The cost of the Eglinton East LRT has nearly doubled, raising more doubts about the future of the Scarborough transit project that the city was already struggling to fund.
A going to Mayor John Tory’s executive committee next Thursday says building the line, which would be a 15-kilometre extension of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT from Kennedy station to Malvern, is now expected to cost between $4 billion and $4.4 billion.
That’s up significantly from an earlier estimate of about $2.3 billion. The report attributes the increase in part to design changes necessitated by the province’s subway plans.
Tory has pitched the LRT as critical to improving transit in Toronto’s under-served eastern suburb, but the project is currently unfunded. At a news conference Thursday, the mayor played down the cost increase and said he was committed to getting the LRT built.
“One thing I’m not going to do easily, and hopefully not at all, is I’m not going to let questions that arise about how expensive it might be or how long it might take or the complications of design stop us from doing the things that we must do as a city,” he said.
In addition to serving the University of pc28Scarborough Campus, the LRT would run through or near seven neighbourhood improvement areas and put rapid transit within walking distance of 49,000 people, he said.
In 2016, Tory and then chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat successfully pitched the Eglinton East LRT to council along with a one-stop subway extension, which they said would form a Scarborough transit network. The plan was to build both projects using $3.6 billion that had previously been earmarked for a controversial and more expensive three-stop Scarborough subway extension.
Behind the scenes, city staff doubted there would be enough money to fund both and as public estimates for the one-stop subway extension ballooned it became clear there wasn’t. Tory and the rest of council chose to direct available funding to the subway, but still came up short. Last year the city estimated the cost of the one-stop version at $3.9 billion.
The one-stop plan was scrapped in 2019 when Premier Doug Ford’s government uploaded GTA transit expansion projects to Queen’s Park and reverted back to the three-stop subway. The Ontario government plans to open the $5.5 billion three-stop extension by 2029 or 2030.
In the new report, city staff said the cost of the Eglinton East LRT has grown because the province’s updated designs for the three-stop subway, which would also connect to Kennedy, would require building a longer tunnel to the station for the LRT.
Ford’s promise to eventually build another subway extension on Sheppard Avenue East instead of following previous plans for an LRT on that corridor has also driven up the cost of the Eglinton project. That’s because the proposed Sheppard LRT would have shared a maintenance and storage facility with the Eglinton East LRT. The Eglinton line would now require funding for a standalone facility.
Coun. Paul Ainslie (Ward 24, Scarborough-Guildwood) said Ford’s “white elephant” of a subway plan, which has been criticized by experts as an expensive overbuild, is “chipping away” at the city’s chances of delivering an LRT in Scarborough.
“It keeps going back to the subway system that everybody says don’t build, but which the premier wants,” he said.
“The longer this goes on, I think the hopes for (the Eglinton East LRT) dwindle.”
Ford has long defended the subway plan by framing LRT as an inferior form of transit and arguing Scarborough residents deserve underground transit.
The Eglinton East LRT isn’t part of the Ford government’s $28.5 billion network expansion plan, and Tory said Thursday it would be up to the city and federal government to pay for it.
He said the city could put almost $1 billion towards the LRT by using money collected through a levy originally intended to fund the Scarborough subway. But “we have to have some discussions with the province about the use of that money,” he said.
According to the terms of the upload agreement, pc28can put money towards new lines of its own on the condition that Queen’s Park is satisfied the municipality is making progress in tackling the state of good repair backlog on the existing subway system.
Asked whether province would let the city direct the levy proceeds to the LRT, Natasha Tremblay, a spokesperson for Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney, said the government “would be happy to review and discuss with the city any proposal that can both expand access to transit while also keeping the city’s vital subway system well maintained.”
The city report recommends the staff move ahead with design work for the Eglinton East LRT, as well as another unfunded project, the East Bayfront LRT.
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