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A lot of pundits tried to encourage the LRT ROW to run on the south side of the road between Brentcliffe and Don Mills to avoid the signalized intersection at the time. For whatever reason, metrolinx did not head that recommendation.
It would have to be elevated over the CPKC line. That would be fairly high. Then, from Don Mills, you would bring the tracks back down to at-grade before reaching the Don Valley Parkway. That would be a steep drop.
When Metrolinx took over, they tried to change it from a portal east of Brentcliffe, to just tunnelling all the way to Don Mills Road. But they encountered community opposition about dropping the Leslie stop in the EA amendment process, and with TBMs already in the ground, they cancelled the EA amendment, and just stuck to what was written. These days they'd do it differently, but this was the first project of it's type, and I think they were still gun shy from their mismanaged Blue 22 EA in Weston.
Community opposition by which community? At the time there were just a few residential buildings around the planned Leslie stop.
I thought it was the developers who owned lands on/near the northwest. And some community opposition that it would remove easy access to the parkland there. Thinking about it more, the biggest opposition was removal of the stop east of Don Mills. You can probably find it in the Eglinton Transit City discussion thread, if you search for Ferrand and Leslie (and perhaps environmental assessment) in the early 2010s.
Yeah, I used to commute that one, turning from eastbound Eglinton to Leslie (and vice-versa)!
I know they couldn't have foreseen this in hindsight, but with tunneling becoming vastly cheaper in recent years they should have opted to just do a C&C extension of the metro along Eglinton.
Especially the fact that the TTC was to have the first phase open in 2015, before Metrolinx took it over from them.
The actual tunnelling is a small part of the cost per kilometre for subway. Look at the additional costs that are added because of they much more frequent emergency exits. And the stations easily cost a lot more than the tunnels.
In the case of Eglinton West, its unlikely C&C would've been that much cheaper. Part of the problem is that there is a massive Gas Mainline running underneath Eglinton at that section, meaning that any and all construction would've required them to do a massive and expensive relocation of that mainline. That's why if you noticed, all of the stations for Eglinton West aren't located under Eglinton, but rather directly north of the Intersection, with entrances being limited to the north side of the street (I'm too lazy to go back a few hundred pages to find the station layout images).
