Commuters from the 905 should have an easy ride into downtown Toronto, says Premier-designate Doug Ford whose long-term plan is for subways to the suburbs.

Speaking in Pickering Thursday morning, Ford said he’d like to extend the subway from Toronto’s city core to Pickering and Markham.

“We love subways, rapid underground transit — unlike the LRT that they rip up two lanes of road traffic and they clunk along the street, antiquated system,” said Ford, referring to above-ground light rail transit trains.

“We’re going to focus on being the most modern transit system in the world. We’re going to build rapid underground transit that’s going to extend not only in Toronto ...(but) so folks in Pickering will eventually be able to hop on a subway and get downtown Toronto.

“People of Markham and the outlying areas, over time, will be on a subway to make sure that we get traffic moving.”

The incoming premier did not provide any further details. However, PC spokesperson Simon Jefferies said “Doug Ford wants to build a state of the art transit system across the GTA, which includes looking at all options for extending transit lines to regions outside of Toronto.”

Pickering is already linked to downtown Toronto by GO Transit, and the number of passengers using the service falls far below levels that would normally justify a subway.

The threshold for a subway is 10,000 people per hour; the GO station in Pickering sees 4,300 users per weekday, and the Markham station 875.

However, GO’s Lakeshore East line as a whole has a weekly average of almost 50,000 riders, and the Stouffville line which runs through Markham has a weekly average of 17,669 riders.

A subway out to Pickering would be costly; according to the TTC, the cost of extending into York Region, its most recent expansion, was roughly $380 million per kilometre.

Downtown Pickering is about 17 kilometres from the Scarborough Town Centre, where a one-stop subway extension from Kennedy Station is planned.

New Democrat Gilles Bisson said Ford needs to “take transit seriously” and come up with a realistic plan.

“Ontarians deserve affordable, reliable and dignified public transit,” said Bisson, who was re-elected in the Timmins area. “Mr. Ford’s confusing proclamation (Thursday) that he will build subways everywhere in Ontario is not a real plan to invest in the services that everyday families need, and it undermines real transit plans and priorities.”

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However, local politicians lauded the move for their booming communities.

Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti tweeted that “gridlock in the GTA leads to lost productivity and costs billions. Pleased to hear Premier-designate (Doug Ford) is committed to building a subway system to Markham,” later noting that “York Region is Canada’s fastest growing large municipality, home to nearly 1.2 million people.”

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