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We recently sat down for an exclusive interview with Toronto Mayor John Tory to talk about the mood of the city and dig a little deeper on transportation choices facing the city in coming months.
UrbanToronto: I don’t know how familiar you’d be with urbantoronto.ca, at all?
John Tory: I’ve looked at it. I can’t say I sit down and look at it every day, but I know you talk a lot about public realm types of issues.
We do. We like to say, “Wherever there is a shovel going in the ground, we’re interested.” It is more buildings than anything else. Infrastructure, parks, etc…. So yes, we try to keep on top of all these things to make sure people are well informed. We try and put in the detail that you would not typically get from mainstream media. We did a study about two years ago now, and we found out that about a full third of our readership is making their living from development. Whether they are developers, architects, planners – either in private practice or with the City…
Contractors…
Real estate agents… exactly. A full third. So, they are more educated than the average audience, and very well informed, and looking to be even better informed. We have been planning to talk with you since way back in April, and ever since then the city has been in a state of preparation for what’s going on now, and so many things have opened in the past little while. I think there was some cynicism out there prior to the Queens Quay opening, prior to Nathan Phillips Square which seemed to be taking forever to get ready…
It was! But, these things got finished because we had the Pan Am Games, make no mistake. And I would add to that the train to the airport, I would add the Athletes’ Village Neighbourhood—I mean frankly, if [the athletes] had not been living in there as we speak, it would sure be delayed too. It was the best because it was a private sector project. But, you know, there were just a lot of things going on in the city that were lagging, and the great thing I’ve always said about these bidding processes for international events is deadlines. People always say, “Is it the sports facilities? Is it the festivals?” And I always say, “No, no, it is the deadlines!” [laughs] because you are actually likely to get something done. Even the Luminous Veil—they finished it up—that was a project they started, what, eleven years ago?
Yep!
So… you know, it just causes things to get done, because people are going to show up. It is like opening a theatre production. You don’t have the option of having the set ready three weeks late, or getting the costumes sewn at the last minute; the show must go on!
In the last two months, all sorts of things have that have opened, and maybe as of the opening of the Pan Am Games… is there a new mood in the City now?
I hope so. I mean, I think I said that in the leading up to the Games that—and it is not confined to the Games themselves—we love to moan and groan. We love to say, “Well, we really shouldn’t do that, because it is going to cost some money,” or, “We really shouldn’t do that because it might be too much about people having fun.” And so I hope that this uplifting effect of the last few weeks, and projects that have been worked on and completed in anticipation of these Games, will cause people to see, and to sense—how great the city looks when we have it in this kind of mode—and to feel how good it feels… because it does!"
"I am a lifetime Torontonian—and the fact that I am the Mayor is irrelevant—but I walk out there now and I and end up interacting with people, and because I am the Mayor, people will tell me how great the city is, and how much fun they are having, and how good it feels. And they might compliment one of the projects, whether it is Queens Quay or what we have done here [Nathan Phillips Square], and so on….
So I think it will last, but there is every reason to believe that to some extent it will revert to form because we love to moan and groan, we love to put things off, we love to say that there are more important things to spend money on, and indeed, there are other priorities. But I think you have to make sure that the public realm in the broader sense has an important place in those priorities, and I certainly think that one of those is that we host the Games.
In terms of going back to the moaning and groaning, one of the greatest sources of that leading up to the Games was the concern about transportation during the Games. And, of course once they’re all over, we will be focusing again on various priorities to improve transportation around this city.
Over the previous two months, the City, the TTC, and Metrolinx hosted a series of public consultations regarding a number of transit initiatives – SmartTrack, the Relief Line, the Scarborough Subway… and at the very end of these consultations, Metrolinx released the results of their Yonge Relief Network Study, which basically said, “Hey, the biggest bang for our buck for fixing the Yonge Subway is going to be building a Relief Line all the way up to Sheppard… and I am wondering if you have any comments at this point about that?
Well, I think often that these questions and the commentary that goes around them, are predicated on the notion that you have to make a choice, between doing two or three of those things you mentioned, or doing one of them and not the two others, or doing two of them and not doing the other. I happen to disagree. I think we have to do them all.
We took two or three decades off building transit, effectively. Now we have begun to make up some of that time by having the York University Subway extension up to Vaughan under construction and soon to be finished, we’ve got the Eglinton Crosstown to be finished in 2020, but I think as far as the rest of them are concerned—three you mentioned in particular, the Scarborough Subway, SmartTrack, and the Yonge Relief Line—we have got to do them all.
And, what I said during the campaign—and I am entirely consistent to this day—is that the Yonge Relief Line, when you do it, is at least a fifteen year project. Everybody knows it. No matter where they are coming from, or what their view is on when it should be done—it is going to take fifteen years. SmartTrack—one of the advantages to it, and why I put it forward, was that it could be done in seven years. You are using existing track, you do not have to buy, or incorporate a new plan, you do not have to dig tunnels to the same extent, and so on. And then, the Scarborough Subway is already on the books approved by the City Council – and funded.
And so, I mean, to me, I think the false choice that a lot of people try and set up is that we should be sort of picking one or the other of these, or picking two of these… we should be picking all three, and do them, because one of our problems in this city is that we do one thing at a time. We have sat back and admired that for several years after that, and the result was that over the decades we have done almost nothing.
I almost cried when the man who came into my office about a month ago was the Ambassador of Japan to Canada and he brought me—I do not know if he was doing it to just hurt my feelings or what [laughs]—but he brought me a map of the Tokyo Subway System where they have thirty-nine subway lines! We have—charitably—three, really charitably, four! Maybe it is three-and-a-half.
Why did we allow ourselves fall so far behind, and why do we think we are as far behind as we are, that we can luxuriously say that we are not going to build one or two of those things that you listed? We have to build them all. And people will write reports saying that the Yonge Relief Line is the best bang for the buck, but you know, but I am in no position to argue one way or the other—depending on which numbers you use—all I know is that I think it is generally agreed that it is a priority project that is going to be good for the city, it is going to add to our productivity, and detract from our traffic congestion.
I believe SmartTrack is the same thing—I believe SmartTrack is different—it goes all the way from Mississauga to Markham, and it covers the whole 416 in between. And of course, the Scarborough Subway is different again. It is more of a regional transportation issue that seeks to address a shortcoming that we seem to have in inadequate investment for Scarborough transit, and an obsolete RT Line.
To go into SmartTrack in a little more detail, I am wondering if that’s a proposal that is starting to evolve a bit more. It is predicated on lines that the Province owns—and Metrolinx is studying how it would be implemented—and I am wondering if it is something that may end up becoming a set of principles applied to GO RER, which the Provincial Government has already announced.
[Shrugs] You know, you could describe it that way, or you could describe it as a partnership between RER and SmartTrack, you could describe it as something that is layered on top of RER, but the bottom line, the thing I will concede readily, and I did throughout the election, is that SmartTrack was built on the foundation of RER, Regional Express Rail…
GO with electrification and All day, two-way service…
Yes. And then what we added to it was more subway-like characteristics in terms of the number of stops that the trains would make, which you have the capacity to do once you electrify. And I think you have the need to do it, because it creates more local service, more flexibility in terms of where people get on and off. GO Transit has been historically set up, you know, to focus on a more express-like service, and this one will be different, which is why SmartTrack is not just one more line of regional express rail. Because some of the regional express rail lines will be ones that are operating on an express basis, as opposed to this.
Couldn’t SmartTrack principles be applied to all seven GO lines, instead of to just two?
Well, in my case, I was running to be the Mayor of Toronto, and I am now the Mayor of Toronto, so my concern is to have a line that I thought would make the biggest difference for the biggest amount of people throughout the 416—and it happens to expand out into the 905 as well—which will connect more people to jobs. But, the answer to your question is there is no reason it couldn’t be that way—short of money, money is always an impeding factor potentially—but you’d also then have to ask the question of whether you wanted one of the GO Train lines to be, you know, a SmartTrack-like service, as opposed to more of an express service, and I think that depends on the analysis of the ridership, and what job opportunities there are around a given line. So there is no reason why if you chose to turn other GO Train lines, such as that into Kitchener, into that type of service, there is no reason you couldn’t do it. It is just a matter of time.
How do you see fare integration along with all this?
It is a hard question to answer, because one thing I sort of said was I wanted the SmartTrack service to be for the price of the TTC fare. And they asked what the TTC fare would be, but I can only answer for what it is today. What is it going to be tomorrow? I don’t know.
What I have said to people is that they should expect regular inflation-based fare increases. So what we won’t do is postpone fare increases for five years, and then have, you know, ten-or-twelve percent of accumulated inflation. And the second thing that is coming is going to have an even bigger impact on the options available to you in terms of fare integration is going to be the Presto Card. The Presto Card, of course, is in use today by—I think—a million people outside of Toronto, but very few inside of Toronto. That is going to radically change in the next twelve months.
You’ve even seen the TTC is saying that they are going to stop selling tickets and tokens to people anymore, and that is in preparation for a change for a transition to an electronic payment system that will bring us kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. We are a little behind various cities that consider themselves like us.
Part of that kicking and screaming is some people who are wondering if we will be going to zone fares, and how that might work? Do you know if that is something you would consider at this point?
The decision has not been taken on what you might do going forward, because I think there are a number of questions tied up. What do you do for the TTC itself? What do you do for the integration of the TTC and the GO Transit/SmartTrack? And I think the bottom line really is, there has never really been a serious discussion about it before. There has been no serious discussion about the implications of the Presto Card and the flexibility; it lets you do a whole bunch of things, even different things at different hours of the day, or days of the week, or whatever, for different groups of people.
I was asked a lot of questions during the election about disabled people, and trying to make it easier for them to get to work and so on, either by making their transit either free or somehow more favourable for them. And there are all kinds of groups like that. I and think what we are going to have, at least once the Presto Card is in, is the ability to have more options and more flexibility. My comment on any particular one would be total speculation, because there has been no [discussion] yet on any of this.
So, can we assume in 2016 we might get a public consultation on the future of…
I think by 2016, when you are in a position where the Presto Card is installed everywhere, and you have an even more robust regional approach to both planning and the building of lines, that you’ll have a discussion. And as you approach getting SmartTrack—and SmartTrack won’t be in operation until 2021-2—but I think as you plan, in terms of both doing your business case and planning for everything, we will be having some of those discussions sometime around then, but I don’t think we’ll see much happen before then.
In the lead up to SmartTrack, GO RER, Relief Line, other various transit improvements that are being planned in the next while, are we going to be relying on expert advice more than political promises? How do you see the city’s various agencies playing their roles?
I think often times what you have to get is a sense of direction and vision that is put in front of the people to be endorsed so that you have a mandate to deal with these things. So I don’t discount the importance of politicians (of which I am one now) showing leadership on things that have to get done. But, if you look how SmartTrack is happening, as opposed to how it did happen, the initial conception really, our guy came from the Province who had this regional express rail, we built on top of that using some of the ideas from places like Crossrail in London, which said that you can layer on top of that a more subway-like service, and get some relief for Yonge Street, and some relief for commuters, much faster because you’re building largely on existing tracks.
And then I think you take that idea, which was inspired by what I would call ‘political thinking,’ and layering things on top of each other, and what is the first thing we had to do with SmartTrack when I got here with my mandate in hand, which was to send it out to a group of experts to look at ridership questions, engineering questions, validating the costs, how to finance it…
So the experts are, I can assure you, right now doing the work that is going to make sure that the information that they come up with has its say. And you could argue, well, “Could you do it in reverse order?” and wait for all the experts to publish their data first, and sort of say, “Hallelujah!” this is the order, we should have a Relief Line, or a this, or a that – of course you could. But I think I would have said to you, given our difficulty with coming to grips with big projects, and getting on with them, and putting them in front of the people and saying, “Do you endorse this idea?” that the way we did SmartTrack which was to have a politician [points to himself] layer on top of it an existing foundation of an idea that was fundamentally important mainly for the RER, and sort of say we can do something more with this to provide immediate relief on Yonge Street congestion, the traffic congestion now—it was a perfectly good way to go about it.
I have been busying myself since then, not only with my councillor colleagues to commission studies to get all the additional background information that you need, but also to go around to collect the money. I’d say on that, I’m doing pretty well. I mean, the Province has agreed to put up the finances for the electrification and the other infrastructure including grade separations and so on, and the Federal Government has committed 2.6 billion dollars—which is unprecedented—and so we are now worried about the City’s portion.
I had a big meeting in here yesterday on SmartTrack to go through the status of all the studies that are being done in order to produce those expert opinions, facts, and figures. And I am very happy that all those things are proceeding. I get regular reports, obviously, from Mr. Byford on the York-University Subway that has been somewhat problematic. I get reports from Metrolinx about the Eglinton Crosstown and Union Station. The work is proceeding there—another phase of that opened up recently—so you know, there is a lot happening in the city, which to me means there is a lot to feel good about for the city finally taking shape, and addressing one of its biggest shortcomings, which is public transportation.
So let's bring it all back to Torontonians’ moaning and groaning. Do we harness that power to keep pushing these projects forward?
I think that Pan Am will have helped with that, because that is where you started with me, and we people will sort of say, “You know, to aspire to do things that seem big and seem expensive, I mean when you first talk about them, they seem disruptive…”
They are daunting, initially.
Well, sure they are. But if you sort of say to people, “Anything worthwhile that you’ve ever done in your life, did it seem big and bold and daunting? Did it seem expensive in some cases—depending on what you had to invest, whether it was your time or your money, or something? Did it cause you initially to back off and not know if you wanted to take that on?”
And now we are seeing some accomplishments.
People are standing out here [Nathan Phillips Square] everyday and looking, and they are very proud of their city, if they are from here. They are proud of the city hosting this sports spectacle that is going so well, and I think the mood is good. And maybe it does show people that if you aspire that way, and you think inspirationally, instead of saying, "Oh, no, no. That is too much for us to take on. We are too busy, we are too poor, we are too this, we are too that." You know, we will keep moving the city forward. Yes, they are hard work, yes they can be disruptive, and all the rest of it. But, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them.
We have to do it.
Correct. We went through the period where we did nothing, and while the city still grew—and it is still terrific—we paid a price for that. We could have been further ahead, certainly on public transportation had we been faster to move, and to do this type of continuous construction, where you are doing something every year, and you never stand back and admire your work, you just keep going—as long as the city keeps growing, which it is. Thank you for your time.
Thank you!
