howl
Active Member
Crazy yes, but that was the political mood back in 2012 - both on City Council and with the Provincial Government (i.e. Metrolinx). There was no thought to transit - just figuring out how to defeat Ford.
Up until early this year, I thought the best solution was to tear up a couple of hundred metres of the tunnel West of the portal and relocate the tunnel south a bit. It could then follow a south side alignment to Don Mills.
Now that the Don Mills station is under construction, I think the station is too deep and too far East to allow the LRT line to elevate over the DVP. Thus, redoing the portal cannot achieve full grade-separation and would only accomplish moving the turnback to Don Mills - and I am not sure that's worth it.
I think Voltz is correct here. The original EA had the above ground stop at Leslie. That is what had been designed and what had been approved. That became the default option. After that here was an 11th hour political push from the reduce-costs side to continue the tunnel all the way to Don Mills and eliminate the Leslie stop altogether. When that faced opposition from local political forces there was a period of hand-wringing and searching for some sort of hybrid solution, like building the Leslie station under the Don River, but none of those options could be developed, analyzed and approved before the tendering deadline. It was simply too late in the process. Therefore the default option was a go. If Metrolinx hadn't put a hard deadline on the process for finding an alternative the eastern TBM would probably still be waiting to start.