What the TTC would look like if Toronto stuck to plans

It's cruel to think about what the TTC might look like today had previous municipal and provincial leaders stuck to a coherent vision when it comes to transit planning. Current planners have released a series of maps detailing what might be done in the next 15 years, which looks as promising as it does unlikely to happen in the allotted timeline.

Yes, Toronto is good at imagining new transit futures, but not at making them happen. This has been happening since 1910, when the first meandering subway was proposed for Toronto. If only we had really started building underground transit that long ago. We might even have a Queen subway and the Bloor-Danforth Line.

The grandaddy of all of these visions would be five years old now had the political will existed to push it through to realization. Conceived in 1985 when the city realized that it was falling behind in transit infrastructure growth, Network 2011 would shuttle Toronto into the future with no less than three new subway lines.

Whenever Network 2011 comes up, the project that gets the most focus is the Downtown Relief Line (DRL), but in fact this was a comprehensive package meant to help Toronto meet the transportation needs of its rapidly swelling population across the entire city. Along with a DRL, significant commitments were made away from the core.

Here's the plan in a nutshell: The YUS Line would be extended to Downsview, A Sheppard Line would be built from Downsview to Scarborough Town Centre, Bloor-Danforth would be extended to Sherway Gardens, an Eglinton West Line would be built to the airport, the Scarborough RT would be extended to Malvern, and a DRL would be built from Union to Pape.

Nowadays this is all sounds like the stuff of a TTC fantasy map, and yet it was very real when it was brought to the table. Yes, there was some controversy at city level, but it was changes at the provincial level that ultimately destroyed the plans.

Premier Bill Davis was on board with the plan, but trouble started when he retired in 1985. The provincial Conservatives would lose the next election to the Liberals, who quickly put Network 2011 up for review. It would never look the same after that.

Some of the plan stuck around over subsequent governments, namely the YUS extension to Downsview and a version of the Sheppard Subway. We would also have an Eglinton West subway today if Mike Harris hadn't killed that almost immediately after taking office from Bob Rae.

In other words, Network 2011 wasn't the only plan that was scrapped along the way. In fact, each time a new provincial government was elected, Toronto's transit future was reimagined. The end result, however, was that not much of anything ever got built.

What particularly stung about Rob Ford's attempt to kill the Transit City plan in 2010 is that support from the provincial government was strong. Metrolinx was founded in 2006 in part to provide greater stability in long term transit planning across the region, and the project was safe from a funding standpoint.

With a whole new round of transit expansion plans in the works, at least we can take solace in the fact that projects like the Spadina Extension and the Crosstown LRT are too far along to kill.

Network 2011 map via Wikipedia, 1910 and Queen St. subway maps via the Toronto Archives, fantasy map by Bryan Bonnici, Transit City plan via the City of Toronto.

by Derek Flack via blogTO