A busway on the old RT on September 30. Then a subway in 2030. Right order?

The Scarborough RT stopped running in 2023, after a derailment ended a life that was already meant to be over. The subway extension that replaces it was, at the time, six or seven years away. That gap is what this is about.

The TTC’s answer is a busway: four kilometres of the old right-of-way from Kennedy through Tara, Lawrence East and Ellesmere, then priority lanes on Ellesmere Road to Scarborough Town Centre. It opens on September 30, a year earlier than planned, and the agency says the trip from the town centre to Kennedy drops from 22 minutes to 15.

Behind it, the real thing: 7.8 kilometres of Line 2 from Kennedy to Sheppard and McCowan, three stations, tunnelling past the halfway mark, ground broken at Lawrence and McCowan in July, and an opening Metrolinx puts between 2029 and 2030. The forty-tower redevelopment of the Town Centre is being built on the assumption it arrives.

So Scarborough is getting a busway now and a subway later, on top of a decade of arguing about an LRT it never got. Whether that is the right sequence, or just the one that happened, is the question.

Sources: CBC, the busway opens September 30 · TTC, the busway completed in September 2026 · Canada.ca, ground broken at Lawrence and McCowan · Steve Munro, the busway a year early