Tory pledges to extend LRT
Mayor won’t give up, although there’s no finance plan for Eglinton East light-rail line
Mayor John Tory, who signed up last week to run for a second term in the upcoming October election, promised residents of Malvern they would be connected to rapid transit after decades taking the bus.
But the cost of a plan to build and extend a light-rail line to the Malvern Town Centre mall and how to finance it remained unclear as Tory made the pitch at an official mayoral news conference in Scarborough on a sunny Monday.
“I will never give up on building transit in Toronto,” Tory told reporters standing outside the mall. “This is going to move ahead, it’s going to accelerate the process of bringing transit to this area.”
The Eglinton East LRT would run east of the Eglinton Crosstown, which is now under construction and will terminate at Kennedy station.
A new staff report tabled at Tory’s executive committee, which meets next week, recommends planning the Eglinton East LRT to stretch all the way into Malvern, north of Hwy. 401.
Previously, staff proposed a 17-stop line running in its own right-of-way east from Kennedy station along Eglinton, turning north and ending at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus on Morningside Ave., just south of the 401.
That original plan was estimated to cost $1.67 billion in 2016. City staff did not provide an estimate for the Malvern portion of the line. Today, there is no clear funding plan in place.
Tory conceded the city would have to find additional funds to complete the Eglinton East LRT and other transit priority projects.
“We’re going to have to advocate for more money, there’s no secret about that,” Tory said, vowing to secure those additional funds from other levels of government.
The federal and provincial governments have already promised $9 billion for transit in Toronto over the next 10 years.
The Eglinton East line is one of the city’s five priority projects that together are estimated to cost at least $17.4 billion, with many in the early planning stages those estimates are expected to increase.
It’s unclear how the available funds will be split among those projects. Last week, Premier Kathleen Wynne, facing reelection in June, announced a list of projects that would receive funds. It did not include the Eglinton East LRT.
The city staff report also recommends a tunnel at the Kingston Rd.-Lawrence Ave.Morningside Ave. intersection as part of an updated design, which it said would create fewer traffic problems. That tunnel, based on little design work to-date, is estimated to cost an additional $249 million to $466 million.
Other considerations for which there are no cost estimates include allowing trains running on the Eglinton Crosstown to operate through Kennedy station instead of requiring a transfer. Extended platforms to accommodate the longer Crosstown trains and others would also be required at an unknown cost.
Despite council direction that city staff present a funding plan and a construction timetable to the executive committee in the second quarter of 2018, staff reported Monday they will not have that plan or timetable until after the municipal election, in the first quarter of 2019.
That leaves both the future of a one-stop subway extension plan being advanced by Tory and his allies as well as the future of the LRT project uncertain heading into the election.
There is no plan for council to hear an updated cost of the subway until 2019, when they are expected to vote on whether to proceed with construction. It is estimated to cost $3.35 billion.
Senior city staff, led by then chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat, previously told council the subway and an Eglinton East LRT could be funded from the same budget of $3.56 billion already dedicated to a subway.
At the time, the subway had been planned to be three stops — replacing the aging six-stop Scarborough RT that will be torn down. Removing two of those stops and extending the subway six kilometres to a single new stop at the Scarborough Town Centre would create savings that could cover the cost of the LRT, staff told council.
But the cost of the subway has since ballooned by more than $1 billion, pricing out the LRT.
“Malvern residents will be left with longer commute times because of John Tory’s multibillion dollar one-stop subway — that cannibalizes much-needed funds that could connect neighbourhoods across Scarborough with rapid transit,” said Councillor Josh Matlow, who has long advocated for a network of LRTs in Scarborough.
“That’s a fact, no matter how they try to spin it.”
Matlow and others have called for a return to a plan to replace the SRT with a seven-stop LRT that was fully-funded by the province but scrapped by council in 2013 under Ford’s administration. That line was planned to extend to Malvern.
Councillor Josh Colle, chair of the TTC and a Tory ally, claimed Monday the subway project was “about to have shovels in the ground” despite council having yet to see updated costs or give the necessary approvals.
Without the Eglinton East LRT, the amount of rapid transit access available to Scarborough residents will significantly decline. With the one-stop subway, Malvern residents would have to travel by bus to the Scarborough Town Centre and on to Kennedy station, a 30-minute trip. With the Scarborough LRT, which was cancelled, the same trip would take just 16 minutes.