A new poll reveals the majority of Toronto residents believe the Downtown Relief Line (DRL) should be built ahead of the Scarborough subway extension and Mayor John Tory’s SmartTrack plan.
The survey, conducted by Pantheon Research on behalf of the Toronto Relief Line Alliance, indicates 52.6 per cent of respondents think the Downtown Relief Line is the city’s highest transit priority followed by the Scarborough subway at 30.4 per cent and SmartTrack at 17 per cent.
But the regional breakdown shows a much different story with 73.2 per cent of those polled in Scarborough supporting the subway extension while the highest support for the DRL is East York at 71.1 per cent followed closely by Toronto at 69.3 per cent.
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Respondents who voted for Tory in the last municipal election also favoured the DRL (58.1 per cent) over the subway extension (21.7 per cent) and SmartTrack (20.1 per cent).
The majority of those polled (55.6 per cent) also said they would not vote for their city councillor who opposed the DRL.
The Pantheon Research poll sampled 981 randomly selection participants by an interactive voice response telephone survey between April 6 and 7 with a margin of error of +/- 3 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
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