McCowan Road

McCowan Road runs from Kingston Road north to Steeles Avenue, where it becomes York Regional Road 67 in York Region. It is interrupted by a brief 375-meter gap north of Eglinton Avenue due to Highland Creek, where McCowan Park and John McCrae Public School are located. During this break, Danforth Road carries through traffic for approximately 1.75 kilometers. Formerly known as 7th Line in Markham, McCowan Road interchanges with Highway 401 at the Scarborough Town Centre within the Scarborough City Centre district. North of Sheppard Avenue, the road borders the western edge of the Canadian Pacific Railway Toronto marshalling yards, which extends to the east of Markham Road.^[8]

McCowan Road is served mainly by the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) Route 16 McCowan bus south of Scarborough Centre station, a station on the closed Line 3 Scarborough (more information in the section below), whose bus terminal is still in use, and the Route 129 McCowan North bus north of it. Route 129's 'A' branch also serves McCowan Road in Markham north of Steeles Avenue, which formerly required all passengers to pay a second fare when crossing Steeles Avenue. Since the implementation of the One Fare program on February 26, 2024, riders paying by Presto card, credit card, or debit card only need to pay once but still need to tap off if crossing the municipal boundary at Steeles Avenue to validate their transfer.^[9] Another route serving part McCowan is Route 53B Steeles East.

York Region Transit (YRT) formerly operated the Viva Green line of that system's Viva Rapid Transit network until that service was initially temporarily suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and discontinued permanently in 2023.^[10] Present regular YRT routes using portions of McCowan Road are Routes 40 (Unionville Local), Route 41 (Markham Local), Route 42 (Breczy South Unionville), Route 45 (Mingay), and Route 522 (Markham Community Bus).

Between 1985 and 2023, the TTC operated Line 3 Scarborough, a light metro line originally named the Scarborough RT, which terminated at McCowan station.^[11] The line used specialized technology that was aging and becoming difficult to maintain, and was slated to be decommissioned upon the opening of an extension of the conventional Line 2 Bloor-Danforth, which began construction from Kennedy station north to the intersection of McCowan Road and Sheppard Avenue in June 2021, with most of the route following McCowan (Line 3 mostly followed the GO Transit Stouffville Line corridor, with McCowan station on an east-west alignment).^[12] However, in 2020, it was expected that Line 3 could possibly fail several years before the completion of the Line 2 extension.^[13] The expected failure did occur on July 24, 2023, when a train derailed, resulted in a decision the following month to not reopen the line.^[14][11]

Here are some nearby landmarks McCowan Road runs near: