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Mayor John Tory won a critical vote on the Scarborough subway at city council on Wednesday with a simple and effective argument: The time for talking is over.

After decades in which Toronto built almost no new mass transit, and years of quarrelling over where new transit lines would go, "we cannot accept further delay," he said.

The "continuous political jousting" over the shape of transit in Toronto has left commuters frustrated and impatient. They say: Enough with the constant back and forth – subway, light rail, subway again. Just build something.

If Toronto fails, Mr. Tory told reporters hours before the vote, "this city is going to strangle itself on its growth."

That is hard to dispute. Toronto is booming, pulling in hundreds of thousands of newcomers from around the globe. Its transportation network has failed to keep up. While other big cities from Madrid to Shanghai have built sprawling modern transit systems, Toronto, North America's fourth-largest city, has lagged behind. You can see the result every rush hour on its highways, buses and subway trains.

Relief is coming, with billions in new investment promised by the federal and provincial governments, but the past few years of futile wrangling over what sort of transit to build and where to build it have slowed progress. First, there was Transit City, an ambitious plan to build a network of light-rail lines. Then came mayor Rob Ford's plans to build "subways, subways, subways." Then it was back to light rail again. Then back to a subway extension in the eastern suburb of Scarborough.

Yet another switch, Mr. Tory argued, would be a huge setback for the city's transit hopes. As Toronto Transit Commission chair Josh Colle put it, "We cannot keep picking the scab and going back and going back and going back."

City council has already voted on this issue more than once. In 2013, councillors decided to scrap a plan to replace the aging Scarborough rapid-transit line with a light-rail line along the same route. In its place, it approved an extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line. The cost of that extension has grown to more than $3-billion and planners have changed the concept from a three-stop line to a one-stop express line.

Mr. Tory's critics argued that council should reverse himself and go back to light rail.

He called that folly. The deal was done, he said. He ran for mayor in 2014 on a promise to stick with the Scarborough subway plan. His opponent on the left, Olivia Chow, wanted to go back to light rail. Mr. Tory won. The provincial government backs the subway. Ottawa signed on too.

Was city council really going to overturn an agreement among all three levels of government and go back to light rail? Was Mr. Tory going to call up his partners in senior governments and say, "Oops, we did it again: We changed our minds?" If he did, he told council on Wednesday evening, "I think they'd say, 'You must kidding.'"

Going back on the subway plan would have made council seem, once again, wildly dysfunctional. Toronto's transit plans would have been thrown, once again, into disarray.

Going back to light rail would mean more quarrelling, more confusion, more delay. Delay costs money. The light-rail plan has grown in cost too, as these things will, so the potential savings from reversing course are already less than critics of the subway claimed.

Each of the plans has its merits. A light-rail line would have had more stops. The subway would carry commuters at greater speed, without the nuisance of transferring. Light rail is still cheaper, despite its own growing cost. The subway is a more robust system that would last longer.

These are difficult choices and complicated issues, Mr. Tory says. Black-and-white answers, "they don't exist." His point is that the issues has already been well chewed over, in elections contested in part on the transit issue and in repeated debates at council. At some point, it has to end. At some point, the city has to decide. At some point, it has to stop talking about what and where and move on to how – to be precise, how to pay for all these brilliant new transit lines.

With Wednesday's decisive vote to proceed with the Scarborough subway, the city may finally have reached that point. Cut through all the sniping, and good things are happening for Toronto transit. Regional express rail is coming. The huge Eglinton Crosstown light-rail project is moving ahead. Plans for a downtown relief subway line are beginning to take shape. All three levels of government are aligned on the need to make progress on transit.

Mr. Tory is right. It's time to stop the talking and get on with the building.

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