Warning transportation infrastructure is at least a decade behind where it should be, York Region small business leaders are calling on the provincial government to extend the Yonge Street subway to Richmond Hill.

The leaders of four of the region’s chambers of commerce and boards of trade wrote a letter Jan. 16 to Vaughan MPP Steven Del Duca, who until the afternoon of Jan. 17 was the province’s transportation minister before a cabinet shuffle put him in the post of minister of economic development.

Extending the subway to Richmond Hill would eliminate the need for 2,500 daily bus trips along Yonge Street from Hwy. 7 to Finch subway station and greatly reduce carbon emissions, said the letter signed by Richmond Hill Board of Trade executive director Karen Mortfield, Markham Board of Trade president Richard Cunningham, Vaughan Chamber of Commerce president Brian Shifman and Newmarket Chamber of Commerce president Debra Scott.

“As a province, we are significantly behind on our transportation infrastructure and it’s extremely critical that we close the increasing transportation gap in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area,” their letter said.

“The past 20 years have seen the population size rapidly increase throughout the GTHA but unfortunately, infrastructure investments have not kept pace with this growth.”

The chambers and boards of trade point out the Ontario Chamber Network, representing 135 communities and 60,000 businesses across Ontario, has put forward a submission in advance of the provincial government’s spring budget calling on Queen’s Park to provide dedicated revenue toward priority transit projects, including the Yonge subway extension and Toronto’s Yonge relief subway line.

The province has already invested $55 million into preliminary engineering and design work on extending the subway to Richmond Hill, “an investment that should be maximized,” the letter said.

The federal government has also contributed $36 million.

The letter applauds the provincial government for investments it has made recently in public transit, including the extension of the subway to Vaughan and improvements to GO Transit and YRT/Viva.