Karen Stintz, who was named head of the TTC by Ford, says putting the suburban east and west stretches of the line in a tunnel is a waste of money because there is relatively little road traffic along those portions.
“It makes more sense not to bury it and use the money to build (the) Sheppard (subway),” said Stintz.
The mayor is on the record as being opposed to placing new LRT lines on Toronto’s roadways.
TTC officials have already said that meeting the Metrolinx completion target of 2020 will be extremely difficult. Provincial officials have indicated that the public has no interest in re-making the existing plans and risking further delay to transit improvements in Toronto.
But if the TTC returned to the original environmental studies for surface LRT – part of former mayor David Miller's Transit City plan – there would be no delay, Stintz told the Star.
She said as far as she knows, new environmental assessments for burying the east and west ends haven’t even been started. The line is planned to run from about Black Creek Dr. to Kennedy station.
Declaring her opposition to a fully underground LRT puts Stintz at odds with both Ford and Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government.
They negotiated the deal to bury the Eglinton LRT when Ford declared that Transit City – a plan to put LRT on Finch and Sheppard, as well as Eglinton – was dead.
In exchange for the province picking up billions in additional costs to bury the length of Eglinton, Ford agreed the city would take on the estimated $4.7 billion cost of extending the Sheppard subway east from Don Mills to Kennedy and then west from Yonge St. to Downsview station.
The mayor appointed Gordon Chong to write a report explaining how the venture could be privately financed. That report has yet to be released to the public but early indications were that Chong couldn’t find nearly enough private funding sources to cover the cost of Sheppard.
Some transportation experts, including respected consultant Ed Levy, believe that it makes more sense to build Eglinton as a subway because the demand for the service will quickly outstrip the capacity of light rail. The relatively minor cost difference of extending the platforms and buying subway trains would be worth the longer term benefits, he said.
Meantime, Metrolinx and the TTC have been at odds over who will build and operate the Eglinton LRT. Metrolinx has been working with Infrastructure Ontario on a public-private partnership that would see the design, construction and possibly even the operation contracted out in much the same way Vancouver’s Canada Line has been built.
TTC officials have said they have no interest in running an LRT that is built under another agency’s management.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Tess Kalinowski
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