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Transit options for Scarborough remain as contentious as ev— no, please don’t leave! This is still very important and interesting, really. Chris Selley, Matt Gurney andNOW‘s Jonathan Goldsbie discuss whether it’s worth plowing ahead with a subway project that’s increasingly recognized as a mistake.

Goldsbie: This week, city council will once again consider the wisdom of proceeding with a three-stop extension to the Bloor-Danforth line. But that consideration won’t take the form of a debate, so much as a reckoning — thanks to a series of questions formally submitted to the city manager by Councillor Josh Matlow, our elected officials may finally come to terms with the consequences of choosing a so-called “Scarborough subway” over a vastly cheaper light rail line that would serve more people. We might at last learn: how much the city has to pay in LRT cancellation costs (believed to be in the $75 to 85 million range); how much the City will have to pay in ongoing capital maintenance and operating costs for the subway extension; whether SmartTrack would cut into the extension’s already-quite-low projected ridership; whether those already-quite-low projected ridership numbers were artificially inflated from even lower figures; and how many new trains would the TTC actually have to buy and how frequently would they run. You’d hope that most, if not all, of these things would have been transparently sorted out beforehand. But of course honesty and forthrightness weren’t exactly hallmarks of the Rob Ford era. Should the city abandon what appears to have been a poorly considered folly? Or are we so desperate for any semblance of progress that we should just cut our losses and get on with building the damn thing?