Presumably Tridel has not sold all the condo units for the possible 16 buildings at Metrogate. While a subway would make the development more likely to happen, I'd rather it not be built with taxpayers money at 4x the price when the demand on Sheppard only warrants an LRT line. I generally don't agree with corporate welfare.
Tridel is only building 6. Again, how is it corporate welfare to build a subway station at a GO interchange a decade after the condos are built? Because in 20 years they might possibly buy more land and build more condos there?
Say hellp to your neighbour Bob. I've said elsewhere that Raymond Cho is my councilor. I too live in Scarborough and I want LRT precisely because its the right technology for mid-density lines like Sheppard, which by the way I told the mayor when he called me shortly after his election. He always forgets me when he says Scarborough wants subways. DRL/King subway requires underground transit cause there is no room on the surface. I suspect you know this but would like to continue perpetuating the myth that the question is about spoiled downtown residents.
Your reading comprehension sucks. Where did I say King doesn't need a subway? It needs a subway sooner than Sheppard needs to be extended. I said it's dumb to single out Sheppard as corporate welfare when the exact same thing (an attempt to co-locate transit and development) would occur with the DRL/King, and when the Sheppard LRT's explicit goal is to execute a housing redevelopment agenda in Malvern (in defiance of current planning and real estate market conditions, of course, so good luck with
that). Some people think transit should be planned around efficiently moving masses of people and some others think it should be planned around reinvesting in racialized and underprivileged communities. Too bad the latter group was in control when Santa McGuintyclaus came to town.
You think every dollar spent on Sheppard would be stolen from you and stolen from the DRL. Well, that's not how funding works. It's not like the province has a DRL piggy bank and a Sheppard piggy bank that it must choose between while slowly dropping toonies into. If we spend zero dollars on extending the Sheppard subway, that coincidentally frees up zero dollars for a DRL.
We were given a blank cheque in 2007 and the whole thing was funneled to Eglinton. The DRL and Sheppard were both skipped.
Really? Didn't you just say Metrogate's advertising promised a subway?
It advertised future subway/GO access, yes, because that's what the city's plan was. The city created the Agincourt secondary plan and the city approved the Metrogate complex and its rezoning. Uh, yeah, shame on Tridel for suggesting the city follow through with its plans to run transit through actual development zones.
Really really? Let me see if I understand this? You are OK with spending $4 billion on a Sheppard subway, but not ok with $1 billion for a dedicated LRT line. You'd rather have buses than an LRT line. Please explain, given that the subway will transport no more people than the LRT line given they just don't live in Northeast Toronto.
That ~$4B extends Sheppard both ways, remember, and there's ways to lower that pricetag somewhat. All the people on Sheppard benefit from a longer subway, even the few riders coming in from Morningside or Meadowvale. But no one south of Sheppard benefits from the LRT...no one at STC or Centennial or anywhere else. We can't afford to spend over a billion dollars to end up with service equivalent to what we can get by improving the existing buses for 1/10th that amount.
And while Sheppard needs to be extended, no, it is not the highest priority project. It should have already been built by now, but it wasn't and it can wait.
I think Centennial College, the University of Toronto @ Scarborough, STC, the Zoo as well as the medium density all along Sheppard are decent trip generators. It's hard for developers to remember I know but building transit isn't only about selling condos at a higher price. It's also about moving the population.
Surely you know that other than the Zoo (which sees very little traffic from transit, and not just because it's deserted half the year), those places are not on Sheppard. But they *would* all benefit from a longer Sheppard subway via STC, especially if Sheppard continued east of STC. STC is a textbook perfect transit hub.
The population isn't along the eastern half of Sheppard so it won't move many people. The only spot with any concentration of people is at Markham/Progress and any line from STC-Malvern would already serve this. Take that away and you're left with next to nothing on Sheppard east of Agincourt except light industry, backyards, and a few strip malls. Meanwhile, if you were to take a transit line south-east once you hit Agincourt, you can bring it to clusters of apartments/condos, the biggest trip generator in the eastern half of the GTA (the mall), tens of thousands of jobs, a hospital, and two growing college campuses, not to mention tons of available land for development and the ability to connect with more and busier transit routes. Draw a slightly diagonal line from North York Centre to UTSC...
that's where the people are that you need to move.
