[URBAN NOTE] Two Toronto Star links on the possibly misjudged Scarborough one-stop subway expansion

[rfmcdonald]

First is Jennifer Pagliaro and Ben Spurr's "First detailed plans revealed for one-stop Scarborough subway".

As the city unveils the first detailed plans for the one-stop Scarborough subway, residents whose homes are threatened by tunnelling are questioning why the city is spending more than $2 billion for transit they worry is not justified.

At private meetings Tuesday, the city and TTC officials revealed the recommended alignment and station location for the subway extension to Scarborough’s city centre. That recommendation is to tunnel east from Kennedy Station along Eglinton Ave., north on Danforth Rd. to McCowan Rd., ending north of Ellesmere Rd. with a new station to be located in the middle of the parking lot now at the southwest corner of the Scarborough Town Centre.

But plans to cut just west of McCowan Rd. before Ellesmere Rd., tunnelling under a section of detached family bungalows that may need to be expropriated, has left some residents asking bigger questions. That was the case at a meeting of just under a dozen concerned neighbours who convened with city and TTC staff.

The proposed tunnel would run under a gas station and 11 Stanwell Dr. homes which back onto McCowan. The TTC has also notified those residents that their homes may need to be expropriated in order to create a 10,000-square-metre staging area for tunnel construction.

Officials are still considering whether to use the northwest or southwest corner of McCowan and Ellesmere for construction purposes. The northwest corner is the forested Civic Centre Park.

The two authors also have this article, "Mayor Tory defends Scarborough subway extension despite new ridership data". Briefly, there's barely enough projected traffic to justify a light rail route. Why spend so much and disrupt so much for so little?

Mayor John Tory is defending plans to build a one-stop subway extension to Scarborough for more than $2 billion despite new numbers that show ridership for the six-kilometre stretch would see trains that are 80 per cent empty at rush hour.

At a public consultation meeting at the Scarborough Civic Centre on Tuesday night, city planning staff unveiled new projections that said by 2031, at its busiest hour in its busiest direction, 7,300 people are expected to ride the new subway.

That ridership number is half of the upper range of figures presented to councillors in 2013 when they approved the extension. At the time, city planning staff said that between 9,500 and 14,000 would ride the subway, but since then the projections have been revised downward to accommodate the effect of the planned SmartTrack line and design changes that reduced the number of stops from three to one.

“I can’t speak to the numbers that were bandied around before I was here, but I can say that the numbers we’re looking at today make this a project that we should do and we must do, and I continue to be very committed to it,” Tory said at a transit announcement at the TTC’s Greenwood yard Wednesday afternoon.

The mayor said he believes recent reports on the shrinking numbers have been “misleading,” arguing other terminal subway stations have similar ridership — an argument also championed by senior city planning staff.