If you were intent on spending $2.9 billion to serve Scarborough and the city, what could you do?

Well, you could take $900 million to buy a fleet of 50 Russian Mi-26 troop transport helicopters, capable of carrying well over 7,500 people an hour from Scarborough Town Centre to Kennedy station in less than two minutes, or all the way to Toronto City Hall in under five minutes. And then you could use $625 million to alsobuy every single person who lives in Scarborough a pony. And then with the $1.375 billion you have left over, you could halve the Toronto Community Housing repair backlog, to ensure 5,000 units of affordable housing aren’t condemned.

Don’t the long-suffering people of Scarborough deserve helicopters, ponies, and housing?

Does that sound absurd? Well here’s the really absurd part: you could do all that for the newly announced price of building a single one-stop extension to the Bloor-Danforth subway line.

On Friday, it was revealed that now that people have studied actually tunnelling and constructing the six-kilometre Scarborough subway extension — rather than just working from the hazy crayon line drawings on which the project was approved by three levels of government and on which tax increases were imposed — the price will now be in the range of $2.9 billion, and almost one-third increase on the previous guesstimate.

This number should kill this project. Period. There is no way to justify spending that much money to serve this few riders.

As an aside: the problem with the proposed extension was never that it would only carry a projected 7,300 riders westbound at its peak hour, nor that it would only attract 4,500 new riders to the subway line. The problem was that it was going to cost an absurd $2 billion to provide that single stop serving those few riders. Adjusting for inflation, that’s approximately 25 times as much as it cost to build the extension to Kipling that currently serves a similar number of riders.

In this case, there is an alternative — one that’s already planned and designed, one that we’ve already spent $85 million or more on preparing — that would have served the same number of riders, and given them more stops. It would have been built in an existing off-road corridor, sparing the disruption of tunnelling under roads and neighbourhoods. It would have cost $1.48 billion (and the provincial government had, once upon a time, agreed in writing to foot the entire bill.)

Then a bunch of blowhard nitwits in the last city council pretended they could build a three-stop subway extension instead for just $400 million more. Now, $400 million is actually an astonishingly large amount of money to spend for the benefit of not having to change trains. But it was low enough to get everyone fired up about it, resolve was steeled, slogans were shouted, gab was baffled, and . . .

. . . And then the price went up. And up. And up again. Until the bill looked like well more than $3 billion.

So then Mayor John Tory and chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat proposed making it just a one-stop extension, suggesting that we could also build a 18-stop LRT on Eglinton East for the same money as the old three-stop plan. Fair enough. The subway portion of the bill was revised back down, to $2 billion.

And then the projected ridership numbers went down. Way down. The price started seeming really steep for the benefit. Especially compared with the abandoned LRT alternative that could easily carry the same riders.

And now, the price has gone up again — way, way up. Possibly killing the only genuinely good idea to come out of this process, the Eglinton East LRT.

And yet there is Tory, still saying he’s committed to the obviously wasteful project. There are many of the other Scarborough councillors, agreeing with him. There’s provincial arm-twister Brad Duguid, book of matches at the ready to set fire to a staggering amount of cash. Enough to house the homeless. Enough to feed the hungry. Enough to build a lot more, better, transit, for Scarborough or for the entire city. They want a tunnel to a mall in the middle of one of the most sparsely populated and least-developing residential areas of the city. An area where job growth has not materialized and shows no signs of doing so.

Some city councillors — Josh Matlow, Mike Layton and Scarborough’s Paul Ainslie among them — have said they’ll fight to revisit this plan at city council. To give our government the opportunity to step away from making a historic mistake.

It is a chance to say, “We thought this might make sense, for a while we believed it did, but detailed study has shown that there is no way to justify spending all our money and our children’s money on this one station. There are other options that will serve Scarborough’s needs as well, or even better.”

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Is it worth believing, after the news conference Friday, that this group and this mayor might do something so sensible? If they don’t, then alongside the many dollars and opportunities they will waste, they’ll demonstrate that any hope or trust we once placed in their judgment was wasted, too.