Rainforest
Senior Member
What limited pool of funds? Are you seriously falling for that pitch/ploy? Where there's political will to do it, it can be done. We just need politicians of action and not weaklings.
Here you are right, at least in part. Popular transit projects tend to attract funding easier than projects born by transit experts, if the latter are not appealing to the public.
The need for a crosstown grade-separated mass transit line north of the 401 simply will not go away no matter how much we may wish it to be the case. Back in the old days, when one part of the city got subway expansion it was in tandem for expansion in another part (University Line and Keele-Woodbine Bloor-Danforth Line built concurrently; Keele-Islington and Woodbine-Warden; Kipling and Kennedy; Yonge North and the Spadina Line). What is wrong with today's set of politicians and city planners that they can't seem to come up with a way to please the majority of constituents and leave no one out? DRL can and should be built at the same time as the Danforth expansion and the Sheppard expansion.
There is no way for the DRL, Danforth expansion, and Sheppard to be built at the same time; for the simple reason that Danforth expansion has committed funding and is under detailed design, while the two others are stuck in limbo.
Furthermore, DRL (Long) alone can't be built all at the same time, due to its huge costs. It will be built up to Danforth or to Eglinton at first, with the Eglinton-Sheppard leg following a few years later at best.
Like I inferred in my original post, the Sheppard expansion would have happened 15 years ago had David Miller not won the 2003 election. Built back then, we would not be talking about the highly inflated $500 per kilometre figures of today. But that's not an excuse to indefinitely do nothing to resolve the issue. Mixing the tunnel with an at-grade section with stops every 500 metres is kind of foolhardy a "solution" to me. It just seems like we're contorting ourselves into knots to justify at-grade road median LRT in this corridor, when everywhere a subway stop would occur already has an abundance of high rises and transit oriented developments nearby - and ergo is much more suited to grade separated mass transit.
Miller tried to push the Sheppard subway, shortly after he got elected. He even positioned it ahead of TYSSE. Since he didn't succeed, I doubt any other mayor would succeed.