Deep breaths, everyone.

What happened at city council on Wednesday? Among those who, like me, supported an LRT option to replace the Scarborough subway, there is a sense that the biggest news was of a huge mistake — the decision to build a one-stop extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line to the Scarborough Town Centre. But it was a decision made by a solid majority of city councillors, who have had years to study and debate and consider the issue. There’s no reason to think they would make a different decision with a bit more time, a bit more arm twisting, a bit more information. They are the elected government of this city, and they reaffirmed a big decision I disagree with. It was not the first time this has happened, it won’t be the last time. Democracy: whattaya gonna do?

At the very least, it puts the matter to rest, or should. Some closure. An opportunity to marshal resolve and resources for other work that lies ahead. And there is always work that lies ahead. Much of it on the transit file. More work now than before, actually.

What else happened at city council on Wednesday? Well, city councillors approved a 15-year transit plan that is, on balance, a very good plan. There is much to be happy about here. For example: city council voted unanimously to move forward with detailed design on a 17-stop LRT line on Eglinton East from Kennedy to the U of T Scarborough campus. City council voted overwhelmingly to move forward with more detailed design of an LRT line on Eglinton West to the airport. City council voted overwhelmingly to support SmartTrack alterations to the provincial express rail plan. City council voted overwhelmingly to move forward with developing work on the relief line that will run on Queen and Pape, and eventually up through Don Mills and perhaps to Sheppard — long listed as the TTC’s top building priority and just as long overlooked. Council voted to complete all this work to have all these lines in operation by 2031.

The hours of debate Wednesday also offered reminders that transit construction hasn’t been at a standing stop these past few years, as we often think it has been during the relentless grind of debate on this one subway line: the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, now under construction, is among the largest transit projects in the city’s history. The six-stop Spadina subway extension to York University and Vaughan will go into service next year. The 18-stop Finch West LRT is out for procurement and construction will begin next year.

The often bitter and seemingly unending debate over the replacement technology for the obsolete and breaking down Scarborough RT has maybe distracted us from the larger amount of actual work that has been occurring while it has raged on. Just as on Wednesday, it obscured the potential significance of the larger transit decisions council made. The Eglinton East LRT, a modified holdover from former mayor David Miller’s plan, will be a more significant improvement for mobility inside Scarborough than anything else that’s been built in generations. The relief line has been half-planned and discussed for decades — and now has $150 million in funding from the province to go with the city’s detailed planning commitment.

The city can’t afford to have the importance of this stuff overshadowed. Because seeing it through will likely require the same scale of effort and energy and passion at city hall that’s been sunk into the Scarborough subway debate this past council term and a half.

The subway extension, now, barely needs to be anyone’s priority to become real: it has funding attached to it — residents have been paying for it already for a few years in an earmarked property tax levy — and it has the political will of the provincial government behind it.

But the rest of this plan, which becomes all the more urgent and important because of that extension decision, has no funding, and will require champions. The city will need to find $30 billion or more for all this, just to build, no doubt some of it from the federal and provincial governments. It will have to keep pressure on those other governments to deliver.

And even then, once all this is built, if it is, the city will have to find money to operate and maintain it all properly. This is not a small thing, we may be reminded in the same week when old subway cars with failing air conditioning are making news, and when the TTC is being asked to investigate ways to cut its budget.

Drawing the lines on the map and then approving further design of those lines is the fun part — everyone loves to be a visionary at the planning stage. Paying for that vision, and grinding through the local complaints, concessions, and arguments needed to make them real, is the hard part. This “network plan,” including the subway extension, was clothed in the rhetoric of visionary city building. Toronto infrastructure founding father R.C. Harris was invoked, as were the Yonge subway and the original builders of the London tube system, among other local and international examples. Great.

Now comes the hard part: you approve a visionary city-building plan, you need to follow through with the visionary city-building money and back-breaking city-building work to make it real, and to make it function and thrive — starting with the city you’ve already built. Many noted that Wednesday’s vote put an end to an old fight. But if it is to mean something significant and positive in the long term, it is the start of a new, and possibly harder struggle.

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Deep breaths, everyone. One battle is over, but the work is just beginning.