A plane on the runway at Billy Bishop airport in Toronto, in March.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
George Fallis is a professor emeritus of economics and urban studies at York University.
In late March, Premier Doug Ford announced that the Ontario government would support the expansion of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, allowing jets to use it. The announcement offered no details or estimate of how much it would cost, although it made assertions of huge economic benefits to Toronto, the Greater Toronto Area and the province.
In late April, the Toronto Port Authority (TPA), a federal agency that owns and operates Billy Bishop airport, provided a few details about the proposed expansion, but said a full plan was months away. Nonetheless, with these few details, a preliminary economic analysis can be conducted. What are the economic benefits and what are the costs?
The TPA proposes a change to allow jet aircraft, and jets need longer runways. The proposal is not for large long-haul jets that could reach Europe, but for medium-sized regional jets such as the Embraer E195 E-2, which Porter Airlines currently operates out of Pearson Airport.
The Embraer is quieter and less polluting than the Dash 8 turboprops currently used at Billy Bishop; the Embraer can carry about 130 passengers compared to the turboprops with 78. The Embraer jets are widely used in Europe and are called “city hoppers.”
But this jet requires a longer runway, adding 600 metres to the current 1,200 metres. The runway extension would run west from the Toronto Islands, on newly created land, parallel to the shore, and end very close to Ontario Place.
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With the extended runway and the Embraer jets, Billy Bishop could service the U.S. cities it currently does, such as Boston, New York, Washington and Chicago, but also many more distant hubs such as Miami, Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco. The jets can also reach Vancouver and many destinations in the Caribbean and Mexico.
How much will this expansion contribute to the economy of Toronto? The Ford government asserts that the increased connectivity from a downtown airport would significantly improve Toronto as a place for innovation, and as a desired location for new businesses, and would attract new knowledge workers to live there. But this assertion cannot withstand scrutiny.
Toronto is already connected to this wider range of cities through Pearson. The gain from the expansion is only from the greater convenience of departing from Billy Bishop compared to Pearson and this is much less than most people realize.
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We imagine the businessperson leaving their downtown office at 12 p.m. to fly to New York from Billy Bishop for an afternoon meeting. But most business travellers leave very early in the morning from their home, not downtown. They don’t want to spend their working day in transit, and by arranging their New York meetings in the morning and afternoon, can be back to see their families that night.
From St. Clair Avenue and Yonge Street at 6:30 a.m., you can be at Pearson in 18 minutes, about the same as Billy Bishop; north of that intersection, it is a shorter trip to Pearson. And even the imagined convenience of the downtown departure is deceptive. From Union Station at noon, the shuttle bus to Billy Bishop takes 20 minutes; and the UP Express train takes 25 minutes.
For most of the city, most of the time, Pearson is closer than Billy Bishop, and for the GTA, Pearson dominates.
Billy Bishop, serving two million passengers a year, seems a small uncrowded airport. With the proposed expansion, it is forecast to serve 10 million a year, in the long run. Billy Bishop would become large and crowded.
The net gain to Toronto’s connectivity of the expansion would be very modest, so any contribution to the dynamism of Toronto’s knowledge-based economy would be modest. And it may even hurt Toronto’s economy in some ways.
An example is that the jets, at full throttle as they take off, will buzz the Therme Spa and Ontario Place, making both less attractive destinations. Also, we know knowledge workers value urban amenities and access to nature. If our waterfront becomes less attractive, Toronto becomes less attractive to knowledge workers.
Providing slightly better access to Mexico and the Caribbean hurts Ontario’s economy. Making foreign travel easier means we spend less money at home.
The economic benefits of the Billy Bishop expansion would be very modest. The costs of building a runway extension out into Lake Ontario, expanding the terminal, and providing better access on land to the terminal tunnel would be enormous. The TPA said recently that a preliminary estimate of the cost is $4-billion to $5-billion. The actual cost could be much higher.
This preliminary economic analysis concludes that the Billy Bishop airport expansion would not be good public policy.