Just when commuters thought the Scarborough subway-versus-LRT debate was settled, the issue that bitterly divided city council last year has re-surfaced.

Metrolinx immediately dismissed the idea of revisiting the transit plan for Scarborough, but that didn’t discourage one city councillor on the Toronto Transit Commission.

Glenn DeBaeremaeker (Ward 38, Scarborough Centre) said the latest TTC report gives him new confidence that there will be a subway underway in Scarborough within a decade.

He called the report fresh proof that Mayor Rob Ford’s plan to build a subway on Sheppard “is a stupid idea.”

But more important, he said, it suggests that the city can afford to build a subway in Scarborough by extending the Danforth line from Kennedy to Sheppard Ave. E. It would cost about $500 million more than converting the SRT to LRT, the Metrolinx plan the city and TTC signed off on late last year. That’s the same amount of money the city has just approved for repairing the Gardiner Expressway.

Extending the Danforth subway was a cornerstone of the OneCity transit scheme that DeBaeremaeker and TTC chair Karen Stintz floated last year. It was rejected by a majority of city councillors, who chastised the pair for failing to consult before floating a $30 billion transit plan of their own.

“I’m thrilled” by the TTC report, said DeBaeremaeker. “I am 100 per cent certain Scarborough is going to get a subway — the intelligent subway, the one that actually carries a lot of people, the one that costs the least amount of money.”

Metrolinx, the provincial agency that is funding and building the SRT replacement as part of the Eglinton Crosstown line, immediately dismissed suggestions it might consider a subway.

“No, we have a plan, actually the city council approved that plan, the master agreement approved the scope — replacing SRT with light rail — and we are very rapidly moving forward,” said Metrolinx vice-president Jack Collins.

The report makes comparisons that have been published before by the TTC and a city-appointed expert panel last year, he noted.

The TTC estimate of $2.3 billion to replace the SRT with LRT is higher than the $1.8 billion Metrolinx has assigned the project. The report puts the Danforth subway extension at $2.8 billion.

The length of the two proposals is different: A subway would add only 7.6 km of transit, compared with 9.9 km for light rail and it would have only three stations rather than seven, according to the TTC report. It would, however, run slightly faster than light rail and would have the capacity to carry 36 million people a year, 5 million more than LRT. The LRT would, however, put twice as many riders within walking distance of a station and serve more priority neighbourhoods.

Although the 4 km/h speed differential wouldn’t significantly alter trip time, riders would save time on the transfer between light rail and subway at Kennedy Station, Collins said.

Converting the obsolete SRT system to modern light rail means closing the line down for about four years, shunting riders onto buses during the construction expected between 2015 and 2020.

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“But then you have to look, on balance, at the lower cost and the bigger area that gets served … the disruption of building an entire new subway line versus repurposing an existing line. There’s trade-offs,” Collins said.

With Metrolinx ready to begin tendering on a massive contract for the Eglinton LRT, including the SRT conversion project, he said, changing plans mid-stream would cause an unacceptable delay.

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