Toronto, heed Ottawa's rail experience

Clive Doucet, The Ottawa Citizen:

I read recent reports that Rob Ford, the new mayor of Toronto, plans to scrap his city's surface rail projects -- Transit City -- with considerable dismay. Larry O'Brien did exactly the same thing to Ottawa after he was elected, and it didn't work. It didn't "save" anyone any money as O'Brien would have it. It cost millions and it crippled the city's government over its mandate.

Major public infrastructure projects require years to plan, engineer and finance. Abandoning them just as they are about to be constructed triggers immense direct and indirect costs. I don't believe most of Ottawa realizes to this day just how absolutely disastrous the cancellation of that project was for the entire city. Politically, it rendered the council impotent.

Giving in to the new mayor's llth-hour campaign promise to re-write 58 separate votes by two councils over eight years; then disconnecting from hundreds of millions of federal/provincial funding dollars without any alternative but some to-be-determined recommendations of a volunteer committee, gave the council no choices but what the mayor and staff presented. If Ottawa City Council could cancel a procurement process which had won a national award, send German engineers home and then start making decisions by the seat of its pants -- then say goodbye to coherent, due diligence decision making on anything.

The young council in Toronto needs to pay attention to Ottawa because the individual political consequences for Ottawa politicians four years on from the initial rail cancellation were equally disastrous -- almost half the council either left voluntarily or were retired by the electorate. Councils need to succeed and you don't get success by cancelling projects that are slated to change your city for the better.

Toronto needs to pay attention to the alternative that was eventually offered to replace the surface rail system O'Brien cancelled -- tunnelling, as Ford is also proposing. It is true, cities did depend on expressways and subways in the first part of the 20th century, but today, city governments all over the world have turned to surface rail. Even in New York. Why? Because it serves more people, it's almost as fast and costs much less. The $2.2 billion for Ottawa's 3.4-kilometre tunnel is more than twice the cost of the entire 28-kilometre north/south line. And federal/provincial funding was jeopardized.

Continue reading here.