How do you spell relief?

“DOWNTOWN,” perhaps?

Good transit news sounds like an oxymoron in this city, but after a few years of excruciating debate over planes, trains and automobiles, there is something the entire city can get behind: the Downtown Relief Line (DRL).

Long the subway dream of Toronto transit optimists and planners, the DRL is finally gaining momentum. After burning billions-worth of his political capital (and, soon, lots of your dollar bill capital) to make Rob and Doug Ford’s one stop Scarborough subway a reality, Mayor John Tory has been holding press conferences calling on Queen’s Park to help fund the DRL.

By long dream I mean 100 years long: if you poke around transit plan archives, you’ll find some version of the DRL going back to around 1910, usually a U shape originating downtown, with branches heading to the northeast and northwest parts of the city. It stayed alive through the decades with increased urgency too, though politics often took transit investment elsewhere.

The relatively short DRL, as currently conceived, would begin downtown at Osgoode Station on Queen St. and run east, with a station at Sherbourne St. before veering south and following Eastern Ave. with stations at Sumach St. and Broadview Ave.

From there it would curve north towards Pape Station on the existing Bloor-Danforth line. Last week city planners released a preferred route north: initially following Carlaw Ave., with a station just north of Queen, the line would continue to a station beyond Gerrard St. where the subway line would gently shift a block east and follow Pape Ave. north and connect with the Bloor-Danforth line. It’s a plan we can all get behind.

Today, Carlaw is the kind of place that seems made for a subway, with a cluster of residential buildings from Queen to almost Gerrard. Some are new, with more coming, and others are loft conversions, created out of beautiful old industrial buildings like the old Wrigley chewing gum factory and the Rolph Clark Stone printing building. There are still, for now, some light industrial and original hard loft spaces around too.

The Gerrard DRL station would be adjacent to the Gerrard Square neighbourhood mall that will likely become even more of a hub than it is today. Twenty years ago it was a fictional hub in the CBC’s soap opera Riverdale, a Coronation Street-style take on this Toronto neighbourhood.

Walking north from the mall along the proposed DRL alignment, Pape becomes residential, lined with single family houses, but a keen eye will see signs this was once a major public transit street. For one, the road is quite wide for low rise residential, but notice all the former storefronts that have been converted into residences and, most tellingly, the rusting steel TTC poles that line the street, all remnants of the Harbord streetcar line that ran here until 1966. It had a meandering route across the city and ended in a loop where Pape Station is now, the reason Lipton Ave. alongside it is so wide.

The beauty of the DRL is that it isn’t a downtown relief line at all; it’s a city relief line. Everybody who wants to go in a downtown direction coming from the east could get on the DRL and leave the Yonge line a little less jammed. Critics of the name suggest it should be called the Suburban or even the Scarborough Relief Line, to appeal to the emotional politics that drives this city’s transit decisions, but whatever we call it, this is the one to cheer for.

Not part of the recent announcements is the rest of the DRL dream: connecting this line all the way up to Sheppard, passing through the densely populated neighbourhoods of Thorncliffe Park and Don Mills along the way. A subway line where a subway line should go: where all the people are.

North of the Danforth, Pape feels like the lost main street of the former municipality of East York, with many blocks of retail and the dense apartment buildings clustered along Cosburn Ave. Imagine a busy subway station there too. Though it hasn’t existed as a municipal entity since 1997, East York never dies as the name is still found on street signs and businesses such as East York Restaurant and Hansen’s Danish Pastry Shop with a sign that proclaims it’s “Celebrating 50 Years in East York.” Perhaps now it’s time for its own relief line.

When the Mayor made his first comments about the relief line last week, he played them off of a proposed extension of the Yonge line into Richmond Hill, saying he won’t allow it unless the province funds the DRL too. Regardless if that extension is a good idea or not, nobody in Richmond Hill wants to get on the Yonge subway the way it is today, jammed after only a few stops south of Finch during the morning rush.

The politics of “we deserve” are cheap and based on emotion rather than facts, but if that’s the game we’re forced into now, let’s play it loud. East York deserves the East York Relief Line. Thorncliffe deserves it. Don Mills deserve it. The rest of the city deserves it too. And so does Richmond Hill.

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Make sure they hear you cheering this one on. Next we’ll start working on the western leg of the DRL.