Hate to say I told you so, but I did

Back in the day when the Eglinton Crosstown and the Finch LRT were twinkles in the eyes of politicians, I said they should be subways. Like the late Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, I believed in “subways, subways, subways.” Why? Well a number of reasons, but one big one is our winters. The Finch LRT was barely open for a day or two when we had a small, but our standards, snowfall. What happened? It got snarled due to “weather related incidents.” Thank you, I rest my case. Take a look at the so-called “stations,” along the Eglinton LRT. At Pharmacy, it is little more than a bus shelter in the middle of a six-lane highway. What’s it going to be like in the middle of a snowstorm or when the temperature dips to minus 20? The line should have been a subway. It’s underground closer to downtown, but in Scarborough it’s a frozen block of ice. When I was still writing in the Sun, all the pointy headed transit wonks would tut-tut when I suggested an LRT was inappropriate for our city. They said we couldn’t afford it. They said light rail was the fastest and cheapest to build. Turns out I was right and they were wrong. We could have built a subway to Ottawa for what we’ve spent on the Finch and Eglinton lines. And speaking of Ottawa, they got LRT instead of subways as well. How’s that working out? Oh, right. LRTs also take away lanes of traffic. So now we have no transit and more congestion. I wonder how much they paid all those experts to decide on the LRT when it was so obvious we should have built subways.