Toronto council took major steps forward Thursday on two seemingly never-ending transportation files costing billions of dollars.

They approved, by a 36-5 vote, a more than $1-billion plan to reconfigure the eastern portion of the crumbling Gardiner Expressway — more than twice what it would cost to tear it down. Council opponents described it as the best of the worst options.

And council advanced, with near unanimous support, a still-morphing 15-year, multi-billion-dollar transit plan for the first time, a move that chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat called a “seminal moment for the city.”

Mayor John Tory said his vote supporting the so-called “Hybrid 3” option for the eastern Gardiner was the fulfillment of a 2014 election campaign promise to maintain the elevated highway.

“My conscience is clear,” Tory said. He noted that after council rejected a teardown option last summer by a narrow margin, he reached out to council critics and others to come up with a more palatable plan. The Hybrid 3 option removes the Logan Ave. on- and off-ramps and adds two ramps at the Keating precinct.

“It will move that link (to the Don Valley Parkway) to as far north from the waterfront as you possibly can . . . and that’s important,” Tory said, adding it frees up much more land for development.

On transit, council endorsed several new lines, including an LRT along Eglinton Ave. East in Scarborough; an LRT along Eglinton Ave. West to the airport; the first leg of a downtown relief subway line to run along Queen St. East. They also narrowed options to integrate Tory’s proposed heavy rail SmartTrack plans with GO Transit expansion.

The city will also consider whether millions of dollars can be saved by taking the controversial one-stop Scarborough subway extension above ground. If completely tunneled, that line is currently estimated to cost more than $2 billion.

“We’ve had a history here of sometimes not asking, I think, reasonable questions because we were fearful that the answer would not support our political quest or our pre-determined destination,” Matlow told council in urging support of his motion to study going above ground.

“Why wouldn’t we ask reasonable questions about whether or not it’s possible to save money while we move forward with a comprehensive plan?”

That request, with Mayor John Tory’s backing, passed 37-4.

Staff will now update work done in 2013 by the province and TTC, when both studied whether a subway in the same corridor as the Scarborough RT could go above-ground from Kennedy station.

Both concluded going above-ground was technically feasible, with several challenges, including the need to rebuild Kennedy station — no small feat, TTC staff reiterated Thursday. The two assessments disagreed on potential savings, with costs differing by hundreds of millions.

Broadly, it’s more expensive to build a subway below ground. TTC staff said Thursday that it costs roughly $150 million per kilometre to build a tunneled subway compared with $80 million per kilometre at-grade.

Staff also said they believe it would only be possible to take the subway above-ground for 1.4 kilometres, about a fifth of the total extension.

TTC CEO Andy Byford pointed out there are several sections in the current system where the subway runs above ground, in some places just briefly between stations. He said the decision to tunnel or go above ground depends on what’s feasible and cost.

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, who has strongly advocated for a subway in Scarborough, said the city should move on with plans before them.

“It’s a plan that I think we can all live with,” he said. “People are talking about a surface subway in Scarborough. If you actually lived in Scarborough, you’d know that it’s not possible.”

He begrudgingly voted in favour of Matlow’s motion anyway.

“I’ll support it, because for some reason he still believes you can have a surface subway out in Scarborough,” he said.

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Council approved a three-stop, $3.56-billion subway in 2013, scrapping plans for a seven-stop LRT that was fully funded by the province. The current plan for a tunneled one-stop subway assumes that savings from scrapping two stations can fund a 17-stop LRT to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus.

Staff will report back to executive committee in June on the above-ground option, along with crucial information on the alignment for the various transit lines in the new plan, station stops, what it will all cost and how staff propose the city pay for it.

With that information before them, council faces a much larger debate on the future of transit in this city in July.

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