Ten minutes. That is how long it used to take to get from Scarborough Centre to Kennedy Station on the RT. Since November 2023, when the aging line shut down for good, that trip has ballooned to 25 or 35 minutes on packed replacement buses stuck in traffic. The 7.8-kilometre subway meant to replace it is now more than halfway tunnelled, a 2,000-tonne boring machine named “Diggy Scardust” chewing through bedrock at ten metres a day.
Good news, for once.
Ground has also been broken on the first of three new stations. Crews started piling work at Scarborough Centre Station, which will feature a new bus terminal with passenger pickup and drop-off spaces, the eastern terminus and a major transfer point for bus routes across the area. That’s a lot of concrete.
$712 Million Per Kilometre
Scarborough Transit Connect was selected as the development partner in January 2025 through a $5.7 billion Target Price Agreement. Three stations added to Line 2: Lawrence, Scarborough Centre, and Sheppard.
$712 million per kilometre.
Let that sit for a moment. Ottawa’s entire six-station Confederation Line cost $2.1 billion when it opened in 2019, and Montreal’s four-station REM extension to the South Shore cost roughly $6.5 billion for a much longer stretch of guideway. Tunnelling through bedrock in a dense urban environment is expensive, but that per-kilometre number should still make people uncomfortable.
After the Eglinton Crosstown’s public-private partnership produced years of disputes and cost overruns, Metrolinx went with a progressive design-build contract instead, where the contractor and Metrolinx collaborate on design before locking in a target price. Whether that actually avoids the adversarial dynamics that plagued the Crosslinx consortium remains to be seen.
Living Without the RT
The Scarborough RT shut down in November 2023 after nearly four decades. Since then, Scarborough residents have been stuck on replacement buses that are slower, more crowded, and worse in almost every way.
Worse in almost every way. The replacement buses run the old RT corridor, but without dedicated lanes for most of the route they sit in traffic like everyone else.
Ten minutes from Scarborough Centre to Kennedy Station on the RT. Now? 25 to 35 minutes during rush hour, crammed into articulated buses the TTC deployed to handle the overflow.
Still packed.
For riders who depend on transit to reach jobs downtown or in Markham and Pickering, losing the RT has meant unpaid hours added to weekly commutes, and it has made the promise that a subway was worth the disruption much harder to believe.
Some relief, maybe. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow announced in early 2026 that the Scarborough busway (an interim rapid bus corridor) would open in September 2026. Dedicated right-of-way along parts of the old RT corridor, signal priority at intersections. Expected to cut travel times by roughly 10 minutes.
Better than nothing. (A low bar, but still.)
From One Stop to Three
How did we end up here? The short version: politicians kept overruling planners.
The original plan, backed by a full environmental assessment, called for a seven-stop light rail line along the RT corridor.
$1.8 billion. Seven stops. More local coverage, connecting neighbourhoods along McCowan Road and Progress Avenue.
In 2013, Toronto City Council voted to replace the LRT plan with a one-stop subway extension to Scarborough Centre. Then-Mayor Rob Ford championed the move, backed by a council majority that argued Scarborough “deserved” subway service equal to what downtown neighbourhoods received. Price tag: roughly $3.6 billion. Then in 2019 the provincial government under Doug Ford (yes, same family) replaced the one-stop plan with a three-stop extension, adding Lawrence and Sheppard stations. Costs went higher. The criticism that a single station would strand too many neighbourhoods went away.
Former city planner Jennifer Keesmaat and the transit advocacy group TTCriders have pointed out the obvious: the three-stop subway serves fewer local stops than the original LRT plan would have, at more than three times the cost.
The subway-vs-LRT argument has real merit on both sides. But nobody ran the numbers and picked subway.
The politics came first. The justification followed.
Scarborough’s Transit Deficit
None of this political back-and-forth changes the basic problem: Scarborough has never had good transit. Most populous inner suburb in the city, heavily immigrant, below-average household incomes, and some of the worst commute times in the GTA. That is not a coincidence.
55 minutes each way. That’s the average for Scarborough transit commuters, according to 2021 census data, compared to 42 minutes for residents in the former City of Toronto. Sprawling geography and a transit network that funnels everything through Kennedy Station explain most of that gap.
The subway is supposed to fix that. But by replacing the RT’s multiple stops with just three stations, it trades local coverage for faster travel to downtown. The RT served six intermediate stops between Kennedy and McCowan. The new subway will serve three, spaced further apart. Riders who once walked to Midland or Ellesmere stations will need to take a bus to reach Lawrence or Scarborough Centre.
Construction and Economic Impact
About 3,500 workers at peak construction, spread across tunnel, station, and surface sites. Metrolinx signed community benefit agreements targeting 10% of labour hours for workers from equity-deserving groups and another 10% for apprentices. On paper, a good deal.
But construction has also gutted the surrounding neighbourhoods. McCowan Road near Scarborough Centre has been down to two lanes in both directions since mid-2025. Several bus routes diverted around station construction zones. Businesses along McCowan between Ellesmere and Progress report revenue declines of 15 to 30%. The same story Eglinton Avenue merchants told during the Crosstown build. Nobody listened then either.
Metrolinx set up a business liaison office for the corridor, offering grants of up to $20,000 for signage and accessibility improvements. Local BIA representatives say it’s not enough. It never is.
When Does It Open?
Metrolinx won’t commit to a date. “Late 2020s” is the best anyone will say. The project is part of the broader $10 billion federal transit investment that also includes the Ontario Line, Eglinton Crosstown West Extension, and Yonge North Subway Extension, together the largest simultaneous transit expansion in Canadian history and an enormous concentration of construction risk. Labour shortages, supply chain pressures on concrete and steel, the complexity of building four megaprojects at once: any one of them could blow the timeline.
Scarborough residents just want to know if the subway will open before the decade is out.
After the Eglinton Crosstown dragged on for 15 years, nobody out here is taking Metrolinx at its word.
Sources and verification: The Diggy Scardust halfway milestone is from Metrolinx project updates. The Scarborough Centre Station groundbreaking is from CBC News and Ontario government announcements. The $5.7 billion Target Price Agreement with Scarborough Transit Connect is from Metrolinx procurement records, January 2025. The Scarborough RT closure in November 2023 is from TTC records. Mayor Chow’s September 2026 busway opening announcement is from CBC News. The three-station plan (Lawrence, Scarborough Centre, Sheppard) is from Metrolinx project documentation. The $10 billion federal transit investment figure is from Infrastructure Canada. The history of the one-stop to three-stop evolution draws on Toronto City Council records (2013 vote) and provincial government announcements (2019). The original LRT cost estimate of $1.8 billion is from the 2010 Metrolinx environmental assessment. Census commute time data is from Statistics Canada, 2021. Construction employment figures and community benefit targets are from Metrolinx procurement documents. Ottawa Confederation Line cost is from the City of Ottawa. Per-kilometre cost comparisons are Ontario Pulse calculations based on published project budgets.
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