Imagine that today you could take a bus in East York or Riverdale, go to the Donlands subway station, and then get a subway train directly to Union Station.
Or how about getting out to Pearson Airport via a subway going west along Eglinton avenue.Likewise being able to get to the Scarborough Town Centre by taking the subway that goes along Sheppard Avenue, which would have been seven years old this year. All that could have been in place if TTC plan written in the early 1980s called, Network 2011 had been acted upon.The irony is the plan that could have been was stopped by the very people who had commissioned it - politicians. Mayor Rob Ford's unexpected cancelation of the Transit City plan is simply another chapter in that same process. A process that began at the beginning of the 20th Century when a proposal to build the Queen Street subway line was defeated in a plebiscite in 1912.That plebiscite was not overturned until 1946, when the public finally accepted the idea, but even then the subway didn't open until 1954. This was due to the simple reason that it took years of political bickering over nickels and dimes, subway routes and deciding which level of government would pay before shovels went into the ground.However, by 1980 it was clear - to the TTC and the province - that the age of subways was overdue. And they were too expensive to build and maintain. By then it had been found that the most cost-effective method of moving large numbers of people was by streetcar on a dedicated right of way, which today has become Light Rail Transport, or LRT.This particularly made sense in mid to low density areas of the city, such as the suburbs, and this has been proven true in successful LRT projects around the world. Politicians, on the other hand, want big megaprojects that will impress the voting public at election time. However, once elected to office they do not want to financially support such projects. When the NDP were in power under then Premier Bob Rae, the Network 2011 plan actually began and work had started on the Eglinton subway line. But when the Progressive Conservatives under Premier Mike Harris were elected in 1995, Harris ordered work on the subway stopped and what had been completed to be filled in. Instead, work was started on a subway under Sheppard Avenue heading east from Yonge Street. It was eventually supposed to head all the way east to the Scarborough Town Centre which would then have seen the Scarborough RT light rail line from Kennedy replaced with subway track. So all Mayor Ford is promoting today is the continuation of the inefficient and expensive plan summarily implemented 17 years ago. The Transit City plan incorporates a cost effective solution proven to move more people and improve the efficiency of existing subway lines with the use of larger subway cars.As it stands now, we will probably have to wait until 2020 before this current political debacle is resolved, if that's even possible given our current political climate.