http://www.insidetoronto.com/mobile...-crosstown-cash-to-build-sheppard-subway-loop
If Toronto Council and the province agree to change the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT to run above-ground through Scarborough, there will be $1.5 billion in transit infrastructure money that could potentially be spent somewhere else.
Under the plan put forward by TTC chair Karen Stintz, that money would go to help extend the Sheppard subway to the east, possibly as far as Victoria Park Avenue.
But if York Centre Councillor James Pasternak has his way, the money would go to build a subway along another part of Sheppard: west of Yonge, between the Yonge Sheppard station and Downsview station.
"I ran on a campaign to fix that link and to close it in, and it's my view and certainly the view of many that that's the vital missing link in our small subway system," said Pasternak in an interview Thursday. "It would allow our commuters to go without transfer all the way from Vaughan and loop down to Scarborough."
Pasternak's idea to link up Downsview to Yonge would create a loop that in the Yonge-University line north of Bloor. But that logic will have to go against a long list of other political concerns.
First, the line would cost about $2 billion, which is more money than would actually be freed up by abandoning plans to bury the Crosstown line in Scarborough. And it would have to jump queue ahead of the plan to build a bit of the Sheppard east line that proponents are regarding as a face-saving project to bring Mayor Rob Ford on side.
And there are other infrastructure projects that would also be vying for that $1.5 billion - notably, the mothballed Finch LRT plan, which councillors like Giorgio Mammoliti, Anthony Perruzza and Maria Augimeri would promote.
Pasternak conceded he faces an uphill battle for his plan. He has hopes that funding might come from Ottawa to help finish his project, but when he visited Environment Minister Peter Kent at his corn roast last summer, he was told that if any more subway funding was coming from Ottawa, it would more likely be spent to extend the subway north along Yonge into Kent's Thornhill riding.
"It was a fruitful discussion in his backyard," said Pasternak. "We just have to keep working on it."