Unfortunate. Thank you.
A consequence of our slow-rolling projects. We’re now entering a phase in the macro economic cycle with increased inflation, increased borrowing costs and severe supply/labour shortages. I wonder if we’re going to look back and wish that we’d taken advantage of the good times when they were around - and built instead of talking and waiting.
There's no question, where we choose to debt-finance projects, that we ought to do so when money is cheap, no better time to borrow than when gov't can get debt at 2% or less for short-term debt and well under 5% for long-term debt.
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There's also the matter of long-term foresight, my old-favourite of R.C. Harris and putting a deck under the Bloor Viaduct 50 years before the Yonge Subway and 70 years before Line 2 trains would make use of it. In this context,
I'm talking about acquiring land when its cheap, before lax monetary policies {among other things) send the cost of acquisition to the stratosphere.
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Something else I would add though, debating the right projects and the right modes, while not unimportant, is sometimes/often entirely wasteful.
I called it early on that the SSE was going to happen, not a refurbished LRT, and the route and that it would be tunneled.
Set aside any discussion of merits here; I could read the room, I knew what the politics dictated; it was never going to go any other way.
The result of the back/forth over the LRT didn't change the outcome except to drive up the cost and see the SRT close before the SSE is ready, resulting a lot of hassle and several hundred million
in additional capital costs (busway conversion) and operating costs (7 years of shuttle buses give or take).
There's no way if I can read the room that someone like Josh Matlow couldn't.
Yet...here we are.
