Eglinton Crosstown: A Tale of too many cooks in the kitchen.

Where 1 + 1 + 1 <= 3.

The Eglinton Crosstown is set to finally open this Sunday, and with it, many Torontonians — and no doubt politicians — will breathe a sigh of relief: Finally, a rapid transit route across this grand city north of Bloor Street! It’s a transformational piece of infrastructure that will legitimately make this city and the lives of its citizens better. Much has been said about the Crosstown and how it went off the rails (including an excellent recent exposé in the Star), but something that has gotten surprisingly little attention is just how many cooks are in the kitchen.

You’d be forgiven for mostly associating the Eglinton Crosstown with Metrolinx, the storied provincial agency tasked with completing the line. Metrolinx was created to act as a region-wide agency for building and operating transit, which is a common function in other big cities from New York with its MTA to London with the iconic TFL — Transport for London. The reality is that most people in the region no longer live in Toronto, and the TTC’s mandate doesn’t really extend beyond the City of Toronto, even if they do operate a handful of services beyond the city’s borders.

Metrolinx itself is a complicated agency. While on paper, it’s an agency focused on building and planning new transit, much of its staff are dedicated to the much larger function of running and maintaining the GO train network — potentially dividing the agency’s focus.

Back to the Crosstown, it won’t actually be run by Metrolinx, but by the TTC, and the plans for the line that had to be carried out by Metrolinx — the province — were originally drawn up by the city. So we have a line that was planned by the city, implemented by the province, and will not be run by the TTC, but ah — not so fast. The line’s construction might be managed by Metrolinx, but the actual construction has been undertaken by Crosslinx, which itself is a group of companies — a consortium including the company formerly known as SNC-Lavalin and Spanish Dragados. And as Crosslinx has built the line, to the specifications determined by Metrolinx, to then be operated by the TTC, it’s had to work with the city to deal with everything from disruptions to utility work. Oh and also, the TTC won’t actually maintain the vehicles or line: they just supply the drivers and Crosslinx is responsible for the actual maintenance.

Confused? That’s kind of the problem. P3s have certainly had mixed success in Canada, but what’s for certain is that probably no transit project in Canadian history has had the absolute morasse of stakeholders that the Eglinton Crosstown has had. An entire network of people trying to avoid stepping on toes, gunning for approvals, and trying to figure out who decides what map to put in the trains — which were bought by the province, to be run by the city, and maintained by private companies.

And the reality is, this confusing mix of organizations is not unique to Eglinton. Just look north on the subway map to Finch West: The line is again overseen by Metrolinx, but with operations by the TTC, which has been the left hand trying to get the City of Toronto right hand to provide the trains with actual priority at city-owned traffic lights. The line’s switches have problems, but are they from the Metrolinx and city plans, or from the company that built the line? Sorry, it’s not a company, but a consortium again — this time Mosaic. Or the separate operating company also called Mosaic? Which needs to make sure they are melting ice day and night.

Ontario has a real crisis of responsibilities. The province has cities, which are creatures of the province that can seemingly not even install a bike lane without provincial blessing these days, which themselves have departments that sometimes don’t see eye to eye. Then there’s the province, which has a Ministry of Transportation responsible for presumably transportation, but then also Metrolinx — which is just responsible for transit in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area — except the agency also runs GO buses as far afield as Peterborough, and briefly ran GO trains to London, and is also going to be taking over ... the Ottawa LRT? And then there’s Infrastructure Ontario, which is responsible for procuring various infrastructure — something Metrolinx has also done.

The point is, the whole transportation landscape in this province is a mess of different governing bodies, with overlapping roles and responsibilities, as well as cities that come with their own baggage. Instead of doing the hard work of rationalizing and integrating these various bodies, we keep adding new agencies and shuffling responsibilities in a way that mostly seems to lead to confusion. And this confusion and sometimes paralysis has national implications: Toronto forms a massive portion of the national GDP, so when its streets are clogged and commuters can’t get around, the whole country takes a hit. New federal high-speed rail plans look great on paper, but who exactly is the Federal Crown Corporation – which is not VIA Rail nor Transport Canada — supposed to talk to about rail access to Toronto?

Other regions and nations have over decades done the painstaking work of creating organizations that coordinate public transit nationally, usually with separate organizations tasked with building out and maintaining infrastructure, and this has paid dividends. Whether you’re on a suburban train out of Paris, or on a high-speed TGV travelling the Riviera, it’s all SNCF. In the Netherlands, a single Presto-style payment card works for the whole country. And in Switzerland, local bus timetables are integrated with the intercity trains down to the minute.

If Ontario — and indeed Canada — wants the public transit of the places we take vacations to and marvel at, then we need to sit down and hammer out everyone’s jobs, and probably reckon with the 11 different transit systems, and two different urban rail systems in Toronto, because the status quo is not working.