A subway
extension to York University. A subway through Scarborough. A train
to the airport. New streetcar lines. Suburban bus lanes. Where do we
start, and when?
Last week I
asked Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion how to choose among the
dozens of multi-million dollar projects across greater Toronto. She
says, “You bring together (those agencies) responsible for
transportation in the GTA, you look at all the needs of all the
municipalities, and you set the priorities.
“Often the
money is not allocated either based on need or priority -- it’s on
who can do the most strenuous lobbying. That’s got to end.”
One way to cut
through the confusion, although not necessarily the political
maneuvering, is to have a single body scrutinize each project,
compare it to the others and rank them in a agreed-upon, transparent
way. The provincial government has committed to creating a so-called
Greater Toronto Transportation Authority (GTTA), which McCallion
says is “long overdue. I don’t know when they’re going to get it off
the ground and make it happen.”
Ontario
transportation minister Harinder Takhar won’t give a specific date
for unveiling such an agency, saying that the province is still
looking for agreement among area municipalities.
He says “We
will continue some consultation until we come to some consensus with
our stakeholders. I hope that we can come up with a organization
that everyone can live with, and then we can move ahead with it.”
One of the main
features of this GTTA would be to get the region’s transit agencies
to mesh their various proposals. Says Takhar, “We need a body that
can plan, a body that can coordinate and a body that can prioritize
those projects.”
Has the
province decided yet whether the body will plan transit only,
without taking into consideration roads and highways at the same
time? The minister says that’s what officials “are looking at right
now and we have not really come to any particular decision at this
point in time.”
To avoid
building transit projects that suffer from poor ridership, would the
body also have control over the way cities are developed? The
minister would admit only that “land use is an important
consideration.”
Asked if the
public will have a say in how the GTTA makes decisions, he says “I
think eventually it’s going to become quite a public process once we
have this organization up and running.”
An estimated 59
per cent of commuters in the GTA and Hamilton drive to work, and
this percentage is rising. Will the proposed agency be required to
set specific targets?
Says Takhar, “I
want to give them some general goals. And the general goals are that
we want to reduce congestion in this province. We want to increase
(transit) ridership in this province, and we need to have ... land
use planning, so that they know -- when they are prioritizing
certain projects -- what things they have to take into account
before we (the provincial government) will consider funding these
projects.”