TJ O'Pootertoot
Senior Member
The Davis Drive Transitway was a waste of valuable capital funds. York Region is great for building transit infrastructure, but notorious for refusing to pay for the transit to actually serve it. It looks great on them as they get a subway extension opening at the end of this year, and as they lobby for another subway extension.
Brampton adds service every year, and get the best transit ridership increases in the GTA. And without the fancy median busways, too.
I think it's totally fair to point out YR is adding major infrastructure while cutting local service but I think you also have to put things in the larger context.
I suspect building the lanes on Davis was a necessary political compromise so northern York Region didn't feel left out when all the money went to the "real" project of building lanes on Yonge and Highway 7; not to mention the two subways. Toronto, for one, is hardly to immune to approving unnecessary suburban transit infrastructure for political reasons.
You also have to view the rapidway in the context of what was there before (a lot of crap retail, a lot of traffic) and the fact Yonge/Davis is a designated Urban Growth Centre, so they're trying to stimulate intensification, including employment intensification around the hospital.
I also disagree they are "refusing to pay" for the service, since their subsidy is way way higher than Toronto, and probably even moreso per rider north of the Oak Ridges Moraine. That they're willing to spend $5.50 (to make up a number) per rider on David Drive but not $7.50 doesn't strike me as "refusing to pay" It's a balance and a tricky one and while I fully recognize it's not apples-to-apples with Toronto, their subsidy and rising property taxes are more in line with reality than that great city.
It's great Brampton's ridership is growing, but they don't have to serve a (sub)urban core as well as a rural area twice the size of Toronto. YRT would be a very different beast if it only had to serve Vaughan, Markham and Richmond Hill. I've said before, I don't envy YRT trying to walk the tightrope they do but, for all their legit failings and mistakes, I still see them trying to drive in the right direction. 10, 15 or 20 years will be a more fair time to criticize whether the Davis rapidway was wasteful.
I don't see what any of that has to do with the need for the Yonge subway extension. A waste of capital funds would have been building the rapidway there, tearing up Yonge, and then having a BRT that's operating at or near capacity on opening day.