This image speaks for itself. The fact that a subway station is going to be wedged in between a freeway and a cemetery, while surrounded by a completely undeveloped plot of land is laughable. There are far more areas in Toronto that badly need transit infrastructure before this subway extension.
Putting aside that Toronto has a whole subway line that runs in the middle of a highway, completely cut off from potential development, my alternate take is that the Bridge station is very smart of use of land that is otherwise sterilized by the two highways. They can make use of it for crucial transit infrastructure without digging a $500M station underground, and probably even squeeze a building or two on top.
The fact that the Langstaff land is "completely undeveloped" is precisely what makes it so valuable. If you didn't build the subway there, you'd get a bunch of townhomes (or worse, the continued operation of a stone yard and a bunch of auto shops) and you know what? Those people would drive to Finch and take the subway downtown and you'd have solved precisely 0 problems the region is facing related to intensification, traffic, housing or the capacity issues on Line 1. Some of the biggest developers in the GTA spent years assembling those teeny, tiny industrial parcels to make it into the "completely undeveloped" patch (I saw Steve Munro call it a "blasted heath") that is sitting there today, waiting to take advantage of every ounce of intensification the subway allows for. They don't make that kind of effort for useless sites, wedged between a freeway and a cemetery.
So, you can think there are other areas that need transit more - that's a debate with a lot of factors involved - but the idea that this site having a subway is "laughable," is just plain wrong. As I've said previously, probably going back a decade now (but it apparently still needs saying) - this view is just a fundamental misunderstanding of Provincial policy and how it manifests itself in local planning.
So the Metrolinx plan is to put the subway under the 407 where there can be no development. I'm suggesting it makes more sense to put it in the middle of this:
The initial plan, of course, was to have the Langstaff station way over at Yonge. So, moving it to the rail corridor is clearly preferable if your goal is to have it in the centre of the development. I suspect there are engineering reasons they had to push it as far north as the 407 rather than smack in the middle of Langstaff Gateway. For one thing, it has to pop above ground north of the cemetery and there's not a lot of north-south area to cover there. Plus, sticking it under the bridges makes it connect well to the 407 Transitway (one day, hopefully) and I wouldn't be so sure there can be no development. They can probably get parking structures, maybe with development on top, in there; on land that would otherwise be totally useless.
Is it perfect? No. But neither was the previous alignment. As I said before, I like that it shows they're thinking creatively, at least. We'll see if it works.
