The City of Toronto is a bit of a miracle: 3 million people live and work here every day (with even more people commuting in and out from beyond the city’s boundaries), generating the economic surplus provincial and federal politicians use to fund priorities mostly elsewhere. Just living your life in this city and paying your taxes are ongoing acts of philanthropy to other parts of this province and country. But to a much greater extent than we’d like, the sinew and muscles that power that prosperity lie on top of a skeleton that can’t be replicated: the transit infrastructure that shuttles commuters to their jobs concentrated in the downtown core was almost entirely built out before I was born — at a cost we couldn’t dream of matching today.
The Ontario Line is a welcome addition to the city’s transit network, but it’s going to cost north of $1 billion per kilometre of track when it’s open. Very nearly the entire existing subway network — the Yonge-University from Finch to Wilson and Bloor-Danforth from Kennedy to Kipling — was built before 1980 at an inflation-adjusted cost of about one-tenth of that. Or, if you prefer: we should be able to build 10 times as much train as we’re getting for the cost of the Ontario Line.
To put it bluntly: we couldn’t build Toronto again today if we wanted to. This week, a new report from the University of Toronto’s School of Cities does some of the work explaining how we got here, building on similar work from NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. There are, predictably, numerous factors driving the explosion of transit costs, and they’re not unique to Toronto, Ontario, or Canada, even if the School of Cities report focuses on building costs at Metrolinx.
One of the biggest factors driving exploding costs is Metrolinx’s reliance on external consultants to do work that ought to be done inside the agency by permanent staff. Those jurisdictions still able to build transit projects at low cost rely on experienced staff (even if they initially have to hire them from elsewhere) who can do much of the work managing these projects and keeping them on budget and on time. At Metrolinx, on the other hand, “the proportion of just the white-collar labour in the Metrolinx projects (17.1%) approaches the entire soft-cost proportion of the Italian cases (23.9%),” in the words of the report.
(The worst offenders for ballooning transit costs are all English-speaking countries, in much the same way that the worst offenders in the global housing crisis are all English-speaking countries. You could do a lot worse than summing up the explanation for the urban crisis of the 21st century as “the anglophone consultant class doesn’t actually know how to do anything.”)
This lack of confidence in project-management skills has spin-off effects: Metrolinx adds in huge contingency costs, all but acknowledging that the napkin-sketch imaginings that Canadian governments laughably refer to as plans will inevitably end up being more costly than promised. In turn, transit agencies become extremely risk averse, knowing that they’ll end up wearing the responsibility for anything and everything that goes wrong. One example from the report: The Scarborough Subway extension is being built with a concrete wall separating the two tracks. The decision to do this was based on an interpretation of modern building codes — except other jurisdictions use the same codes and don’t include the same type of concrete firebreaks. The result is that the tunnel for the Scarborough extension will involve 18 per cent more concrete liners and require a whopping 42 per cent more volume excavated than would a comparable tunnel built in Europe. And it’s worth pointing out that this is for a small extension of the Bloor-Danforth line that, for the rest of its length, also doesn’t include these concrete dividers.
(Oh, and about the Scarborough Subway: it looks like it, too, will be delayed, because the tunnel boring machine has encountered unexpected soil conditions. The commuters of Scarborough, sold a handful of magic beans more than a decade ago, will continue to suffer into the indeterminate future.)
There are prescriptions for fixing these problems, of course. We could seriously commit to building Metrolinx’s in-house expertise for project management. But, of course, that’s what we were supposed to be doing that with Infrastructure Ontario, albeit for a broader portfolio of provincial projects, including hospitals, long-term-care homes, courthouses, and highways. The auditor general this week found numerous cases of IO failing to control costs on these projects, too — the cost disease isn’t restricted to transit infrastructure. We are, in a very basic sense, not good at this stuff.
We could be despondent about this, or we could try to face the problem and take a clear-eyed look at it. The good news is that this isn’t a physical law of the universe we’re battling; we don’t need to perfect nuclear fusion or something similarly exotic. We just need to get as good at building transit as other jurisdictions are. The prize for doing so is having a more livable, prosperous future than what we can currently imagine — or afford.
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