The Scarborough Town Centre opened to the public on May 2, 1973. The Borough of Scarborough hoped that the shopping mall and the civic buildings beside it would become the core of the borough's new downtown. Although Scarborough was eager to link their downtown to rapid transit, Metro Council had voted only to extend the eastern terminus of the BLOOR-DANFORTH subway from Warden Station to near the Kennedy/Eglinton intersection, miles from the Town Centre site. The Scarborough rapid transit line proposal was revised to close the gap, again using streetcars on private right-of-way. With Scarborough developing the lands on and around the old Canadian Northern Railway line into residential housing, the Metropolitan Toronto Transit Plan review, under advice from advocates and experts like Bob Wightman and Steve Munro, recommended that streetcars operate out of Kennedy Station and turn north, following Canadian National's Uxbridge Subdivision to Ellesmere Road, and then operating east either at grade along the middle of Ellesmere or along an elevated guideway, to the town centre.
At the time, TTC and Metro planners declared that the subway extensions to Kennedy and Kipling stations would be the last to be built for some time, citing the rising costs of subway construction (the 1.6-mile, single-station extension from Warden to Kennedy was planned to cost at least $41 million in late 1970s dollars) and the fact that the densest areas which were economical for subways to serve were now largely served by subways.
The Scarborough LRT line, as proposed in 1975, was seen as just the first phase and a trunk of a new rapid transit tree that would branch out into northeastern Scarborough, providing inexpensive transit to newly developing neighbourhoods, while giving them a fast single-seat ride to the subway. The stations did not have to be as large as subway stations, and small stations were planned for the line halfway between Lawrence and Eglinton and over Brimley Road. There were serious plans to extend the Scarborough LRT line as far as the intersection of Finch and Morningside. There were long-term proposals to take the line to the Toronto Zoo, and perhaps even into Pickering. The first phase of the 13.2-kilometre line, from Kennedy to Scarborough Centre, would cost just $85 million -- roughly 40% of the cost of a full-fledged subway at the time. The line would make use of the planned new CLRV streetcars - of the 196 contracted to be built, 22 were to be used on the Scarborough Line, operating in trains of up to three cars.
Meanwhile, the provincial plan to build a maglev demonstration line at the Canadian National Exhibition ran into trouble. There were issues over the fact that Krauss-Maffei's "Transrapid" system had been conceived as an inter-city high-speed express train and was impractical for inner-city service featuring closely-spaced stations. The West German government also decided to consolidate its options for maglev technology to other companies and cut back its support for Krauss-Maffei's initiative. This forced Krauss-Maffei to back out of its deal with the Ontario government. Work on the GO-URBAN test line was abandoned, having felled some trees and built foundations for a few support columns that would never rise.
With the GO-URBAN ICTS project dead, the Davis government shifted tactics. In June 1975, it rebranded the Ontario Transportation Development Corporation into the Urban Transportation Development Corporation (UTDC) to make it less insular. It took on the task of designing and building the next generation of Toronto's streetcars - the CLRVs - to keep the crown corporation active and producing while it continued to work on the Intermediate Capacity gap issue. UTDC soon announced it had established a consortium to develop the maglev technology. Working with SPAR Aerospace, Standard Elektrik Lorenz, Dofasco, Alcan and Canadair, it created a design that used linear induction technology to pull computer-controlled railcars operating with steel wheels on steel rail. Work began on a prototype vehicle that was soon moving on a test track at UTDC's Millhaven plant.
