OneCity
Senior Member
I'm wondering if the outright exclusion of a Lawrence station is even Council's doing. Something seems kinda up with the planning here. Used to be that affordable options were explored and presented, at least preliminarily. Then it'd be up to council to yay or nay toward the high-cost. Like with a station at Lawrence we'd see a low-level viaduct or buried station box below the river (a la York Mills). But now it's as if we skipped that step and moved right to the high-cost option: deep bore or nothing.
Yes Smarttrack had handcuffed City planning from the get-go of Tory's term and the mandate was to get the subway as far away from the RT (smarttrack) corridor as possible. That is what the corridor review was all about. Obviously the costs are anything but low on this corridor but this was optically the easiest option to keep Smarttrack as a thing and still scrape by to keep the subway a thing in combination
Planners will do their best to plan with whatever mandate they are given whether LRT, a 3 stop subway or a smarttrack-subway combo. The RT corridor is out of the question for both subway and LRT for many reasons from RT shutdown, optics, further delays, Smartrack, etc. so the best that can happen is to keep moving forward and for council to approve the stop at Lawrence (even Tory voted for), cancel the Lawrence Smarttrack station and open at Ellesmere possibly in the future. This subway stop will be an issue next election and this Q&A is foreshadowing that rumble from Scarborough.
I have no faith any subway opposition care to loosen their stance here although it only needs a couple votes to reverse, but I expect the pro subway opposition to hammer the Lawrence and Sheppard stops and feed off the support in Scarborough and make this an issue if not adressed
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