That's not just a shame. It's absolutely infuriating. The solution to what is the biggest problem in the region is so blatantly obvious. Raise taxes a little, perhaps add some road tolls and we could easily generate the $20 Billion or so to build a RT/LRT system that would easily provide excellent transit coverage across the whole city for the foreseeable future. And even after those relatively small tax increases, we'd would still maintain our ridiculously low taxation rate. This isn't a hard problem to solve, at all. But as long as we keep electing politicians who don't care about actually solving issues, but are instead focused on winning the next election, that will never happen.
$20 billion............are you kidding?
Toronto only needs about $2 billion to cover the entire city with REAL mass/rapid transit and not the stop-at-every-light-and-every 2-blocks LRT plan which is neither rapid nor mass. Toronto has a huge amount of infrastructure already in place but refuses to use it for only reasons the creator knows.
Toronto has hydro corridors itching for cheap BRT routes, freeways wide enough to accommodate HOV/bus-only lanes, and most importantly a massive rail network that most cities on the planet would give their left nut to have. Toronto has a huge rail network most of which is now totally grade separated and is owned by the metro transit authority and yet Toronto doesn't use, quite literally, one foot of it but no one seems to know why.
Toronto's rail corridors spread from Union to every area of the city and all many of the needed stations are already built. Some sections would require twinning and some land acquisition and certainly electrification but the basis of a rapid transit system is already there. No endless environmental reviews or consultants as the corridors are already being used for transit but only for people in the far flung 905 and opposed to the people that actually live in the city itself. As I stated before, @2 billion would electrify nearly the entire GO system within the city and by purchasing the 50 mketer Bombardier non-proprietary LRT's that run on street and on normal rail tracks, the city could have a massive system up and running as soon as the trains arrive.
That $2 billion could electrify the system with GO chipping in, buy an entire fleet of trains, and the garage/maintenance centre to serve them. Add a $100 million for BRT along the Hydro corridors and Toronto would have a huge system at a tenth the price of the $20 billion figure and could be up and running in a few years. Instead of this Toronto wants to spend $2 billion on an underground subway in the burbs for 6 km of track to replace a functioning RT.
Toronto is very odd because lack of money is not it's main problem but rather lack of will, inertia, poor transit planning, refusal to look at alternative options, and treating GO like it serves Cleveland and not Toronto.
Toronto already has a huge rapid/mass transit system up and running, it's a shame they don't let the citizens use it.