The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Whatever Happened to Transit City?

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

One of the most widely debated issues in Toronto in the last two decades has been transit. A plan called Transit City launched 18 years ago. In the intervening years, the City of Toronto and its transit funding partners have had many plans, and stops and starts on infrastructure building to move people around the GTHA. For a look back, and forward, we welcome: David Miller, former mayor of Toronto, and managing director of the C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy. Jennifer Keesmaat, president and CEO of Collecdev Markee, a sustainable housing development group and former chief planner for the City of Toronto. And John Lorinc, urban affairs journalist, and columnist for Spacing Magazine.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over 19 seasons of the agenda, one of the most widely debated issues has been transit. A plan called Transit City launched 18 years ago. In the intervening years, the City of Toronto and its transit funding partners have had many plans and stops and starts and stops and starts on infrastructure building to move people around the GTHA. With us for another look, let's welcome from Victoria British Columbia, David Miller, the former mayor of Toronto and managing director of the C40 Center for City Climate Policy and Economy. And here in our studio, Jennifer Keesmaat, president and CEO of the Collect-Dev-Mar-Key

company. That's a sustainable housing development group. She of course, Toronto's former chief planner. And John Lawrence, urban affairs journalist, and we are delighted to have you two back here in our studio. And former Mayor Miller, great to have you on our program too. It's been a long time. Let's... I'm delighted to be back. Thanks, Steve.

Let's start with this. We want to do, Sheldon, we want to put this graphic up. We're going to do a bit of a timeline here on Transit City just to give everybody this little walk down memory lane. We're going back to 2007. Transit City conceived by then Mayor Miller and then TTC Commissioner Adam Cimbrone. It got approved. It included the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, the Finch West LRT, the Shepherd East LRT, the Scarborough LRT. Much of this is going to sound familiar,

right folks? In 2009 the Ontario government announced $8.6 billion in funding for those lines. Also in 2009 Metrolinx took ownership of the LRT lines, though they would be run, they'd be operated by the Toronto Transit Commission, the TTC. In 2010 Rob Ford mayoral campaign promised subways, subways, subways and thus putting Transit City into question. In 2010, after Rob Ford became the mayor, Transit City funding was cut and the projects deferred or canceled. They are in some state of completion now. In 2025, Eglinton Crosstown, suspected for September,

I'll believe it when I see it, Finch West sometime 2025 Scarborough extension 2030 Anyway, we'll see if any of this ever happens. You two have both got smiles on your faces David Miller. Take us back Transit City What was its original mission as you conceived it? well, the importance of Transit City was to try to build a city which city was to try to build a city which people did not have to own a car. A car is an expensive thing. Traffic is a huge issue in Toronto. And in order to allow people to live in the city without being obliged to have a car, you need a transit network. And I think the real insight of Transit City was we used the actual data by our planning department and the data kept by the TTC about

bus ridership to both project where rapid transit was needed in the future and where the demand was today, which not surprisingly tended to be in low income neighborhoods. And the insight was we could build a transit system within a generation that created a network around the city if we use predominantly light rail at grade and some places tunneled where it had to be like parts of the Eglinton line. So we used real data, real projections about potential growth where we could build new housing in an affordable way in the city and technology that was affordable and could be built rapidly. That was at least the plan.

Jennifer Kiesmet, as you let me put it this way, philosophically why is it so important to the smooth functioning of the Greater Toronto Area to have a properly functioning transit system? We'll go back to first principles on that. What's the answer? Well, I think David outlined it in his introduction, is that a city is a dense urban place. We've demonstrated our city is continually adding more people. We're evolving the urban form.

It's getting denser and denser. It's a physics problem if you continue to assume that people will get around in cars. There is not enough room. So foundational to the evolving city is creating great places where it's possible to get from anywhere to anywhere on a transit network that is convenient that typically has One transfer is usually the easiest way to move

You can if you transfer once and you can get anywhere to anywhere. And it also needs to be affordable. In order for those things to work, you also need frequency, you need reliability. There's a whole variety of layers. It's not just about the line on the map, how frequently the bus comes or how frequently the LRT comes is really critical as well.

But it really goes back to that foundational piece of providing the option of creating a city where it's convenient, safe to get around anywhere to anywhere without a car, without a car. That's the foundation. So, John, let's go back 15 years. Rob Ford becomes the mayor. He decides the accent ought to be on subways and not LRTs.

What did that do to the vision that Jen Keysmat just laid out? Well, one of the very first things he did in office was basically call in the TTC chief general manager and ask him to down tools on the Transit City project. With the exception there was some backing and forthing about this, about the Eglinton Crosstown line. And then we spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether it was financially feasible to create

the subway system that he envisioned. And at some points, it was very grandiose. It was going to be a big loop at one point along Shepherd. And he had appointed an advisor to run the numbers and discovered that the math doesn't work. And so we were in a situation where the plan that had been sort of put forward by former Mayor Miller that had gotten some but not all the funding it needed was basically stuck

in neutral. And then we went through this elaborate process of trying to figure out what to do next. Well, let's go down memory lane a little more. neutral and then we went through this elaborate process and tried to figure out what to do next. Well let's go down memory lane a little more. Karen Stintz you all know, she's actually a former candidate for national office not too long ago. Former TDC chair, former Toronto City councillor, former mayoral candidate. She was on this program 13 years ago talking about all of this and here's what she had to say. Sheldon, roll it if you would. I think also we have to acknowledge the things that you're talking about like vision for transit, vision for the waterfront, those types of longer-term strategies.

They're not one-term decisions. And so at some point we need to figure out as a city how do we actually agree that we've made a decision. Because we did actually have a plan that was fully funded. And a mayor was elected who didn't agree with that plan, and for reasons that are legitimate. But now we found ourselves two years doing nothing, and again, facing difficult decisions in council where there's this appearance of opposition.

And I don't think, it's very difficult to break through that. So David Miller, the question becomes, in a democracy, when politicians change, because elections have consequences, how do you get anything built if one council wants to change its mind from the previous council, etc., etc.? Well, that's a tough question because it's at the heart of democracy. I mean, the people who are elected should be making the decisions. I think one of the things we've seen,

Transit City has stood the test of time, even though not all of it is being built, because we went about it the right way with using real data and real projections. We didn't draw political lines on a map to benefit somebody. And I think we're seeing Finch being built, Eglinton shockingly slowly, but it will open I think probably next year, actually not this year.

Because that was the approach. And I think that's part of my answer to your question. A second answer is in the end, it's up to people. The city government, the public service, whoever's elected at the time, the mayor of the day, can do their level best to build something that has longevity. In a different example, we certainly did that with the environment strategies, which have stood the test of time as has the environment department in the city. But in the end, it's up to people. And people really want a high functioning, excellent transit system in Toronto. And, you know, perhaps one of the things that was unfortunate about Transit City was

it wasn't far enough under construction when I left office that people were going to speak up and demand that it be continued. We'd invested about a hundred million dollars or so in construction on Shepard, which was thrown away when it was canceled, but that had been construction behind the scenes, things like moving sewers, people couldn't see a line and you know, it's a reminder that in government you really do have to give people something they can see, feel and touch and then they'll demand much more of it. I really expect once Finch and Eglinton open we'll see the people of Toronto saying now we

understand we want more, we want to ensure this network reaches every part of the city so everybody can have access to higher order rapid transit. Well let me follow up with Jennifer on that. Does it look like the way it's unfolding, like there is some sensible vision at play? Or are we just sort of ad hoc this, ad hoc that? I don't know. What do you think? Well, I'll fill in a little gap from what David Miller was just

talking about, because it was Transit City. And then in part, it's a little bit of an answer to your question about, well well how do you bridge these political cycles and how do you build a public understanding and capacity for a longer-term vision because if you do that then you won't see politicians elected who are deviating from a vision that people understand. One of the reasons why someone can show up and say hey this is a crappy plan, we shouldn't do this, is if the public doesn't know about it

and they don't support it and they don't see the value of it. And that was one of the reasons why the very first thing I did as chief planner was launch Feeling Congested, which was all about linking together a whole bunch of different modalities, subway, LRT, King Street was a transit priority corridor, linking all those things together and building capacity both on City Council as well for understanding the importance of building out a network and for

linking together the secret sauce that Toronto has always had. We've always been the city where you can move seamlessly from the subway to a streetcar to a bus. That at a point in time that was really unique to the City of Toronto and people came from around the world to look at how we linked together these different modalities. And so the plan that we created, which is actually the plan that's being built out right now, is a plan that builds out the priorities from that feeling congested exercise which includes the relief line which is now the Ontario line, it includes Eglinton LRT which we reconfigured somewhat including putting more of it

below ground, it includes Finch, it includes some extensions into the suburbs and what we what we did to build capacity with the public for that plan was we focused on our objectives what are we seeking to build capacity with the public for that plan was we focused on our objectives. What are we seeking to achieve with transit? We prioritized social equity. We prioritized sustainability. We prioritized strong neighborhoods. And then we layered in, as was done earlier with Transit City, we layered in the data

to demonstrate and to essentially sort. We had 23 projects to sort those projects based on those key priorities and went out to the public and said how much does social equity matter? How much does sustainability matter? How much does walkable neighborhoods matter? And then we, you know, a sorting exercise took place. We layered that in with the technical analysis and that's why the relief line, now the Ontario line, actually became the number one project because, and it is under construction in the city, the whole city is

construction, it's everywhere right now, it is well underway under construction and that was about preventing system failure at Interchange Station at Bloor. Let me pick that up on that with you, John. If you have to see it to believe in it, as we've talked about here already, when the public, as they do and as they have over the last many years, sees an Eglinton Crosstown still not open years after it was promised to be open, other transit projects still well behind schedule,

still well over budget, how do you garner public support for this kind of stuff when it just looks like we're surrounded by, I don't want to say failure, but it's not great, right? No, very not great. I mean, I think it's a good question. The provincial government is spending a lot of money on transit, on the GO Rail network, on the Ontario line.

Tens of billions. Tens of billions of dollars. And eventually, all of that money will gestate into something that begins to be a network. I think what the public sees a lot more of is really frustrating traffic congestion. And what I wish the public and the politicians would talk about more is why those two things are connected.

And then take it to another place, which is to ask the question whether we're building transit properly. My hypothesis is that we put all our eggs in this big basket called Infrastructure Ontario and Triple P's. And it's done precisely the opposite of what it's promised to do, which was on time, on budget. And there was a study that came out of U of T

last year, which compared Toronto transit construction on a per kilometer basis to a lot of other cities around the world. We are absolutely at the bottom of the list. So it's not like we're trying to figure out how to get to Jupiter. These are things that are done in many places around the world, many more congested places. And we just keep making the same mistake over and over again.

Well, let me ask about, I'll ask David Miller about format here. In as much as John mentioned Triple P's, public privateprivate partnerships. There were days when governments sort of organized the projects themselves and then were responsible for bringing them in on time and on budget. Now there's some kind of amalgam of public and private partnerships, alternative financing programs. There's lots of different beasts out there. Can you tell if one of these works better than another,

and if so, which one? Yes, I think you can tell. And it's quite clear from the Toronto context that the model of so-called public-private partnerships has failed. And there's a whole history within Transit City. There's not enough time to go into detail. But the short version is the TTC had done something

like 65 to 80% of the design of the Eglinton LRT, preparing it for a more traditional process when the province decided to take it over and redo all the work literally to PPP it. And it's clearly been a failure in terms of delays and cost overruns. But I think it actually speaks to a bigger picture, Steve. What Jennifer and I were speaking to was the ability of the City of Toronto to create transit plans that answered your question. How do you have longevity and consistency in something that takes more than one term of council to properly plan and deliver. And the answer to both of those was the City of Toronto and its agency, the Toronto Transit Commission,

need to be the ones who plan the future of transit in this city on behalf of the people who live here and in elect City council and the mayor. And what we've seen is the province through Metrolinx literally take over that responsibility. I think there's legislation that says the TTC is not allowed to be involved on its own in transit planning now, which is perverse. And I think a lot of these problems can be traced

not just to the PPP model, but the fact that we have a provincial agency who is accountable to politicians from Kingston and campus casing, not to people elected to serve the needs of Torontonians, which is making decisions. So we see some good projects being built. The part of the Ontario line that goes between downtown and Don Mills, very important. Eglinton, very important. Fink's very important. But we don't yet have a network. Scarborough, in particular, doesn't have the LRT lines. It should and it needs. And to me, it's because the decisions were made at Queen's Park instead of inside the city of Toronto by the people

we elect as Torontonians where those decisions and plans should be made. And it's dysfunctional and it's a recipe for mistakes. John wants in on that. Well, I mean, I think that I understand the logic in that argument, but if you step back and look at what has happened politically, it's been regime change at the city of Toronto and therefore at the TTC that has created this sort of flip-flopping. I'm not in love with infrastructure Ontario

and the approach that is currently underway. But if we can imagine three years from now that the Ford government is defeated by a liberal government or an NDP government It's very unlikely that they are going to suddenly discontinue the Ontario line or the other big projects They're in play that continuity will be present Because it happened 30 years ago. Yeah, they built the tunnels for the Eglinton line and then the Harris government filled them in Yeah, so this does happen. Yeah, David Miller. Go ahead

filled them in. So this does happen. David Miller, go ahead. John, I admire your work tremendously. I think it's the first time I disagree with you, but that is manifestly inconsistent with history. I did some research on this, and the pile of transit plans that the province has promised and never delivered is like this. It's enormous. You can look back at David Peterson, Bob Ray. Bill Davis was the only one who really had a long-term vision and got to execute it, probably because his conservative government was in power for 43 years. That problem of change of direction comes at both orders of government. And I just very strongly believe from a democratic perspective, the people of Toronto should be the ones who are electing the people

that are going to decide where the future of our transit is going to be, because it's their transit system we're building. Jennifer. Well, you only have to go eight years ago. What was the first thing Doug Ford did when he took office? He put all the LRT lines on hold. He put all of them on hold. Hamilton went on hold for two years.

There was a massive fight in Hamilton about the LRT line. So I think that I don't think any level of government is immune to that kind of politicking around transit. But I do think that what we're talking about here are some really fundamental governance questions that I don't think we have yet resolved. And even as we were advancing the Eglinton LRT, there were enormous unresolved governance questions about who was operating the LRT, what the interface between the TTC and Metrolinx was going to be.

But that sounds like plumbing. People don't care about plumbing, they care about the outcome. People don't care about plumbing, but the issue here is about the governance, who's making the decisions. I fully agree with David. I don't actually think that anything has gotten better by changing, you know, moving the governance around and saying these people are going to make the decisions instead of these people hasn't actually resolved our transit delivery in any way. And there's the planning question, what is it that we're going to build, and that's tied to the vision of the kind of city that

we're trying to create. But then there's also the question of the construction, who's building it and who's leading the construction. That's a whole other question. And then there's the question of the operations. And the challenge is we have a major operational crisis in transit in the City of Toronto right now. We're underfunding operations. I was on the TTC today. I sat there for 10 minutes debating,

do I get off the subway, do I stay on the subway? Well, there was some shutdown, some switch wasn't working somewhere. It happens every day. It happens every day. So you can build all the lines that you want. But if the subway's running every 10 minutes or it's breaking down every, you know, multiple times per trip, that's another key governance issue.

John? Well, just to add to, I mean, think what both of you said. I mean, the other part of it that is increasingly conspicuously problematic is the fact that we live in a region which has wall-to-wall, 905 to 416 to more 905 traffic, inadequate transit. We have strange transit projects that go out to the 905, like the Yonge Sub, North extension. And it feels like the, on the one hand, you need to think about the region as a region. And the question of governance is,

do you have like a regional governance of the transit network, or do you have some sort of layered thing? How do they work together? And I don't think that's actually in play. And one of the things we're talking about now is this inane idea of the big tunnel underneath the 401 as a way of relieving traffic. And we should be talking about better

East-West transit corridors. So when you say inane, do I put you down as being undecided on this thing? The only thing I'm undecided about is whether the cost will be more or less than $300 billion. It's actually monstrous and I think it links into this bigger question which is what's our vision as a region, what's our vision as a city, what are we seeking to achieve? Because your infrastructure then becomes an overlay on top of that that delivers certain

objectives around social equity, around sustainability, around quality of life. And right now at the provincial level we have two competing visions. The line to Vaughan, the extension to Vaughan of the subway, amazingly we've built that infrastructure but we actually shut down the line on the weekends. We actually reduce service significantly because there's simply no demand. Which just shows there's enormous, the entire system actually subsidizes that extension out to Vaughan. The King Street car subsidizes that extension because the ridership is so high. So I think the problem is, it's a problem of what are we trying to create here in this

region and how do we want to live? And the tunnel is a perfect example of having no idea, is the goal to move cars? Is that the goal? It's not going to move more people. I think it's to give you a big bike lane for your bicycle. Isn't that what they want the tunnel for? David Miller, let me get you back in here with just a few minutes to go here. And that is, we saw the difficulties in Ottawa with their LRT as it tried to find its way.

Eventually it's gotten better, but boy, that was a real bumpy ride for the start. Eglinton Crosstown still hasn't opened. Do people in decision-making positions yet understand what has gone wrong with these projects so we don't keep making the same mistakes again if we ever want to build more lines? That's a hard question to answer because not in those rooms, but I think from the outside the answer is no, because really the problem is pretty simple. The province needs to step back a little bit and recognize that it has a coordinating role and because it collects

sales and income taxes, a funding role. But these decisions about technology and route are best made locally. And I think there needs to be a collective recognition that the PPP model has failed, particularly for really big projects like the Edmonton Crosstown. It just doesn't work. You know, the TTC had a pretty good track record, not perfect, but a pretty good track record of building infrastructure. And one of the things is if you have public ownership of the building of infrastructure, you can keep that going and do what we all recognize needs to be a part of this,

which is keep building a little bit each year. So I don't think the system has recognized that yet because there's a lot of pressure from the private sector to do the PPPs. But when it does, we can build capacity, certainly in Toronto, internally like we used to and really excel again at thinking about networks and being able to build each year rather than having these big projects that come all at once. I think that's the ideal and frankly Metrolinx has been a failure in so many ways. You could write a book about how poorly it manages these projects, about its lack of understanding of what an urban transit network is all about. The airport

train, for example, they had glossy magazines and fought like mad against the idea there should be a stop at Bloor Street and had to relent only when the province made them. They're just not set up to do this right. And I don't think that lesson's been learned yet, because the province likes having its agency run things, but that's what's clear to me, certainly from the outside. I think you just gave John Lawrence his next book idea. Anyways, thanks so much everybody for joining us on TVO tonight. David Miller, the former Toronto Mayor,

Jennifer Keesmath, former Chief Planner of the City. John Lawrence, Urban Affairs Journalist. Great to have you all with us on TVO tonight. Thanks so much Steve. Thanks Steve. Thank you. Thanks Steve.