[URBAN NOTE] "Whether subway or LRT, Scarborough has to be just the start"

[rfmcdonald]

Edward Keenan in the Toronto Star makes the obvious case that the development of mass transit networks has to be sustained throughout their development histories.

There are two certainties in Toronto political debate: the Scarborough subway and taxes.

What about death, you say? Ha! No such luck. No one who has closely watched city hall over the past decade believes fighting about these topics will ever die.

And so, we reported this week, a proposal for new taxes of some form is coming back to city hall in the fall. And Subway Bowl CXXXVIII will be contested at the city council meeting starting Tuesday. There, once again, councillors will be asked to vote to either move ahead with work on the new, more expensive, less expansive extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line to Scarborough Town Centre, or to revert to the twice-abandoned former plan for a new seven-stop LRT to the same destination.

I wrote recently about what I think is the most reasonable case to be made for the subway plan — an argument that depends on a series of other conditions for its logic. And in the end I remain unpersuaded — I think, as I have for years, that the LRT plan would probably accomplish most of the city-building and transit network goals as well or better. The case was put well in a recent op-ed by Councillors Paul Ainslie and Josh Matlow.

I won’t rehash all of those arguments on both sides here — if you care at all, it’s likely you are intimately familiar with them already, and it’s also likely you have already made your mind up which side you’re on. My opinion is that the subway option would be a mistake — and an expensive one — and that Scarborough commuters and the city’s goals would both be better served by the alternative proposal.

But my big fear about the debate Tuesday (and beyond) is not that the subway extension is approved and built. It is that nothing else that’s been proposed in addition to and alongside it will be built.