The shouting still isn’t over on whether the Scarborough Subway should be built at all, despite what De Baeremaeker, Mayor John Tory, or Scarborough’s MPPs have said.
But the basic route for the thing has been decided, though unofficially: it’s going up McCowan Road, as De Baeremaeker and other supporters always thought it would.
“There’s an emerging direction with McCowan,” Hilary Holden, from the city’s transportation planning department, said standing by a drilling rig in front of a bungalow opposite Makinac Crescent.
“Practicalities suggest McCowan is more promising.”
Officially, three extension routes, the McCowan, Midland and Bellamy, remain in contention, but the boreholes demonstrate the department’s mind is made up.
It’s not test-drilling the other two corridors, looking for groundwater layers, boulders, and which mix of clay, gravel and silt tunnel borers would go through.
It has only drilled the McCowan route and areas common to all three - Kennedy Station, Scarborough Town Centre, and McCowan north of Highway 401.
