Today I received a flyer in the mailbox with an appealing proposition: “Extend the Yonge subway to the 407 now!” Look a bit closer, though, and you start to see some problems.

The Yonge Subway North campaign is riding the coattails of the Ontario Liberal government’s MoveOntario 2020 transit proposal, intended to provide funding to a number of transit projects across the province. One of those projects is a heretofore unannounced plan to extend the current Yonge-University-Spadina subway up past Finch station, all the way to Highway 7/407. Not that such a extension hasn’t been considered before—in fact York Region Transit has always figured a subway extension would be required to handle the massive amount of traffic already flowing down Yonge Street into Toronto. But up until McGuinty’s announcement a couple of months ago, that subway was always seen as a possible “third phase” of YRT’s current Viva rapid transit project, the fruits of which are already visible on Yonge and Highway 7 today in the form of large, shiny blue buses. MoveOntario 2020 turned the extension into a near-future possibility, and as such YRT put their plans to build a dedicated bus right-of-way on hold in July.

Putting the busway on hold is prudent—if McGuinty is truly serious about the subway, then it makes no sense to put the busway in as currently planned (you can read the Environmental Assessment for details—if you want to cut to the chase, take a gander at Chapter 9 of the Final EA Report (PDF)). And there’s little doubt that given the choice between rapid bus transit and a subway extension, most people would choose the latter. Furthermore, unlike the Spadina extension to the Vaughan City Centre at 400 and 7, an extension up Yonge to Highway 7 actually makes sense—there’s already plenty of traffic, ensuring the extension will have sufficient ridership to justify its construction.

But the way the subwaynow.ca flyer frames the debate on buses versus subways is vague at best and disingenuous at worst. It makes it that much harder to support the Yonge Subway North campaign when there’s so much questionable material being thrown around as fact. The flyer essentially reprints the FAQs on the website regarding the proposed extension, so you can read along even if you didn’t get the flyer.

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Do we need a dedicated bus lane in the middle of Yonge? The subwaynow.ca people argue the answer is no. Their reasons include left turn restrictions, reduced parking spaces, and the lack of effectiveness in combating congestion. My personal favourite quote: left turn restrictions will affect “not only local residents and businesses, but also Emergency Response Vehicles.”

The ludicracy of an ambulance waiting on a traffic priority signal is hilarious for two reasons: one, traffic priority signals as currently implemented, at least on the Spadina dedicated streetcar line, favour left-turn vehicles first, and streetcars/buses second; two, it’s an AMBULANCE, and they immediately have priority over transit vehicles. If the left-turn issue has to do with the possibility of a raised right-of-way blocking left-turn access to side streets where previously there was just an intersection: Toronto’s experience with dedicated ROWs is currently very small, but it’s worth noting that emergency vehicles seem to have no trouble getting around on Spadina, and in fact the right-of-way can serve as an asset because emergency vehicles can use the much clearer center lanes instead of getting stuck in rush-hour traffic. Compared to that, the time an ambulance or fire truck loses in hopping the curb (a solution Toronto councillor Joe Mihevc put forth when answering concerns about the St. Clair ROW) is marginal.

Another concern subwaynow.ca raises is that of street widening eliminating valuable parking spaces outside local businesses. The flyer doesn’t go into any detail about where this street widening will occur or how many parking spots will be lost where, and the website doesn’t appear to elaborate on the losses either. We do have the transitway EA showing the final layout options for the transitway, though it’s a low-resolution map with vector-drawn lines so it’s hard to gauge what’s actually a widening and what’s just a mismatch between the satellite imagery and the vector lines. Nevertheless, here’s where the major street widenings are between Steeles and Highway 7:

• Steeles Avenue north (and presumably south), for left-turn lanes and a bus shelter island. Cuts into a gas station lot and the grass outside the parking lot outside a small plaza. Not shown, but a similar cut would affect the grass area outside Centerpoint Mall and parking outside the City Optical plaza.
• Meadowvale Avenue, for left-turn lanes in both directions. Cuts slightly into the parking lot outside the burger joint to the east. No apparent impact north of Meadowvale and the grass area outside the Cadillac dealership lot.
• East side of Yonge between Morgan and Clark for a bus shelter island. Cuts into the sidewalk/grass area outside the parking lot of a small plaza containing the Britannia Pub.
• Elgin/Arnold Avenues for left-turn lanes in both directions. Cuts into the grass/parking area of the Octagon Restaurant and what used to be a car dealership, but may now be a car wash (I don’t remember).
• Yonge between Center and Jane to the west, and Colbourne and Thornhill Summit to the east for a left-turn lane northbound. Cuts into the buffer zone between the sidewalk and the street on both sides. (This is one of the more costly cuts because both sides of the street have old plazas with storefronts that come up right to the sidewalk.)
• North of Thornhill Summit Way on the east side, for a bus shelter island. Cuts into the sidewalk/grass area parking lot outside the plaza with the Starbucks.
• Yonge between Baythorne and Royal Orchard on the east side, for a bus shelter island and northbound left-turn lane. Cuts into the parking lots of the Caldwell Banker and a small plaza, as well as the Yonge frontage of an apartment complex.
• Yonge between Bunker and Uplands on the west side, for a southbound left-turn lane. Cuts into the grass buffer outside a plaza and a car dealer lot.
• Langstaff Road between Yonge and the CN tracks. This will likely swallow up some frontage outside a bunch of industrial buildings, but more likely much of the industrial land will be expropriated for a new bus maintenance facility.

Let’s be perfectly clear here: this is no St. Clair. Where that project dealt with narrowing sidewalks because of a sheer lack of available real estate and the elimination of street parking, the Yonge ROW will have few such issues because of the generous buffer spaces between the street and the sidewalk, and then again between the sidewalk and parking lots. The only situation where we get into a St. Clair-esque crunch is near Thornhill Summit Way, where the old plazas come right up to the sidewalks. The amount of lost parking appears to be minimal to none, unless we assume that the old buffer zones between sidewalks and parking lots are kept intact at the cost of parking lot space. I wonder what developer would make that choice, given the apparent value of parking spaces. Even then, St. Clair businesses complained because street parking was the only parking available to customers; by contrast, there are huge swaths of parking spaces in parking lots just off the street.

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Having dealt with that thorny issue, let’s talk about some of the other problems with the campaign. Are subways less disruptive to build than bus lanes? Amazingly, subwaynow.ca says yes, citing “new subway building techniques” versus the chaos caused by street widening. Anyone who lived through the Sheppard subway construction will probably have something to say at this point, but let’s indulge the Yonge Subway North people and look at their examples of low-impact subway construction. All their example documents cite the Canada Line construction in Vancouver, including this PDF from Translink regarding construction in March 2007. Note the pictures of giant pits being dug for new stations, as well as the huge pits in the middle of Cambie Street. So much for “underground and out of sight.” It’s almost as if the Yonge Subway North people didn’t even bother to read their own evidence before posting it to the site.

Will the subway serve local residents and pedestrians better than a bus? Yes, says subwaynow.ca. Two problems: first, buses aren’t going to disappear from Yonge Street the second subways arrive, just as local bus services on Yonge south of Steeles and Sheppard between Yonge and Don Mills haven’t stopped either. In suburban areas, the distance between subway stops can be huge, and your only alternative to local bus service would be to walk. There’s a reason why YRT hasn’t stopped their Highway 7 and Yonge Street local lines despite the presence of Viva; try counting the number of bus stops you pass between Steeles and 7 while on the Viva Blue line. Why does the YRT 1 line drive through High Tech Road between Bayview and Yonge? Because people actually live and work there, and without that local service you’d force all those people to walk to either Yonge/7 or Bayview/7.

Which leads to the second problem: how can a subway, which by its very nature only stops at the highest-density intersections, serve local pedestrian’s needs better than a bus? Let’s say I wanted to go to the Licks restaurant south of Kirk Drive. If I wanted to get there by transit, I’d have two options assuming the subway uses the same station placement as Viva Blue: take the YRT bus straight to the stop outside that plaza, or else take the subway to Royal Orchard and walk a couple of blocks. And though you can argue that maybe your fat ass needs to walk a little more if you’re going to eat at Licks, I don’t think that’s the argument subwaynow.ca is trying to make.

But what about the concerns regarding walking across bus lanes to get where you’re going? Clearly those concerns were brought up by someone who’s never seen people walking across the Spadina streetcar lanes with abandon. Not to mention that seven lanes of traffic is seven lanes of traffic, regardless of whether two of those lanes hold buses or not—a subway will do nothing to narrow Yonge Street magically for pedestrians.

Does the subway serve local businesses better? subwaynow.ca says yes, because “the subway is both good for business and the community.” This is what we call a circular argument. Oh, but wait, the subway “makes it easy to stop and shop.” Good justification there. Meanwhile, the bus lane will make it “more difficult for shoppers to frequent their favourite shops and restaurants.”

Aside from the argument I just presented above about why local bus service is crucial even in the presence of a subway (which applies equally well to businesses who don’t want a lengthy five-block walk to keep customers from coming to their store), there’s also the question of whether a dedicated bus lane would reduce traffic to businesses in the area. The impact on parking will be minimal, but the impact on drivers may not be; here, at least, the left-turn phobia is somewhat valid. But this is a problem dedicated ROWs everywhere have to face, and history suggests the impact on local businesses isn’t so clear-cut as “dedicated ROW = bad.” The Spadina ROW brought up similar concerns from its local businesses, that foot traffic would be reduced and more efficient transit would mean fewer people in the store as people were whisked from point A to point B without so much as glancing at local storefronts. But the jury’s still out on whether Chinatown is dying, or what the ultimate causes might be. And one thing is certainly true: go to Spadina on any given weekday and it’s still busy.

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That’s just responding to the criticisms of the dedicated busway the Yonge Subway North campaign makes. There are plenty of other problems with putting in a subway versus a dedicated busway. For example, what about Yonge Street north of Highway 7? The traffic doesn’t just end once you pass the highway, but there’s no plan for a subway extension to Elgin Mills, either now or in the distant future. The busway was designed to handle this traffic as well, and without an alternative solution you’re basically sacrificing North Yonge’s transit needs for South Yonge’s needs. Also, the Yonge subway line is already overcrowded during rush hour, so how will it deal with the additional traffic from the extension? And will York Region be able to pay for the operating costs of a subway? It will cost $14 million a year to run the Vaughan subway extension; by comparison, the entire YRT/Viva combined bus system was given a 2007 operating budget of $24.5 million. York Region can afford the Vaughan extension because by and large, it’s the City of Toronto that’s paying for it. Don’t expect Toronto to make that mistake twice.

And speaking of Toronto, it’s the TTC that’ll be operating the subway extension, yes? The TTC that’s so severely underfunded that it just had to raise fares again in order to lose only $35 million next year while city council sits on their hands about levying new taxes to pay for city services? Figure out a way to get all three levels of government to sort out transit funding properly, and then perhaps we can talk about making the subway extension a reality. Because despite all my criticisms above, I still think the subway would be a very good idea—if I actually thought it would happen within my lifetime. While everyone’s busy holding out for that subway, though, what happens to the Yonge corridor in the meantime? The reason why the busway plan was made was because it’s a solution that is needed now. Saying we shouldn’t build it at all because a subway might be in the offing is begging for trouble.