I grew up in Scarborough, so I love rapid transit and hate the bus.
Seriously. The bus is the devil.
Rapid transit - be it subway, elevated train or dedicated lane streetcar – gets you there fast. The bus… doesn't. It pokes and waits and fights gridlock just like a big car.
As a result of today's major announcement by the McGuinty government, a lot of people living in Scarborough (and Thornhill, North York and Etobicoke) just got off the bus (or out of their cars) and into rapid transit.
The combination of an extended and revamped Scarborough RT and the new Eglinton RT, both going as far as Malvern, is a major lever for ending the sprawl nightmare and getting some real energy and density at Scarborough Town Centre.
Which brings me to the next victory for public transit: the Eglinton subway killed by Mike Harris just got restarted. (I wonder if the station Bob Rae built under Eglinton West, and Mike Harris demolished and filled back in, will be excavated out again? There is some poetry to that.)
The dedicated lane streetcar will actually travel underground like a subway for 13 kilometers between Keele and Leslie. This is a great tool to create density at Yonge and Eglinton, building a second mid-town "downtown," with all the potential for innovation and dynamism that brings.
It relieves a lot of pressure off the Bloor-Danforth line, which will speed up that line during rush hour.
Extending the Western terminus to Pearson finally brings the airport onto the rapid transit grid (and might make the Blue-22 direct rail option from downtown unnecessary.)
In addition, there will be a new LRT along Finch Avenue, connecting Humber College to the RT grid. Like the York University subway extension, this connects a learning environment in the suburbs to the downtown research hubs, creating a better climate for innovation. It also will increase demand for Humber as students see they can get their quickly and cheaply, and gives the LRT a large built-in ridership to its Western terminus.
What I don't understand about today's announcement is that it does not feature the Don Mills RT.
My cursory understanding of transit engineering in Toronto is that the big problem is the overcapacity of the Yonge Street subway. The TTC can't build anything that feeds more passengers onto the Yonge line because it is already running full-tilt, with fully packed trains every two minutes in the morning rush. The first priority has to be relieving the Yonge line with another North-South line to take up some of the pressure.
Another line to the West won't do it, because there is already a subway to the West. The Don Mills RT does the job best by giving people east of Yonge a better, faster option to get down to the Bloor-Danforth line (or the new Eglington line, come to think of it.)
Don Mills is also relatively trouble free from a construction perspective. Don Mills Road is wide enough to accommodate a dedicated lane RT without trouble (and without the outcry of streets like St. Clair or Eglinton), although the last two kilometres along Pape would require a tunnel to be constructed.
With a VIVA expansion York region and the new Eglinton and Finch lines, it remains to be seen if the Yonge line will not buckle under the strain of these new projects without relief.
