Thursday, April 15, 2010

1986 - A Sheppard subway for Scarborough? - still waiting


1 comment:

  1. Wed. Feb. 12, 1986 THE NEWS/POST Page 3
    Sheppard Subway Highest Priority
    by Gay Abbate

    A subway along Shep-pard Ave. linking Scar-borough and North York City Centres should be the number one public transit priority for Metropolitan Toronto says a report prepared by Scarborough's transportation and plann-ing staff.

    The report. which will be presented next Monday evening to a joint meeting of the city's planning and works and transportation committees, was prepared as a Scarborough response to Network 2011, the master public transit plan prepared by the TTC and Metro planners last year. Network 2011 (http://transit.toronto.on.ca/subway/5111.shtml) was cir-culated to all area municipalities for com-ment before Metro Council makes its decision.

    Network 2011 proposes a 25 year, $2.7 million rapid transit strategy with the Sheppard subway from Yonge to Victoria Park as first priority and its even-tual extension to Scar-borough not scheduled until the year 2004 at the earliest.

    In between the two are the construction of the downtown relief line to parallel the Yonge subway line and an Eglinton busway to connect the Mississauga City Centre with the Spadina subway.

    The final phase would be the upgrading of the Eglin-ton busway to a subway or light rail.

    According to the Scar-borough report. the Shep-pard subway linking the ex-tended Spadina subway with the Scarborough City Centre should be built as soon as possible because it would provide rapid transit to thousands of Metro residents not presently be-ing served by rapid transit.

    There are about 140.000 people in northwest Scar-borough alone. This line would also feed into and in-crease ridership on the Spadina line.

    The Scarborough staff has concluded that the downtown rapid transit line
    designed to provide relief for the congested Yonge subway is not needed, at least not prior to the year 2011.

    One of the reasons for the relief line is the increased travel growth into the Toronto downtown core from outside the Metro area. However, according to the Scarborough report. any additional travel growth from outside Metro can be accommodated by GO Transit.

    Studies show that in the last five years only 27% of all new office development within Metro has located in downtown Toronto. This shift would indicate that the majority of new jobs are locating in the suburbs thus supporting the need for more rapid transit lines in the suburbs rather than in Toronto.

    The report also stresses the need for the extension of rapid transit into the Malvern area although it does not rate it as a high priority.

    Metro staff has stated that there will never be suf-ficient population in Scar-borough's north-east to warrant spending the estimated $207 million re-quired to extend the RT to Malvern.

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