Toronto’s mayor says there is no reason why six new SmartTrack stations won’t be under construction as soon as next year, and that the “surface subway” line he campaigned on will be in service soon after that.
John Tory maintained Monday that the revised timeline of 2025 was still realistic for SmartTrack service, as the federal government confirmed it would provide the $585 million in infrastructure money for the new stations the city requested in the spring.
“Mayor Tory, we heard you, we heard your sense of urgency,” Minister of Infrastructure and Communities Francois-Philippe Champagne said at the funding announcement.
“Shovels will be in the ground as soon as next summer.”
Minister of Infrastructure and Communities Francois-Philippe Champagne is seen speaking at a funding announcement on August 26, 2019. (CTV News Toronto)
The six council-approved stations are St. Clair-Old Weston, King-Liberty, East Harbour, Gerrard-Carlaw, Lawrence-Kennedy, and Finch-Kennedy. They will be constructed along existing rail lines to operate additional train service within city limits.
The SmartTrack plan is now a sliver of the platform it was when Tory first pitched it to voters in the 2014 mayoral campaign. The first iteration was an $8-billion plan involving service every 15 minutes between 22 new stations, in place by 2021.
“It’s a little later than when we had said in the earlier discussions of this, but it’s a project that didn’t exist when I first suggested it,” Tory said.
“What I’m happy about is that an idea was taken from a standing start in 2014, and has moved ahead to the point today where we can have hundreds of millions of dollars being committed by the other governments to actually build six new transit stations.”
Toronto Mayor John Tory is seen speaking at a funding announcement on August 26, 2019. (CTV News Toronto)
The province had pledged to solicit private funds for SmartTrack Stations, but Tory said the federal cash would guarantee the future of the new stations if that procurement was unsuccessful.
The funding pledge comes amid some uncertainty among city planners as to whether the six new SmartTrack stations are still necessary given the provincial rewrite of the Scarborough subway and relief line plans. Discussions are still ongoing, but Tory defended the move to proceed with planning for all six.
“I’ve yet to run into the first person in the city of Toronto who comes up to me to tell me we’re building too much transit.”
