Shepherding Sheppard

The Toronto Star’s Transportation Reporter Tess Kalinowski, on the new agency that will work toward making a privately-financed Sheppard subway extension a reality:

Toronto Transit Infrastructure Ltd., (formerly Toronto Transit Consultants Ltd.) will be responsible for taking the business case for the Sheppard subway before the federal government to make sure “our business model makes sense,” TTC chair Karen Stintz told the Star.

“Someone just needs to be shepherding through that process and there is nowhere in the TTC that we can do that … so this consulting company has been re-established,” she said.

via TTC revives consulting arm to oversee Sheppard subway – thestar.com.

It dawns on me that one of their first orders of business will be to search for someone — anyone! — with credibility who could produce a report claiming that the more than four billion dollars the city hopes to raise with this scheme is possible.

Norm Kelly, Doug Ford and former councillor Gordon Chong are directors. Chong wrote an editorial praising Rob Ford’s transit plan for the Toronto Star in January. (I wrote about it.)

Related to this: the Toronto Environmental Alliance has released another snazzy graphic comparing the funded portion of Transit City with proposed revisions. They, probably wisely, leave the Sheppard subway line off their map. It’s nowhere near real enough yet to include, especially compared with a Sheppard East LRT that would have been open in just three years.

Really, though, you could probably simplify the graphic even further and just write “THE MAYOR WANTS TO SPEND TWO BILLION DOLLARS NEEDLESSLY PUTTING TRANSIT UNDERGROUND JUST BECAUSE SOME DRIVERS MIGHT BE INCONVENIENCED.” Probably less attractive visually, though.

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