Its not that much of a betrayal of what the Subway represents. The subway as it stands today isn't some sort of high capacity local Toronto service as much as it is a feeder Artery that is served by Toronto's main bread and butter - busses. By that view, this subway extension isn't much of a departure from the status quo (other than maybe the lacking bus frequencies in York Region besides Viva Blue).
Yeah but that would be TTC busses, now we are serving viva exclusively after Finch or Steeles & what not, but some of the other responses makes sense, we still have to go up Yonge neway with Yonge between Finch n Steeles being packed with busses n cars
I do think an important part to mention though is that during the Metro era even though the Subway was expanded beyond the City of Toronto (as well as the TTC becoming responsible for bus service in Metro), the 5 other municipalities contributed to the TTC's annual operating budget. A portion of every municipalites property taxes went to Metro who used it to fund 1/3 of the TTC's operating budget (among other things), while the other 2/3 came from the Province (at least by the 80's that's what the split was). So while Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke got their subway extension they didn't get them for free and helped pay for the operations. As far as I am aware York Region doesn't contribute a single penny to the TTC's annual operating budget, so as I see it they are getting a free ride since they get these extensions while Toronto foots the bill every year. The ideal arrangement would be for municipalities that want the subway should have to contribute a percentage of there budget to the TTC, what that percentage is is for the bean counters to figure out, but there was no free rides during the Metro days and their shouldn't be any now.
I don't know if this will be economical. TTC already has trained crew, equipment, and massive yards. Having another maintainer for a short part of the whole line requires new equipment, land for storage, and trained crew. Not to mention making it needlessly complex to maintain the line when there are separate maintainers but one operator. It may be simpler to keep maintenance on existing lines with the TTC.
This argument is routinely used to discredit the continued existence of the Gardiner, that it's a road for 905ers to use to get into the city. Just saying.
That is a very useful bit of information!
All true, but I would add that the Gardiner doesn't exist in a bubble, and that its demolition would have undesirable knock-down effects on public transit, too. GO buses would be stuck on local roads, and those roads would be filled with cars diverted from the Gardiner. The elevated design of the Gardiner ruins the core of the city and was a really unfortunate design choice in retrospect, but tearing down the Gardiner would be the type of own goal that we are only capable of in Ontario.
See, way back when,I thought that was the reason for GO transit.It could have been, and still could be. I also thought Metrolinx was that too, but have since learned otherwise. The challenge is the city no longer actually stops at an artificial border that is visible without signage. Which,if I am right is exactly what Metro Toronto used to look like.
The design shown in the Environmental Report Addendum (figures 24 - 29) shows a 3 line train storage yard adjacent to the CN right of way to the west from the end of High Tech station to north of 16th Avenue.