Subway extension leads to questions

Re After 15-year wait, train leaves the station, Dec. 18 Like thousands of other excited transit buffs and transit users, a friend and I checked out the new subway extension into Vaughan.

The stations are beautiful and architecturally interesting. But I couldn’t help feeling that this was a subway to Baffin Island, basically a subway to nowhere.

It’s great to see subway expansion beyond the city’s boundaries, but I have to wonder if this is money well spent. As a teenager, I went on opening day when the University line expanded north of St. George Station in 1978. I did the same in November 2002, when the Sheppard line opened. It’s always a wonderful experience when a new subway line opens. The extension to York University was long overdue, but did it really need to go north of Steeles Ave.?

Time will tell: development tends to follow subway lines. As much as it was exciting to experience the new extension on Sunday, I wonder if the multibillion-dollar gamble into York Region was worth the cost given other pressing transit priorities. At this point I don’t see it. Andrew van Velzen, Toronto

I would think that the ratepayers of Scarborough have every right to be offended and upset that a municipality outside the city of Toronto gets subway service into the centre of its community (Vaughan) before Scarborough gets a subway to the centre of its geography.

For decades, the citizens of Scarborough have had to be satisfied with a subway to Kennedy Rd. Even today, citizens are told that a subway extension to their municipal centre is in the future, but it will only consist of one stop, resulting in inferior service to that provided in the rest of Toronto, and now to Vaughan. If the Bloor-Danforth line cannot be extended effectively, then the Sheppard line should be extended to Malvern, and help Scarborough be more included in the city of Toronto. Brian Moore, Brantford