Scarborough subway could be 10 years down the road

It would take 10 years to build the truncated Scarborough subway Transportation Minister Glen Murray envisions — and five years before shovels even go in the ground, says a Metrolinx consultants’ report obtained by the Toronto Star.

More than 40,000 daily Scarborough RT riders would spend at least three of those years relegated to buses while the $1.4 billion Danforth line extension is built to the Scarborough Town Centre.

Subway service would also be suspended between Warden and Kennedy for track work during a shorter, unspecified period, according to the report.

But Murray said he is optimistic the project can be delivered much sooner.

He also suggested that stopping the subway at the Scarborough City Centre rather than continuing it to Sheppard Ave., as city council had approved, makes more sense.

As far as TTC chair Karen Stintz is concerned, ending the line south of Sheppard is a key flaw in Murray’s plan. It means the subway wouldn’t connect directly to the coming Sheppard LRT.

Murray, however, said “there’s a very strong feeling that it doesn’t make any sense to extend the subway past the Scarborough Town Centre. People are saying, ‘You should really finish this now at the Scarborough Town Centre, because bus rapid transit and LRT make better sense from that point.’”

The Sheppard LRT and the still-unfunded downtown relief subway line are higher priorities, given ridership demand and congestion, he said.

Murray expects his proposal would attract the same 31 million annual riders that was projected for the TTC’s subway scenario — the version city council conditionally approved — which would go all the way to McCowan Rd.

He downplayed the significance of the study by 4Transit JV (Declan, MMM, Hatch Mott MacDonald), saying it was one of several pieces of work used in the planning.

Metrolinx called the consultants’ report a “preliminary” look at whether a subway could negotiate the tight turns of the SRT route where it heads north out of Kennedy Station and then east into the City Centre.

TTC CEO Andy Byford has said the proposed route along the SRT pathway is “at the very limit of the design tolerance for a subway,” and requires far more engineering work.

Murray says his proposal, which would be completely funded by the province, touches on two “priority” neighbourhoods, compared with just one in the TTC’s subway alignment.

The SRT was originally to be replaced with a seven-station, 10-km LRT that would open in 2020, but council has since backed out of its agreement with Metrolinx.

Although Murray’s announcement suggested there would be only a single station between Kennedy and the Scarborough City Centre, the consultants’ report touches on all the existing SRT stations.

It suggests that stops at Centennial College and Sheppard Ave. East would be viable. But Midland and Ellesmere have low ridership and few transit connections.

Murray has said that Centennial students, who mostly travel from the east, would be better served by Durham Region’s Pulse bus rapid transit.

The most complex part of aligning the subway with the SRT is rebuilding Kennedy Station, which would need to be repositioned to provide a more gradual turn and accommodate the terminus for the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT.

The consultants put Kennedy Station-related costs at about $600 million.

About $400 million of the Kennedy Station cost would be covered under the shared Eglinton Crosstown budget, said Murray, who added that he hasn’t seen the report but has been briefed.

“Until you actually reconcile all these numbers, I don’t really want to be putting them out there. The one thing I do know is we can do this for $1.4 billion … and that’s with a 30 per cent contingency, so there’s quite a bit of room there to absorb any cost overruns,” he said.

The consultants put the cost of the subway running on the SRT route from Kennedy all the way to Sheppard at $2.4 billion, including contingencies.

But Murray maintains it would cost $1 billion less if it runs only to the Scarborough City Centre, though the distance from there to Sheppard is relatively short.

The focus, he said, is on the quickest way to build the subway.

The minister’s plan is the latest politically charged chapter in Toronto’s protracted Scarborough transit debate. On Wednesday, he announced that Queen’s Park would move ahead on a different subway than the TTC’s version, angering Stintz and potentially setting up another protracted transit debate at city hall.

But Councillor Joe Mihevc, a longtime LRT supporter who took political heat in July for supporting the TTC subway plan, said the provincial proposition is a good start to realizing a subway for residents in the city’s northeast who are underserved by transit.

“It brings a direct link from Southwest Etobicoke to Southeast Scarborough. That’s a pretty attractive proposition to me,” he said.

Mihevc said he would tentatively support the plan if it comes to council in October. There is still time for Ottawa to provide enough funding to build the subway north to Sheppard, he said.

“There’s other cards that have to be played. The feds have to come in, or this thing could all fall apart,” he said.