And John Tory says "I've got it, don't worry, the Toronto Taxpayer Card has a great credit limit"
I think it's John Tory's instinct from back when he was running for Premier to have Toronto pay for everything, even things Toronto only marginally benefits from. See the centrepiece of his election campaign, a $7 billion line from Missisauga to Unionville.
For me the heart of the matter is this, which plan can deliver this to Scarborough Centre?
It's equally bad to just put the LRT in the same alignment and to keep STC as is. Unless you bury the LRT below the STC district, you can't have the above project.
Again, both sides are stubborn. The LRT side had multiple opportunities to modify the plan to alleviate the Kennedy Station problem and to completely reinvigorate STC so it could be a functional urban centre that could attract both residents and investors. Instead, it was SLRT as is or nothing. Why wasn't elevated Skytrain pushed?
Why would Skytrain be acceptable but not LRT for building the above situation? In either case, you're not using up that much land with the elevated guideway, it's just a different vehicle choice. Maybe ICTS would be slightly more slender and no catenary, but it wouldn't be an order of magnitude difference.
The SRT alignment is not as good as McCowan Road. Pushing Skytrain by showing residents Vancouver as an example would have had a better impact, but we'll never know.
But the SRT alignment *is* better for STC. The weak points of the SRT alignment are that it uses up track space in the Stouffville sub and that it passes through low-rise industrial sites for the north/south part of its alignment, but once it gets to STC it has a good route since STC is an east/west rectangle and the SRT runs through the centre of it. The Bloor-Danforth extension has a single stop at the eastern edge of STC so it doesn't provide as good coverage of the site.
In addition, the extension of the SRT would have had a stop to service all that proposed development in the McCowan precinct:
I'm sorry, but all those years the LRT proponent had the floor at city hall, they never proposed an integrated plan that would revitalized STC with the LRT. Instead this is what they proposed:
The same but an LRT instead of the current fleet
As soon as the above plan to rejuvenate STC was thrown in the subway plan, I knew it was over and subway would win every votes from now on, even if 1 stop makes no sense and Smarttrack killed the 3 stop plan.
The plan to "rejuvenate" STC is independent of the rapid transit solution, though. You could do it with either. Continuing the SRT east to centennial college and to Sheppard would probably do more to spur development than a single stop.
Putting aside LRT vs subways for a second, people wanted CHANGE!!! Something the LRT proponents never understood about Scarborough.
The way I understand the LRT vs. Subways debate is that the current SRT, with its transfer, forms a psychological barrier between Scarborough and the rest of the city. The fact that transit city proposed a transfer from subway to street running LRT on every transit line that seemed to approach Scarborough (e.g. Sheppard subway to LRT, Kennedy to SRT, underground Eglinton transfer to SMLRT at Kennedy) probably didn't help the sense of segregated transit and geographic isolation. If the constraint is a continuous, grade separated line, then the Bloor-Danforth extension is the only logical outcome. I've grown to appreciate Burloaks position more on this.
It's interesting how the Bloor-Danforth subway runs the full gamot of what you'd expect rapid transit to be. In the central part it has frequent stop spacing every couple hundred meters in leafy low-rise neighbourhoods, only to gradually morph into an express 6 km stop with massive bus terminal surrounded by highrises, a shopping mall, and parking lots.
