Why long-term transit planning never seems to happen properly

[jsburbidge]

Almost everyone agrees that developing a municipal transit system requires long timelines on the planning side, with an approach treating the whole system as an interconnected network.  However (at least in Toronto) it never seems to happen: the last instance being the Scarborough subway debacle.

This wasn't just a one-time failure.  Within my memory there have also been the walk back the McGuinty government took on the full transit city plans even before Ford came into power; the way they allowed Ford to stall the process without council approvalfor a significant amount of time; the way the need for a relief line for the Yonge Subway has receded into the future -- and it's need has been recognized for some time; the building of an extension of the Spadina subway line into Vaughan, where it will almost certainly be underutilized and a poor match for the area's transportation needs; the building of a underutilized Sheppard subway line and the cancellation of an Eglinton line already under construction (as well as the cancellation of other lines in the same plan) by the Harris Conservatives.  And that's just since the mid-1990s -- further back you can see things like the provincial government forcing the ICTS technology on the SRT project.

It's not that there isn't a recognition of the need for transit to be a long-timeframe, arms-length endeavour.  Metrolinx was created to provide just that sort of management.  So why do things keep screwing up?

First of all, it's important to realize that arms-length bodies generally aren't.  Ontario Hydro is one of the most venerable arms-length bodies in the province, established to deal with infrastructure issues which, like transit, require a network approach and a long window for planning; but the crowning scandal for the McGuinty government involved direct political interference in plant sitings after an arms-length process had established them in the first place.  Even the LCBO, which really does run a set of stores with very minimal government intervention, has seen direct governmental meddling when the government wanted to meddle -- the half broken deposit system which ties into Beer Store recycling is a good example of a structure which would not have existed without direct intervention, and which is nota good solution to the problem it purports to solve.  (I know all sorts of people who don't go to the Beer Store and put LCBO bottles out for recycling than recapture their deposits by taking them in to the Beer Store; I assume there are plenty of people who don't even recycle them.  And because the Beer Store doesn't actually handle anything other than beer, the system is just a cumbersome way of directing bottles into recycling rather than a mechanism supporting reuse as the original Beer Store returns were (and as the pop bottle returns I remember from my youth were)).

Still, a Crown Corporation like the LCBO could easily have a ten to twenty year plan for managing their infrastructure and capital costs which would be unlikely to be fiddled with by their legislative masters.

The problem boils down to one simple point.  Pretend you're a government and you hand managing a large transit system over to a true arms-length board.  They go away on a planning exercise and come back to you and say "We have a detailed plan for running, maintaining, and growing the system; it's going to cost four billion dollars a year[1]". Oops, you forgot to give them a revenue source to cover their expenses; and they have a lot of expenses.

The scale of funding municipal transit is not trivial, even after fare recovery gets factored in.  And delegating that sort of ability just isn't on.  Taxes are unpopular, and that sort of cost translates into substantial taxation. (The closest the government has done to handing far-reaching taxing powers away was when it allowed school boards to set their levies directly.  This worked when there were about 600 local boards and most boards had small budgets.  Once the boards were amalgamated in the 1950s the writing was on the wall, although it had to wait for the Harris government to take over control of school funding directly.  This is one reason why so many schools now have book sales and pizza days to raise extra money.)

This means that transit authorities just will not be allowed to make plans without regular checking back as to what sort of funds will be available; and that governments will, inevitably, want to ensure that this sort of expenditure gives them the maximum possible degree of political payback. (Governments are in the "business" of providing services.  In general, their re-election depends on how good that provision is perceivedto be.  If nothing else, this tends to make high-profile projects with ribbon-cuttings and the like far more popular than invisible things like keeping the trains running.  Of course, if the trains break down, or a critical bridge collapses for lack of maintenance, that's very bad.  Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.)  And if the parties competing for power have electors unevenly distributed through the province -- hello, Ontario 2014 -- a change in political overlordship inevitably means a change in policy.

And every time Metrolinx checks back to get plans approved, to put in adjusted budget requests for the coming year, that's another time that multi-billion dollar budget has an opportunity to get reviewed for what it delivers.

So much is reasonably obvious.  What makes the system really dysfunctional is the built-in incentives which our electoral system provides, defining "normal" political behaviour.

People complain about the trustworthiness of politicians, but I'm not convinced that personally, at an individual level, they're any worse than the average human being, and in our modern political environment, which is hypersensitive to any whiff of scandal, I suspect they're somewhat better on average (regardless of outliers like Ford and Mammoliti, who are, nota bene, at the local level).  The system itself has behaviours built in, though.

The electoral model we have requirespolitical leaders to be attentive to the short-term demands of the electorate.  (In his very early years as PM, Trudeau mused about governing from principle regardless of the immediate opinions of the electorate, with an attitude of "let them judge me at the polls".  You would think that this would have been greeted as a principled statement; in fact, it got a lot of negative pushback.)  Even though it's the theory of representative democracy, people didn't like the idea that you elect a representative to use his judgement in your place, with a check back at election time.  They expect responsiveness to interim public opinion.

Also, our riding-based system can magnify the value of a comparatively small set of swing votes at a local level.  It's baked in.  A party will pay most attention to disaffection in ridings where they have (or might have) members and where there is a relatively small margin between their share of the vote and their next competitors.  Ridings which vote X in a landslide are likely to forfeit the attention of both the losing parties and of party X (because the disaffection of, say, 10% of the electorate won't change the result).

Finally, the dynamics of a four-year[2] election cycle are such that there is a built-in horizon of four years after which the urgency of any issue drops off.  This doesn't mean that only short projects happen: sometimes just getting shovels in the ground and showing visible progress is an excellent thing to bring to the polls.  But it does mean that when that annual budget review of an expensive stack of transit programs comes up, what's important may vary wildly from year to year.

This is, however, exactly what creates blowups like the gas plants scandal, or the Scarborough subway fiasco: local pushback with an immediate large payout in the offing.  The system is built to create situations where an arms-length process trundles along until in a changed context differing priorities in the allocation of a lotof money come into play.

It's worth noting, too, that it's very hard to push an unpopular decision so far out to arms length that the government won't suffer.  One minor example is how governments frequently create arms-length, "impartial" bodies to determine the amount that sitting members / councillors should be paid, and then overrule them for much smaller pay increments because even with the whole impartiality element they're still going to be seen as being responsible for giving themselves a large raise.

Is there a way of fixing this? As far as I can tell, the only structural way of avoiding this within our current system would be to create a commission which (a) was the creature of two independent levels of government and (b) had funding at a level determined by a long-term agreement between those two levels. (The involvement of two levels is pretty well necessary to avoid one level of government just overriding an arms-length body entirely in its control.)  Municipal transit, however, is firmly within the constitutional ambit of the provinces, and mere use of the funding power would not give the federal government a significant role.  Transit activists have been requesting a "national transit strategy" for some time, but in the current constitutional framework one is unlikely.

(A stable government also has a fairly stable area where its core is.  The Wynne Liberals are centred on the GTA, and are accordingly going to pay it more attention.  If anyversion of the PCs win, however, the centre of the party will be out in the rural parts of the province.)

Can different elements be mitigated?  A stable government over several decades can have a longer horizon -- consider the Frost/Robarts/Davis continuum.  However, within the system, there's no way of creating that sort of stability other than what actually happened in that case: a continued streak of growth with a general avoidance of major scandals and some intelligent and balanced leadership.  The latter two conditions may be achievable; given the current economic world order it is doubtful that the first condition is achievable at the present.

[1] Two billion dollars a year is about the cost of the Big Move.  The TTC operating budget ia about ona and a half billion.  Half a billion for the rest of the system is certainly lowballed. (I'm taking costs pre-fares: one important aspect of policy is determining fare levels which will provide the greatest benefit on balance to the civic area.

[2]Constitutionally it can be longer, but the trend these days is for setting an election date on a fixed anniversary of the last one.