Pushing the start of construction on Sheppard to 2014 will push it into the municipal election year, making this a municipal election issue.
In all likelihood there will be a centrist pro-subway candidate other than Ford who will realize the need to build subways instead of light rail. Building low capacity light rail along Sheppard will create too many transfers and will not provide a service much faster than the existing bus service along Sheppard. It will not provide travel times competitive with driving (despite severe rush hour traffic congestion) for the vast majority of east west trips in the northern part of the city. Grade separated transit is needed in Toronto, which includes subways and frequent commuter rail service, and light rail is totally inadequate for main lines, particularly with the rapid growth in the GTA we have been seeing. We will likely see 2 million new residents in the GTA in the next 20 years, most of them living in condominiums which means that the need for transit will be much larger and traffic congestion much more severe than what we see today. I hope that by 2014, the economy will be booming and more transit cash will be available, and possibly new taxes or road tolls will have been approved to raise revenue. $8 billion is nowhere near enough to tackle the problem of transit in the GTA, and this is why we saw council resurrect Transit City (build more lines for the same amount of money but use inferior light rail technology because there is not enough funding). We need 20, 30 or even 40 billion dollars in transit cash in the next 20 years, to build subways (the downtown relief line/along Don Mills, Eglinton, Sheppard, the Yonge extension to Highway 7, etc.), high frequency commuter rail on all the major lines, and major improvements to bus service in the 905. Cities of 7-8 million (which is what the GTA will be in 20 years) in areas where transit is properly funded (i.e. not Los Angeles) do not build light rail anywhere other than minor feeder lines (like St. Clair) to a large subway/commuter rail system. Toronto should be funding transit like Madrid, where there are 13 subway lines, ten all-day commuter rail lines and where 4 light rail lines provide service to areas much lower density than Eglinton, Sheppard or Finch.
