Scarborough busway will cost $12M more and won't be ready for another 3 years: report

The conversion of the decommissioned Scarborough Rapid Transit (SRT) line into a busway is now estimated to cost $12 million more than initially thought and it won’t be ready before late 2026 at the earliest – a year later than previously hoped.

A report set to be considered by the TTC board this week lays out the state of the project and the latest projections for it.

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The previous estimate for the project at an earlier design stage was $55.7 million. Now that the project has progressed to 60 per cent of the design, the cost is now estimated at $67.9 million. Staff also note that cost “is not final and will likely fluctuate" until the design work is fully complete.

Some of the factors driving up the cost include $4.3 million for additional barriers to separate the GO track and the planned busway, as well as additional costs for guard rails, light posts, raw materials and signage.

The design work is expected to be complete by the end of this year, with construction starting in 2025 if the project is fully funded. The conversion work is expected to take approximately two years to complete, staff say.

That news did not go over well with transit advocacy group TTC Riders Monday.

“The TTC approved the replacement busway in April 2022!” the group said in a post to social media. “Construction should have started in November 2023, when the Scarborough RT was planned to go out of service. That's why transit riders are calling on City Council to speed up and fund the busway in the 2024 budget. #ScarbTO”

The group presented councillors Monday with a giant “invoice” for riders’ lost time since the derailment. They estimated the time added up to close to half-a-million hours.

They pointed out that the busway could have been operational by late 2025 if it had been funded earlier.  

Since the SRT was decommissioned following a derailment earlier this year, riders have been taking buses which travel along dedicated bus lanes on regular roads.

The planned busway is meant as a temporary rapid-transit patch for Scarborough until the completion of the Scarborough Subway Extension, which is slated to be ready in 2030. It is expected to shave seven minutes off a current bus trip between Scarborough Centre Station and Kennedy Station for approximately 118,000 weekly customers until the subway is ready, according to the city.

While the city has been putting up money to advance the design work for the busway, construction of the project remains unfunded and the city is hoping that the province will pick up the tab.

“The TTC in partnership with the City of Toronto is currently seeking provincial funding for the construction of the Busway as part of ongoing discussions on the Provincial Subway Program Agreement in Principle,” staff say in the latest report. “Negotiations are expected to conclude by June 2024 and a report back on the outcome will be provided to the Board on next steps.”

City staff point out in their report that a decision needs to be made about what to do with the busway once the subway goes into service. Staff say they've ruled out the possibility of turning it into a cycling facility because of space constraints and other logistical issues.

A high-level estimate in 2018 pegged the cost of decommissioning and demolishing the remaining Line 3 infrastructure at somewhere between $150 million and $175 million. Staff say the city could also try to convert it for “some type of adaptive reuse.”