Last year, Star readers identified the Downtown Relief Line as one of their top 10 big ideas. This week, we check in on what, if any, progress has been made.

Every morning Suhail Barot rides his bike from his home at Dufferin and Eglinton to the University of Toronto’s St. George campus.

Like many in the GTA, the 30-year-old routinely finds his transit plans foiled by congestion, as thousands of people try to get home at exactly the same time.

In bad weather he would like to take the subway home, but instead is turned away at the turnstile, as bikes are not allowed on packed trains during peak hours.

The downtown relief line could make a big difference in Barot’s everyday life. But he fears it may never arrive.

“At the rate they are going it’ll be when my kids go to college, as opposed to when I’m at college,” said the electrical engineering PhD candidate, laughing.

The line is envisioned to connect downtown Toronto with the Bloor-Danforth subway east of the Don River, to help ease overcrowding on the Yonge line, particularly at the Bloor-Yonge interchange station.

Both the TTC and regional transit authority Metrolinx have identified it as a top transit priority, and the clock is ticking.

According to a 2012 TTC study, even with currently planned improvements to the TTC, without it the Yonge line will reach a breaking point in 2031.

The biggest problem is there’s just no money dedicated yet toward building the line.

“They have no suggested start date. They have no suggested end date, they have no, who is going to be responsible for this, none of that,” said Barot, who has closely followed the file as a member of the citizens group TTC Riders.

Councillor Josh Matlow has long been a champion of the relief line but he, too, is frustrated with the lack of progress.

“I’d say that we are, optimistically, better than we were back 100 years ago,” he said with a laugh.

Versions of the line have indeed been bandied about for a over a century.

In 1911, the Toronto Engineers Office proposed an underground streetcar line along Queen St. through downtown.

The year before, a subway line very similar to today’s relief line configuration was proposed as part of the concept for Toronto’s rapid transit system.

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The “good news,” said Matlow, is that the relief line is still a transit priority for the city, along with SmartTrack, the Scarborough subway and GO regional express rail.

But it competes for both attention and funding with all of these other projects.

A2012 TTC study put the price tag for the initial phase of the relief line at $3.2 billion.

Council has directed city staff to do community consultations and technical work to determine the preferred route and stations, which they will report back on.

Even if funding was secured tomorrow, the project would have to move from the project assessment phase into design before construction could start.

“We’ve been talking about a 15-year timeline,” said Hilary Holden, the city’s director of transit and sustainable transportation.

Transit advocate Steve Munro said another part of the problem is that the relief line means different things to different people.

The part currently being studied would go from somewhere around Pape station to around King station.

The so-called “longer version” would continue north to Don Mills and Eglinton.

Munro said that’s the part that would really reduce transit numbers and would also help with the relief line’s image problem, the perception that it only serves the downtown. In a 2015 report, Metrolinx concluded that a subway linking Don Mills to downtown would have a real impact on relieving congestion on the Yonge line.

The relief line, said Munro, is not on anyone’s “A list” as far as funding goes.

“Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything,” he said. “It’s like the weather.”

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