What now? The demand northeast of Kennedy is travelling primarily to Scarborough Town Centre where the Sheppard East subway would be heading.
1) The scheduled travel time on the current SRT and subway to Bloor-Yonge is 35 minutes; that would drop to 31 minutes if it didn't include the 4-minute time to change at Kennedy (I'd assume the slower subway trains would be balanced by few station stops). Scarborough Centre (SC) to Bloor-Yonge on a future Sheppard subway and Yonge subway would take about 39 minutes. Even if it was built, it would be faster to take the existing SRT.
2) A Sheppard subway extension to SC would require 8 km of track, compared to only 6 km for a Danforth extension - about 1/3 longer ... and presumably 1/3 more expensive.
3) The LRT on Sheppard East is already under construction; track construction and vehicle contracts are expected to be tendered within weeks. By the time a new council comes into office in 6 months time there will be no going back. There is no timeframe for SRT replacement.
4) Predicted demand for a Danforth extension is much higher than a Sheppard extension.
Seems like a no brainer to me.
As for arguing that the predicted 5,000 demand on Eglinton is underestimated ... remember that's the peak location ... not sure if that's Yonge or Dufferin ... but somewhere around there, in the subway section. If you want to argue that the subway should extend further east than Don Mills road (which is where the cost would become more than the current tunnel) then you have to look at that demand, which is even lower than 5,000! You could triple the 2031 forecast demand east of Don Mills road on Eglinton and it would still be in LRT range.
Swap Agincourt in for Lawrence East as your intermediary trip generator and we're still talking about a high daily yield of riders that'd use it. Demand north of Finch Stn is York Region's problem, nothing a Toronto Mayoral candidate should have to worry about. The TTC had a choice in 2006 to approve a dedicated bus lane down Yonge from Finch to Steeles which would do away with a majority of the congestion issues but they chose instead to massage RHC planners' egos instead.
The TTC says Eglinton is at 5400 ppdph by 2031. Both the census and existing demand put that figure at much higher level considering the high volume of transferees a subway along the same route could attract. And we all know for a fact that 17,500 pph minimum would utilize a DRL. So yes, let's by all means extend the YUS further and further into suburbia where park' n' ride commuters will overcrowd morning rush trains before we even arrive in Toronto proper (Lawrence southwards) meanwhile it takes close to an hour or longer for east-west routes to dump passengers onto the Yonge Line. And let's build the new TC light-rail lines in a disjointed, fragmented manner such that one's one-seat bus commute from the far end of the city directly to the subway becomes a three ring circus as in Sheppard's case of bus + LRT + "stubway" + subway taking 90 minutes to complete.
![Roll Eyes :rolleyes: :rolleyes:](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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