This apparently should be posted once a page in here:
Scarborough residents' anger is completely misplaced. Instead of the downtown Illuminati or whatever it should be directed towards Councillors De Baeremaeker and Cho for royally screwing them over and depriving them of a transit line that would be finished and operating by now. How they get off the hook is baffling. Too many Scarborough residents are just looking for an excuse to hate on Old Toronto.
Although I like that video because it shows how useless and slow-witted Ford was, I still think Matlow, Miller, TTC, the City, etc were all complicit in complicating the debate about the SRT. And this goes well beyond that one Council scrum the video was from. I think the S(L)RT should never have been called "LRT", and the mere fact that it was labeled as "LRT" (or IMO
mislabeled) polluted the project right from the outset.
Sure the S(L)RT was to use light rail vehicles, the very same used on other LRT lines. But it was to be 100% grade-separated, and was probably going to have driverless operation. Such a line shouldn't be called "LRT". Call it a light metro, light subway, or simply call it a subway (albeit one that happens to use streetcar-like vehicles designed for on-street use)...because that's what it is.
Another thing that's kinda screwy is that Matlow was adamantly announcing how Toronto doesn't have any LRT lines. If that's true, then why was Spadina, Harbourfront, and St Clair all called "LRT"? And the unbuilt East Bayfront streetcar (which will be almost a mirror image of 509) still to this day referred to as LRT?
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As for this proposed surface SSE... have we seen any diagrams of how this could work? Any alignments, or proposals? And rather than a large loop, has it ever been explored to create a tail track east of Kennedy along Eglinton, with a Wye setup? So E/B trains departing Kennedy would travel east a couple hundred metres, then double-back along the northern part of this Wye to surface alongside the Stouffville corridor?