Where Is Blue 22?

As I mentioned in a recent post, two of the reasons that I had stopped blogging for three years were a new job and travel - which go hand in hand. Most of the travel that I've been doing for work in the past year has been to Europe, where I've been exposed to an interesting phenomena - painless, cheap and efficient rail service from the airports to downtown centres.

I've travelled frequently to Copenhagen, Oslo and London - all offer fast, efficient train service to and from the downtown core - what a concept. My first trip to Oslo was a real eye opener when I found I was able to get from the airport, to my downtown hotel and then a downtown meeting - all withing 45 minutes of picking up my luggage (let's leave the quick and friendly Scandinavian passport control for another blog) - pretty good considering the Oslo airport in 50Km from the downtown core!

My experience in Copenhagen has routinely been very similar, to the point that I can plan a 2:00pm meeting downtown when I'm scheduled to land at 12:35 - and in six trips I've never been late once.

All of this efficiency begs a question - why can't a "world class" city like Toronto manage to provide visitors a similar experience? I know that it's been discussed for a long, long time and in 2003 the Union Pearson AirLink Group (100% owned by SNC Lavalin) was awarded the contract to build and operate a Union Station - Pearson rail link also known as Blue 22. This would be great news, except for one small problem - it's now mid-2008 and there has been no positive movement on the project!

It seems that MIBYism has once again reared it's ugly head (this is a chronic problem in the city of Toronto) and local residents and politicians (including the Liberal "rocket scientist" Laura Albanese) have pretty much put this project on the back-burner. They say that they would be happy to see this link happen, BUT they want it buried AND to make frequent stops in the neighborhood, pretty much negating the concept of a high-speed rail link in the first place.

NIMBYism and the lack of strong local and regional government leadership seems to have destined our fair city to be a transportation backwater for the foreseeable future. It's pretty bad when we're shown up by cities where the entire country's population is smaller than the GTA.

As always, I lay the lions share of the blame on my favourite scapegoat - Mayor David Miller - nice work.