More people should be talking about GO Transit's Scarborough potential

It’s not often that GTA transit riders get a legitimate piece of no-fooling great news, but it happened a couple of weeks back when Metrolinx announced that, starting in June, service on GO Transit’s Lakeshore line will increase to see trains every 30 minutes or better, all day long.

For commuters travelling anywhere between Oshawa and Burlington, that means less hassle and more options.

Ontario Minister of Transportation Glen Murray hailed the move as the final step toward turning GO into “full, regular transit,” suggesting that riders will be able to tear up their schedules and instead simply head to their local station, confident that a train is only a half-hour away.

Murray’s comments came off as a bit hyperbolic, but I’m OK with his sentiment. This is a game changer. A big one.

But could the game change even more? Isn’t it true that more frequent service on GO Train lines across the GTA could radically change the shape of our transit system — not just for Bay Street commuters, but for everyone?

I think it could.

Take, for example, another big transit story making headlines these days: The Scarborough subway. Shambling to its feet once again like a zombie that won’t stay down even after it’s been smacked in the face with a shovel, the desired subway is back on the minds of several local politicians. Scarborough needs a subway, they say, to provide fast, regular service to downtown and the rest of Toronto.

But when they talk about improved transit service, they rarely talk GO. And that seems a little crazy, given that GO can and does operate transit service that delivers commuters from Sheppard Avenue East and Kennedy Road in Agincourt to Union Station in just 29 minutes. Even with improved subway connections, there’s no way the TTC could match that kind of speed.

The sticking point? Only six trains make that trip from Scarborough to downtown on an average weekday morning. On weekends, there are usually no trains at all. Imagine if instead they ran every 30 minutes, all day. Or go wild and imagine that the trains were electric, and ran every 15 minutes.

Yes, there are barriers to running more trains in these corridors. In many cases, the rail lines are still shared with freight companies who demand exclusive access during parts of the day. But logic dictates that untangling those knots might be cheaper and achieve results faster than building expensive TTC subway expansions to Vaughan, Scarborough and Richmond Hill.

That’s not to say that new subways and other rapid transit infrastructure aren’t needed across the GTA. They are.

But let’s not leave GO Transit out of that planning process.

We know GO can get us places.