Friends of Toronto Waterfront Birds

The maintenance and expansion of the Toronto Island Airport on a prime natural habitat for birds and key migratory routes poses a long-term threat to migratory birds, including birds at risk of disappearing in Canada.

The Toronto Port Authority’s proposed pedestrian tunnel to the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport is currently undergoing an environmental assessment screening process. The Draft Environmental Screening Report (November 2010) submitted by Dillon Consulting Ltd., attempts to limit the scope of the assessment to the “vicinity of the pedestrian tunnel.” It does not address in a full, comprehensive and independent way the impact such projects geared towards airport expansion have on air quality, noise pollution, and migratory birds and other wildlife.

While the draft report acknowledges the hundreds of species of migratory birds that rest or breed in the Toronto Harbour, it claims “the lands that may be directly affected by the pedestrian tunnel provide limited to no bird habitat.” A proper environmental assessment requires that the scope of the report include not only the tiny area covering the tunnel construction, but the central issue of what effects added infrastructure and airport expansion would have on Toronto waterfront birds.

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Commentary by Brian Iler, CommunityAIR

Is the Tunnel Needed for Airport Expansion?

It is clear from the Jacobs report (pages 14-15) that the ferry access is one of their “pinch-points”. Without more means to access the airport, expansion WILL be curtailed. They suggest that they need to use shuttle buses on the ferry “as soon as possible”:

The new ferry will go a long way to taking pressure off what would otherwise be the lowest capacity point in the system. Nonetheless, both upper passenger deck and shuttle buses on the car deck will need to be used to meet the forecast demands by October 2010.

The model calculates the passengers that would not be accommodated on the first ferry departure because of capacity constraints (assuming that a reasonable level of service is to be maintained). The model was run with a ferry capacity of 150 (upper deck only) and 200 (upper deck plus car deck). Exhibits 13 and 14 illustrate the inbound passengers not served on the first ferry with only the passenger deck in use and with 50 or more passengers in shuttle buses on the car deck.

With only the upper deck used for air passengers, in the morning inbound rush, some passengers will have to wait for a ferry because of crowding. There is a need to implement the movement of shuttle buses on the ferry as soon as possible.

The need to keep a high level of service cannot be emphasized enough. The Airport’s business model is working precisely because the level of service is high in terms of travel time, hassle and congestion. If this model is allowed to break down, the consequences could damage the viability of the entire concept.

The study demonstrates the folly of trying to jam a busy airport into a modest two-laned street.

This study establishes the upper limit of slots, presumably. However, it states explicitly that even the current cap of 202 slots is treated as flexible:

Whether the slot cap is controlled by the NEF constraints or other system capacities, there will be a slot cap that will likely be 202 movements per day or less unless and until capacity can be improved.

The maximum number of slots has been a moving target:

The leaked document states quite clearly that the $35 million settlement between the TPA and Transport Canada limited the number of large turboprop slots to 120. It was on that basis that Porter was paid $20 million from that amount. To suggest that more are now permitted would run entirely contrary to that settlement, surely.

Our press release and backgrounder, from last January, indicate just how much that limit has been capable of being “adjusted”.

The City has commissioned a peer review of the most recent slots study, and we can expect its results shortly. We cannot expect, though, that it is likely to finds a lower limit, as it seems that night-time flights (between ten and seven) each count for 16 daytime flights. So Jacobs has simply removed enough night-time flights to allow daytime flights to reach 202. We’ll see if that is really legitimate, when the study arrives.

Note too that the 2001 Sypher-Mueller study, that established a slot limit of 112, in its modelling of future noise, assumed that (at page 79): “the Airport will continue to be operated as a daytime facility. Hours of operation would be from 0700 to 2200”

So, without any night-time flights, they found only 112 slots were available.

And we know how difficult it has been to enforce an explicit curfew. With slots, it will be too easy to allow planes to land after ten, and hope that City doesn’t ask for an NEF analysis after the fact to see if there was a breach. It’ll be a very tough enforcement proposition, worse with a Ford administration.

Regardless, I suggest the tunnel is now becoming essential to permit more expansion. Hence their push for it.

Where’s the Money for the Tunnel Supposed to Come From?

The tunnel that was originally projected to cost as little as $20 million (Star June 3, 2009) went up to $38 million in August 2009, and is now at $45 million. That’s most unlikely to be the final number.

Where’s that money to come from? Here’s what the TPA said in its January 29, 2010 release:

The private sector proponent would arrange Bank financing representing approximately 50 per cent of the project’s estimated $45 million cost. In addition, the TPA will consider providing up to 20 per cent of the project’s cost in the form of a subordinate loan or other instrument.

Surely any private sector financier will insist on securing any loan on public assets held by the TPA.

And while ultimately passenger user fees might pay back the public money spent, there are two risks at play:

* Porter’s the sole carrier committed to the Island Airport, and its financial condition is far from assured – based upon the latest available data from Porter (first quarter 2010 – revealed in the prospectus for its failed IPO) Porter has lost huge sums of money since it was founded: $11,486,000 in 2007, $3,317,000 in 2008, $4,609,000 in 2009 and $5,972,000 in the first three months of 2010. There is no evidence that points to a turnaround in Porter’s fortunes – in fact the recent chronic 20% discounts (mounting to 30% in recent days) suggests sales continue to be problematic.

* Then there’s the matter of the TPA’s unpaid property taxes – about $40 million. Most lenders will be skittish about relying on a borrower facing a liability big enough to bankrupt it, if forced, finally, to pay them by the City. That, given a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision, is increasingly likely.

Both of these risks will surely give any private sector financier considerable pause.

So the TPA will be using its own funds (taxpayers’, ultimately), and borrowing more, using public assets as collateral for their borrowing,, on the assumption that the airport will continue to be viable enough to repay the loans.

That also assumes that peak oil will not hit, and it will not reduce flying. That’s an increasingly weak assumption. Here’s a recent piece:

From John Michael Greer’s blog, The Archdruid Report, http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/12/in-wake-of-victory.html

In The Wake Of Victory

This has not been an easy week for believers in a brighter future. As I write this week’s post, food prices in the global market are soaring toward levels that brought mass violence two years ago, driven partly by climate-driven crop failures and partly by the conversion of a noticeable fraction of food crops into fuel ethanol and biodiesel; the price of oil is bumping around somewhere skywards of $86 a barrel, or right around two and a half times the level arch-cornucopian Daniel Yergin insisted not that long ago would be oil’s long-term price; the latest round of climate talks at Cancún are lurching toward yet another abject failure; and bond markets worldwide are being roiled by panic selling as the EU’s Irish bailout has failed to reassure anybody, investors in US state and local bonds realize that debts that can’t be paid back won’t be paid back, and even the riskier end of commercial paper is beginning to look decidedly chancy.

With all this bad news rattling away like old-fashioned musketry, it can be hard to look beyond the headlines and grasp the broader picture, but that’s something well worth doing just now, especially for those of us who have put in some years in the peak oil scene or, for that matter, any of the other movements that have had the unwelcome job of pointing out that infinite growth on a finite planet is a daydream for fools. What the broader picture shows, when all the short-term vagaries, the rhetoric and the yelling are all stripped away, is something as simple as it is stunning: we were right all along, and the rest of the world is slowly, with maximum reluctance, being forced to grapple with that fact.

We’ve come a very long way since the peak oil movement began to take shape just over a decade ago. In those days, those of us who were concerned with petroleum depletion were basically a handful of heretics howling in the wilderness, at a time when serious books on energy by major academic presses routinely missed the obvious fact that fossil fuels would run short long before they ran out. The suggestion that oil production might be limited by geological factors was dismissed derisively by people straight across the political spectrum; if the price of oil ever actually rose above the rock-bottom levels it then occupied, the conventional wisdom went, the law of supply and demand would infallibly bring new production online and force the price back down.

Then, of course, the price of oil began to go up, and production didn’t respond. All the considerable resources of political and financial rhetoric have been worked overtime to gloss over that extremely awkward fact, but the fact remains: petroleum prices are now at levels that were unthinkably high only a few years ago, the bountiful new production the conventional wisdom foresaw has not happened, and dozens of alternative resources that would supposedly be viable once oil cost $30 a barrel, or $50, or $80 are still nowhere in sight. Last week the IEA, the international organization that tracks energy supplies and predicts their future trajectory, quietly admitted that conventional petroleum production had peaked in 2006, and ratcheted down their projections of future energy supplies yet again.