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No, new yard and maintenance facilities would have been needed, no so with an LRT conversion. and the main problem with the capacity limit of the SRT was the single track at Kennedy, that needed to be replaced either way with a new platform.
How do you plan on doing this when only Mark I cars will fit the tunnel???? Then there is the accessibility issue.
Yes a new yard will have to be built
It's not really much worse than the rt in every way but it is absolutely no better than the rt, for l to more money than a full refurbishment and extension. The lrt provides no benefits over a completely refurbished and extended rt, and comes in at a much higher cost. If there was no rt before, the lrt would be a pretty good plan, but replacing the rt with it is not (in my opinion anyways)
Considering how short the tunnel is, I can't imagine it will be too difficult to either change the tunnel or find an alternate solution. One of the major advantages to ICTS is its ability to climb steeper than usual slopes so having the rail climb after Ellesmere to go over the Stouffville corridor is definitely a possibility, and so is modifying the curve at Kennedy. Sure this is a lot of money, but doing all of that, as well as building new structures such as a snow shelter along the length of the track should still be cheaper than converting it to LRT.
Polls are a direction to look at but aren't absolute and should be taken with a grain of salt. Polls should always be questioned for any biases that could've been had by those conducting it or margins of error based off who was asked. Do you know what's absolute? The ballot box, and the ballot box shows that Scarborough has consistently voted for pro subway politicians for the past decade.
Lower capacity, lower acceleration, more prone to creep since if in the future a politician wanted to save money on an extension, all he would have to do is take a cheap option to run it in the median of the roadway and destroy the reliability of the service (See LA for how this can seriously hurt a line), and finally the conversion would cost more money for no real benefit. With the subway option, even if its not perfect, at least you can point out where the subway improves on the original RT, stuff like running in a better corridor, removing a linear transfer, and removing redundant stations, and I guess you can throw in better reliability in Toronto's cold climate. The LRT doesn't solve any of these issues, with maybe the sole exception of winter reliability, but even then cities like Moscow show that the only thing you need to make systems more winter resistant is just to cover it up with a snow shelter, and installing that alongside an SRT refurbishment would still cost less than the LRT plan.
IFF what you're saying is true then maybe there is an argument for LRT? But as I wrote above, even in the most ideal conditions for LRT where the price does edge in its favour I think an SRT refurbishment would still offer a better value, especially if instead of building the Eglinton Crosstown as an LRT, it was an extension of the SRT (This would've been the greatest of all plans we had in this city as it would've provided a more reliable service on Eglinton and the issue of the linear transfer is less present), but I think SSE is a good 2nd option.
I don't get this reasoning, people vote largely by name recognition or party affiliation, the LRT supporters didn't all move to the few ridings where candidates were promising LRT.
But then the candidates promising LRT should not have been elected at all, if support is that widespread. Those promising subways were just going along with the populist rhetoric stirred up by Ford any tryiing to out do each other with campaign promises, and many of them had previously been fine with LRT.
That's not a fact, some surveys had showed otherwise, and I live in Scarborough, I hear many comments about how ridiculous this all is. And big decisions like this should take more into consideration than people thinking subways are awesome.
