What frustrates me is that "the people [in the outer 416] have spoken!" Street-grade LRT is not good enough. It's subways (in this case, two for Scarborough) or nothing. Which IMO is rubbish. What about Etobicoke?
1) What about Etobicoke?
2) Voters in Scarborough are rightfully frustrated because every major subway project seems to stop dead at the Scarborough border. I was in elementary and high school when there was talk of bringing the Bloor-Danforth to STC and getting rid of the SRT, because thousands of residents detest that transfer. At the time of course, people dismissed it and moved on to the Sheppard subway, which in due course ended...right before it touched Scarborough. Naturally, residents there are frustrated.
Most didn't support LRT not because they love cars (as is often asserted here...because of crackpots like Save our Sheppard), it's because most didn't think LRT was fast enough. And there was a fear that once the LRTs were built Scarborough would be stuck with slow transit for a generation.
The reason they support subways is because subways are associated with speed. I'd argue that this is exactly why GO and TTC need to integrated with places like Scarborough reconfiguring transit to focus bus services on GO stations which would bring Scarborough commuters to the core quickly. But in the absence of something like this, don't expect commuters who face 1.5-2 hr commutes to settle for billion dollar LRTs that knock off a mere 10 mins.
New York only has one subway line solely outside of Manhattan; the 'G'. Even then, that line runs close to Manhattan...it's the equivalent of St Clair. If you want to take a subway from the Bronx to Queens, or Staten Island to Brooklyn, or Brooklyn to the Bronx; you have to go through Manhattan. Otherwise, it's a bus trip.
We shouldn't build subways that cater to suburb-to-suburb commuting, because the demand doesn't exist for that. That's why Sheppard will always be a feeder line.
At least New York has subways that go into the boroughs. Toronto barely has that. Nobody would be arguing for Sheppard if the North-South line on Yonge was instead a diagonal line cutting across northeastern Toronto. As it stands, Yonge is far for all of Scarborough. Hence you need some kind of service to bring people to it.
A DRL along Don Mills would probably lessen demand for a Sheppard East extension. But then again, extending any DRL north would probably happen after Sheppard was extended.
As for the general comparison to New York and other cities, you can't make them 1 to 1. The contexts are very different and those have to be taken into account.
We don't have the population or density of New York. We never will. Our citie is not compose of island boroughs. We will never be Paris or London either. Our cities weren't built around highly dense ancient cores. And unlike Europe where their largest cities are also usually their capitals and sole world-class city, Toronto increasingly has to compete with Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal for attention in a country the size of a continent.
I'd say our best bet now is making GO a true suburban rail service, a la Paris RER or German S-bahns. Integrate the TTC and start directing buses to the GO stations. Do that and it'll become very easy to restrict subway development to the core. But otherwise, until something is done to drastically improve travel times for outer 416 commuters, expect them to cast ballots for politicians promising to cut their travel times.
