TRANSFER STUDENTS

Two Scarborough campuses are just a few kilometres apart, but only one is on the latest transit map,

Nisareg Shukla calls the TTC his second home.

The 20-year-old Centennial College student spends 90 minutes each day commuting, hopping from a bus to two subway lines, the Scarborough RT and another bus to get to school and back from his home near Keele St. and Lawrence Ave.

“Just imagine when there’s a storm, how long it takes,” said Shukla, who studies mechanical engineering. To pass time on the commute, Shukla said, “I read the newspaper, listen to music, sleep — it depends on my mood and the time of the class.”

An LRT stop at his campus was part of the transit plan in 2013. That was changed to a three-stop subway that would have included a station near Centennial’s main campus.

New plans revealed this week added to the mix a 17-stop LRT that is expected to improve transit for many in the underserved area, including students at the U of T Scarborough (UTSC) campus.

But the plans also removed two of the stations from the subway extension, including the one near Centennial’s main campus. That has left some, including Shukla, feeling shortchanged.

The subway trip to Scarborough Town Centre will be quicker, “but it still means that our students have to sit there and take another bus to get to campus,” said Rosanna Cavallaro, the college’s associate vice-president of communications. “It would be really great if they would consider stopping at the main Progress Campus.” A stop on the new LRT on the way to U of T Scarborough will service Centennial’s smaller, adjacent Morningside campus.

Cavallaro noted that the Progress Campus’s population, at 10,000, is roughly the same as that at UTSC — another reason it should have a stop. But she said she’s happy the project as a whole still stands. So is Hassan Mohamud, a UTSC journalism student whose commute from York Mills is also 90 minutes long. Mohamud had to take on an extra year at school to complete his political science minor because he can only take the courses in Scarborough and they aren’t available in the summer.

But he’s skeptical too. “It seems like a steady decrease of what was originally promised,” Mohamud said, referring to the reduction in planned subway stations. The extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line will run the six kilometres between Kennedy Station and Scarborough Town Centre without stopping.

With only a year left to complete his degree, Mohamud will be long gone before his travel time gets any shorter.

University vice-president Bruce Kidd, who’s also UTSC’s principal, acknowledged the project has “been along time coming” since initial LRT plans were formulated during the David Miller mayoralty back in 2007.

“This is delivering on a promise that was made years ago,” Kidd said, adding that when faculty and stu- dents discuss their commute, “they speak through gnashed teeth.” Kidd called the LRT’s route through campus a “game changer” that will benefit not just students, but also area residents and Torontonians wanting to get fit at the Pan Am Sports Centre nearby.

Meanwhile, the campus student union is advocating for a shuttle that would carry U of T students between Scarborough and the downtown St. George campus.

“This is something that the LRT extension will be relieving the need for, hopefully. But the problem is that within the next few years coming up to it, there’s still that gap in service,” said Yasmin Rajabi, the student union’s VP external.

Back at Centennial, Shukla has big dreams of a more direct route to school. “If I had a subway station, like, right here, that would be great.”