Scarborough transit plan ‘buys peace in the land’

Proposed one-stop subway extension, 17-stop LRT gets broad support

A new proposal for transit in Scarborough is being hailed as defensible planning while brokering a “peace treaty” at city council and with the province.

A one-stop subway extension from the Bloor-Danforth line along McCowan Rd. to Scarborough’s city centre and the addition of a 17-stop LRT that would connect five underserved priority neighbourhoods all within the same $3.56billion price tag will be officially announced today. The executive committee meets next week.

After the Scarborough subway exten- sion became one of the most polarizing issues at council in recent memory — with former mayor Rob Ford and Scarborough-area politicians arguing residents “deserve” a subway over a seven-stop, $1.48-billion LRT that was fully funded by the province — council members from both sides agree the new plan is a vast improvement.

“My job here, I believe, is to get the best possible transit answer I can for Scarborough and I think we’ve really made huge strides forward in that regard by getting now both a subway to the centre of Scarborough and the LRT and to build enough consensus to make sure it happens,” Mayor John Tory told the Star Wednesday.

“It’s going to develop a much broader base of support, it’s going to be much better from a transit perspective, it has the support of the chief planner . . . and I think it’s going to be way better for Scarborough.”

The plan acknowledges Scarborough residents needs rapid transit in place of the aging SRT — not only to get downtown, but to get around Scarborough. The new configuration was developed after chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat approached the mayor’s office in October as criticism toward the controversial three-stop subway intensified.

Councillor Joe Mihevc, who at first backed the three-stop subway and ultimately voted against it in 2013, said the new plan “buys peace in the land.”

The province and federal government are on board with the plan, say city hall sources.

Still, Tory and staff can expect questions over the cost of that political compromise.

Councillor Josh Matlow, who has been the most vocal opponent of the three-stop subway — pointing to a lack of justification for the price tag — praised Tory for bringing councillors together to work on a solution.

“I respect the fact that Mayor Tory has recognized that the initial threestop subway plan was not the right plan for Scarborough and that he wants to work with council to get beyond the dishonest and divisive debate and serve as many residents in Scarborough as possible,” Matlow said.

“The plan that the chief planner has proposed is something that we can put on the table. There’s still a num- ber of questions that need to be asked.”

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaker, who Tory dubbed the Scarborough subway champion after he pushed the line onto the council agenda in 2013, said he was at first shocked to learn it was being revised.

“We moved heaven and earth to get the Scarborough subway on the map, to get it approved, to get it funded. So in my mind it was a done deal and it was finished,” he said. “Is this an improvement over the subway only plan? I have to say yes. I have to be honest.”

Senior sources say by eliminating two stations from the subway plan and removing the need to tunnel north from Scarborough Town Centre to Sheppard Ave., the city can save more than $1 billion. The new proposal cuts out stops at Lawrence East and Sheppard Ave.

The savings would be used towards a different LRT — one that is modified from a line first put forward in the early iterations of former mayor David Miller’s light rail plan called Transit City.

That12-kilometre LRT would be an extension of the Eglinton Crosstown line already under construction — dubbed Crosstown East. It would continue east from Kennedy Station along Eglinton Ave. to Kingston Rd., then along Morningside Ave., looping directly through the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, which is planning a major expansion.

It would connect to both Eglinton and Guildwood GO stations while travelling through the Eglinton East, Kennedy Park, Morningside, Scarborough Village and West Hill communities identified by the city as “neighbourhood improvement areas” — typically low-income areas that lack resources and city funding.

Sources said the plan, which could see the subway built sooner, achieves some key city-building and transit objectives.

“It can make a lot of people happy and do a lot of people good,” said one source.

The subway provides the express connection to downtown needed to kick-start the Scarborough City Centre, which has seen virtually no commercial development since 1991. Those development opportunities aren’t available at Lawrence or Sheppard, although it would be possible to continue the subway north in the future if the need and the funding were available.

The revised plan also prevents the subway from cannibalizing ridership from Tory’s Smart Track plan. Running on the Stouffville GO line with new stops, Smart Track would then become more of a local transit service, fed by buses, leaving the express trips to the subway.

Scarborough, which has good eastwest buses, is lacking the kind of north-south connections that Smart Track would provide.

There are no ridership projections attached to the plan yet after staff ran an initial study to show Smart Track and the three-stop subway can’t run side-by-side.

The new transit configuration will be run through the same kind of study that was used to provide ridership forecasts for Smart Track, released earlier this week.

Ford and his supporters had also pushed for a Sheppard East subway extension, something that Star sources say would now cost about $5 billion without providing the same rider and development opportunities.

There is no timeline for completion of the proposed subway extension, but sources suggested 12 years might be a reasonable possibility. The revised one-stop subway could reduce that horizon by a couple of years, they said.

The LRT is already considered “shovel-ready.” Although 19 stops were approved, fewer stops would shorten trip times for users and concentrate ridership in the most needed stations. But LRT stops are relatively inexpensive and, if ridership justified a stop, it could likely be built, said the source.