he’s stuck with it despite warnings that it will cost too much, achieve too little and the money would be better spent on bigger priorities.
If there’s one thing that unites these and other infrastructure fiascoes, it’s that they involve regular, debilitating episodes of political interference, partisan tampering, ill-informed intrusions and the general compulsion of elected officials to stick their noses into complex operations with amateurish ideas and counter-proposals that owe little to knowledge, expertise or common sense and everything to egos.
Peruse the history of the Green Line, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, Ottawa’s LRT fiasco or any of Toronto’s other ill-fated transit initiatives — the latest of which, the 15-kilometre Ontario Line subway, already has city residents bewailing construction-related traffic gridlock, yet isn’t due to be completed for seven more years — without concluding that politics is overwhelmingly to blame for their troubles.
Big projects take time, careful planning, proven expertise and deep, reliable financing. Municipal governments can rarely, if ever, provide that. In Calgary’s case, the city couldn’t afford the project cost on its own, so it appealed to the province, which in turn looked to Ottawa. All three levels pledged financing, but elections, rivalries and competing personalities made delivery of the cash consistently uncertain.
Since 2011, Alberta has had six premiers from three parties with distinctly difference leanings, two prime ministers (one from Alberta, the other deeply disliked by Albertans) and two mayors. Squabbles, grandstanding, name-calling and finger-pointing forced regular revisions, escalating costs and extended delays, sparking new rounds of bickering.
The final nail came when the province withdrew its promised $1.53 billion in funding, leaving the city with a bill it couldn’t afford. Conservative Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen said the city’s latest planning revision was “unacceptable,” but took the opportunity to lob a few insults at former mayor Naheed Nenshi, now leader of the Opposition New Democrats, for his “utter failure to competently oversee the planning, design and implementation of a cost-effective transit plan.”
Dreeshan then rejected blame for scuppering the project, insisting “the funding is still there” if the city alters the project yet again to meet provincial preferences. This for a line that was originally to include 29 stations across 46 kilometres but had been reduced to a first phase with seven stations at a cost of $6.2 billion.
Mayor Jyoti Gondek is to meet with Premier Danielle Smith to discuss options for the plan, so maybe it will be miraculously revived. And extended. And reworked. Gondek isn’t very popular, however — fewer than one in three think she’s doing a good job — and might not survive re-election. By which time power could also have changed hands in Ottawa. Which means new voices and new egos determined to exert their authority by inserting themselves into the simple idea of building a transit line. By which I mean, driving a stake deeper into its heart.
National Post