[URBAN NOTE] "Two Cheers for the One Stop Subway Extension"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist hosts John Parker's argument that the subway confusion in Scarborough, with multiple overlapping and changing plans over the years condensing towards a future of underservicing in east-end Toronto, will work out for the best.

It clearly uses six kilometres of subway tunnel solely to link Scarborough Town Centre to the end of the existing TTC line. This exceeds the length of any single stretch on the current system. It will be costly, and it will require some serious reworking of how the TTC deploys its trains at the eastern end of Line 2. But to expect the politicians to give up on that symbolic length of subway tunnel appears beyond hope at this point.

On the happy side, it will no doubt get a lot of use—as advocates for a Scarborough subway have argued all along. A lot of people live or work within a short walk of the proposed destination. Of all the proposals that were seriously advanced in the long and tortured path to a final plan, this one has the benefit of not being completely crazy.

It then becomes a matter of fare differential to determine how many riders heading for downtown Toronto stay on the line to Bloor-Yonge (or—God willing—to a future downtown relief line), and how many hop off and pick up the GO train at Kennedy for a quick trip to Union Station.

As to the presumed role of a local SmartTrack line, the matter becomes largely irrelevant. The fallacy of the original Smart Track promise becomes increasingly evident with each announcement that emerges from the City’s detailed review process—just look at the utter fantasy of the proposed western spur to the airport. Who knows when—if ever—anything resembling the election-time proposal will be implemented and, if it is, what it will look like and who will operate it. At the moment, it appears for all the world that it will be absorbed into the detail of an eventual regional GO line, and it will be implemented when Queen’s Park decides to get around to it.