COLUMN: On the contrary, there's plenty of room in Vaughan for Toronto transit

Yorkregion.com
March 10, 2016
By Tim Kelly

So, from the ivory tower of One Yonge Street, it wasn’t enough the Toronto Star’s tall foreheads saw fit to dump on the idea of a Yonge subway-line extension to Richmond Hill in a Monday editorial. No.

On Tuesday, Star GTA columnist Edward Keenan had to get personal. From his perch in the tower, Keenan rubbed it in and trashed Vaughan. He didn’t mince words either.

Some of the choice bits:

• “It is a dystopian suburban landscape of endless asphalt dotted with scrubgrass and children’s birthday party venues.”
• “It feels like an asphalt version of the vast desert autodrome battlegrounds of Mad Max: Fury Road, except with some roller coasters.”
• “It looks more like horror-movie screenwriting than urban planning to me.”

I could go on but you get the point.

The oddest thing about the piece however is its headline in the newspaper: “No room for Vaughan in Toronto transit.”

Unless the headline writer or columnist has been asleep for the last decade, there is plenty of room for Vaughan in Toronto transit. As in, Vaughan will have a subway terminal opening on the Spadina line by the end of 2017. And Vaughan will be the first municipality outside of Toronto to have a subway stop on the TTC.

Vaughan is still largely a growing city as evidenced by the population explosion over the past two decades.

It will have a spectacular “downtown” of its own, once the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre is built out in 15-20 years, around the subway stop. But it will take time and patience to get there.

Yes Vaughan is not Toronto, but it also doesn’t have the pollution, the crime and the stress that comes with big-city living either. It has plenty of greenspace and you can be in the countryside in a 10-minute drive. Not so from downtown Toronto.

Could be that’s why so many people keep coming to live here and open new businesses here year after year.