Fingers crossed this subway will run surface and head to Malvern. Cancel the Lawrence & Ellesmere ST stops & the entirety of Scarborough will have a great future. Otherwise we've just picked winners and losers again & large areas of Scarborough will lose once again be victim to short sighted stubborn Political planning.
I get what you are saying, but I have a lot of difficulty with building parallel transit paths in the same general area. It will appease the people who feel a grievance today, but in a few years there will be regrets.
Your suggestion creates two redundancies:
- SmartTrack plus a surface subway in the current SRT corridor
- a subway running east-west from SRT to Malvern plus (eventually) transit on Sheppard running east-west just a little to the north
A better layout would be
- Build the Crosstown East LRT, going all the way up to Malvern
- Change the "express" version of the Line 2 extension back to its original version , with the Lawrence stop, extending all the way up to Sheppard
- Build Sheppard transit all the way out to connect with the Crosstown East line on its way to Malvern
- Build SmartTrack in the recommended Option C format
More expensive? Yes. Scarberians won't object to that! But it's better spent money as there are fewer redundancies and it brings transit closer to most parts of Scarboro. It will all get built eventually anyways, so our kids will thank us (while they pay the bill).
- Paul