“It’s a necessary evil”: Scarborough commuters on the real cost of the subway extension

With Rob Ford no longer mayor and the Gardiner debate temporarily settled, there’s now officially nothing in Toronto politics more divisive than the idea of extending the Bloor-Danforth subway through Scarborough Centre. Transit experts say building heavy rail in a lightly populated part of the city is wasteful; Scarborough residents counter that a subway is the only adequate compensation for decades spent riding buses and the increasingly rickety Scarborough RT. Here’s something we can all agree on, though: the subway extension is going to be really, really expensive. During June’s public consultations on the project, the city’s most optimistic cost estimate was $3.5 billion. We asked transit riders at Kennedy station whether they think the extension will be worth the cost.