Clients and financial advisors are often at odds over spending. Advisors can have a difficult time convincing clients that a latte indulged in several times a week can be a serious misuse of the family budget. Depending, of course, on the family budget.

It’s a misuse because coffee can be had for pennies at home or in a thermos. Still coffee. The same principle applies to the recent, brain-numbing decision of three levels of government to build three subway stops over six kilometres in Scarborough, on Toronto’s eastern edge, for about $1.8 billion. The so-called “plan” replaces an earlier one to upgrade a 30-year-old fixed rapid-transit (RT) line with new light rapid transit (LRT). The cost of the old plan was about $1 billion and, unlike the new plan, the LRT would have connected with a new LRT on Sheppard Avenue. There’s also the $85 million lost in cancelled contracts.

The replacement LRT was to be part of Transit City, an integrated plan to extend state-of-the-art, high-capacity, high-speed LRTs throughout the city.

Transit engineers designed Transit City as the best way to get the most people moving for the lowest cost – about $9 billion in 2010, just before Rob Ford was elected mayor. It’s not a latte, but it is coffee. In one of Ford’s first acts, the virulent critic of LRTs killed the plan, with nothing to replace it. Last year, city council killed the plan to kill the plan. Welcome to limbo.

The new, three-stop subway is widely seen as cynical politics by the feds and the provincial minority Liberals, who were facing a byelection in the region; they won with the subway promise, but the feds stole their thunder by throwing in $600 million. Now, many are worried that Ford will succeed in blocking other LRTs planned for the many far-flung neighbourhoods in Toronto with nothing but buses.

It’s instructive to drive through some of these areas at rush hour. Or, better yet, get on a bus – if you can elbow your way through the crush of commuters spilling over the sidewalks and onto the roads, which aren’t too dangerous, given that all the cars are just inching along. The majority of the riders are newcomers, many clearly struggling, as they balance babies and groceries on overcrowded, stuffy buses.

The wisdom of using almost 20% of the billions needed for cross-city transit to repair three stops on the exact same route of an existing, fixed link – not even providing new service – seems highly questionable.

But apparently not. Now, some fear that Ford’s so-called “victory” on the Scarborough subway issue will lead to more cancellations of the LRTs he hates so much. Get in the way of cars, he claims, even though these LRTs run in their own lanes. They are still planned for several major arteries, including one for Sheppard Avenue East (13 kilometres for $1 billion).

Never mind, though. Ford has identified some recent city spending he does think is just too much. Last year, city council approved the purchase of 30 chairs for $75,000. The chairs are copies of original Warren Platner chairs purchased for Toronto’s world-renowned City Hall in the 1960s. New ones cost $5,000. The copies, for half the price, will last for another 40 years – longer than the Scarborough RT.

Now, that’s a bargain.

© 2013 Investment Executive. All rights reserved.