Transportation Planning and Infrastructure

Week 4 Class Notes

INFRASTRUCTURE AND EVIDENCE-BASED DECISION MAKING

 “Have we reached the death knell for evidence-based planning in Toronto?”

o Controversial GO stations
o Scarborough subway
o East Gardiner future
o Transform Yonge
 Everyone says they favor evidence-based planning – what happens when the evidence conflicts
with the speaker’s opinion? (which it inevitably does)
 Whose evidence? What counts as evidence? Where does evidence fit into democracy?
 Running on outputs vs outcomes – “building a subway” vs “improving transit in Scarborough”
 Equity for whomst?
o Infrastructure is built for technical and symbolic reasons
o Accounting for geographic and socioeconomic inequities as their own kind of evidence
 Up-front costs + added costs + opportunity costs
 Ideally, political involvement from emergence of problem through prioritization of problems
 Once alternatives analysis starts, it’s dicey to keep politicians closely involved
 Cost-Benefit Analysis
o Meant to be impartial
o Economic impacts, social impacts, (sometimes) strategic impacts
o Every element has to be monetized somehow
o “Discounting” – have to account for depreciation of investment over time (e.g. might
start planning now but service won’t start for 10 years)
 HS2 in UK
o (HS1 was London-France)
o London-Birmingham-Manchester-Newcastle-Edinburgh
o Cost-benefit analysis criticized as too optimistic – none of this is really objective
o Route crosses lots of very wealthy rural communities
o How do you assess someone’s enjoyment of a landscape? What weight should that
have?
 Scotland: how do we spend limited resources on transportation?
o Technical studies recommend investing almost everything in Edinburgh-Glasgow
corridor and connections from both to England
o Actual investments happening all over the country
 All of these benefits seem framed through the lens of work – what would cost-benefit look like if
it weighted all mobility, including leisure and family obligation, equally to work?
 Toronto cases
o Finch LRT: benefit:cost ratio of 0.75:1, very high operating costs, approved anyway
o Gardiner Xpwy: evidence says to tear down, politicians don’t believe evidence
o Scarborough Subway: refusal to even do a study
o Funding the Big Move: keep re-doing study until it says what you want
 Create a clear role for technical evidence but keep a place for politicians