Month: April 2008

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What We Got For Five Million

One of my jobs here seems to be the curmudgeon whose view of the latest great thing isn’t quite as gentle and forgiving as other commentators.  This brings me to Museum Station.  You can see lots of photos over at The Torontoist where many (including me) have commented on various aspects of the station.

For me, one big issue is not just that it’s unfinished, but that in doing so, something is lost of the original design.  Just to refresh everyone’s memory, here is what we were supposed to get.

MuseumOriginalDesign

Note the curving ceiling that hides the plumbing and pulls the rows of columns together in a long gallery.  You won’t see that at Museum Station.  I suspect that the TTC didn’t want yet another specialized ceiling finish that would spend half its time disassembled while work went on above, but we’ve lost something important there.

Another issue is the large patches of painted concrete wall at intervals along the station.  Nothing is shown in the image of what might be there, and one wonders whether this was intended for advertising.

Speaking of advertising, there were ads present at the station until last weekend when their negative impact on the overall design was raised by some of us at Transit Camp to people who are in a position to get things changed.  They were.

The other change is that the old Metron, carefully preserved even though it didn’t work, was in the station right up to the weekend.  Odd how we’ve been told the problem is always with getting electrical work done for Onestop installations.  Funny how in a $5-million project they didn’t put in the conduits and wires for the new video screens.  They’re even shown in the drawing above, but that’s something else you won’t find at Museum.

I was kind of hoping the Metrons would stay as the beginning of a TTC museum of horology.  They could have relocated a few of the old analog clocks from Lower Bay to round out things.

Finally, there is an odd, unintended historic reference in the plaque describing each of the columns.  We learn that the red columns modelled on the Forbidden City would have held up yellow ceilings, a colour only the Emperor was allowed to use.  Yellow, of course, was the old colour of Museum Station, and it’s absent now at platform level.  No Emperors here I guess.

For me, Museum has too much the feel of a half-baked project.  Nice columns, but lots left to be done and nobody stepping up to pay for it.  If all this decor cost us five million, we were ripped off.

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Metrolinx Green Papers: What to do about Transit (Part 2)

In the first post of this series, I discussed some of the philosophy behind the coming Metrolinx Regional Transportation Plan.  Rather than getting into a lot of detail (that deserves a separate post), I want to talk about process.

[Oh no!  He’s going to go all policy wonk on us!  Let’s just go somewhere else for our evening’s entertainment!]

Sorry, folks, but how this process is going on is at least as important as the nitty gritty of all those reports and charts and maps.

Once upon a time, governments announced grand schemes, but nothing happened for quite a while.  Politicians fought over which line would be built first.  Then the engineers studied it, held public meetings, produced an Environmental Assessment, and waited for the money to flow.  Finally, a line was built (or not) and opened (or not), and the whole mess started over.

Then someone discovered that the Toronto way to build transit might be a tad short of world class, and that other cities just went out and did things.  It helped that the star attraction was in a European tourist haven, Madrid, rather than someplace with a lot of snow and a dour government.

Presto, chango!  Let’s get the EA process down from two years to one.  No sooner do we do that, than we want it down to 6 months!  We want results!  Now!  Today!  Before the next election! Continue reading →

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From Mars to Hamilton?

Saturday, April 5th was a beautiful, warm, sunny day, but over one hundred dedicated souls spent it in the basement of the MaRS Centre on College Street talking about transit. To my great delight, the crowd was not just the “usual suspects”, the transit afficionados who can be counted on to show up at every event, but a much broader group of people with strong interests in what can make the city and its transportation system work.

This was the second “Transit Camp” (last year’s dealt with the TTC’s website), and the first in a series of “un-conferences” about the Metrolinx Regional Transit Plan. Many folks from Metrolinx as well as the TTC and other agencies attended, but it was not a gathering of professionals where the general public sat meekly through hours of powerpoints. Indeed, this event generated far more wide-ranging discussions and feedback than we would normally see at a “formal” public participation event.

When this scheme first surfaced, I worried that the leap from a single topic Transit Camp to something as broad as a regional plan might founder through lack of focus and from the huge learning curve anyone new to the topic would have in absorbing work already done by Metrolinx. To my great delight, the event self-organized into roughly fifty discussions not one of which took the form of “let’s argue about Metrolinx Green Paper number 42”. Indeed, many of the topics lay in areas that Metrolinx studies only glance at.

This can be an opportunity for Metrolinx, but it can also be a dangerous rift between what matters to people about transportation and what Metrolinx is actually doing. Much of the official focus is on the maps, the proposals for various network options, and I expect we will see the usual tugs-of-war between regions each of which want at least three new subway lines to serve their town centres. But that’s not what a transportation network is all about, and many issues from the quality of space in which people travel to service and fare structures to the challenge of providing viable alternatives to auto trips fill the agenda.

Transit Camp was a useful reminder of this, and it underscores the need to look at the whole picture of transportation and travel experience, not just lines on a map.

The next event will be in early May, possibly somewhere to the west, maybe in Hamilton, with a third event somewhere in the east to follow. In the best tradition of unstructured events, things are still a bit vague.

By June, when the draft Regional Transportation Plan comes out, the discussions will inevitably change (printed maps always cause people to argue over the lines rather than the issues), and the tone of future Transit Camps may adjust accordingly.

Watch the Metronauts and Metrolinx pages for information on future events.

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Metrolinx Green Paper 7: What to do about Transit? (Part 1)

The Metrolinx consultation process leading to a new Regional Transportation Plan is in full swing complete with online feedbacks and a series of public meetings. Probably the most important of the seven “Green Papers” (documents for discussion) is the last, the one concerning transit.

You can read all 60+ pages or a very high level overview at Metrolinx site.

I am not going to attempt to boil all of this material (or the other 6 papers) down into posts here and leave it to readers to explore the Metrolinx site on their own. However, some aspects of the transit paper deserve comment as well as the process by which the new plan appears to be taking shape. Continue reading →

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It Must Be Spring: The SRT Computers Are Working Again

Those of us who make daily expeditions on the SRT have known, every winter, that operations get rather flaky once it gets cold and especially once there is a lot of snow. This year, the SRT stopped running in automatic mode around the start of February more or less when the major snowfalls came.

The first few weeks were a bit rocky with very long holds at stations as SRT control managed the trains by radio. Believe me, when the wind is howling through those stations, you don’t want to be sitting in a train with the doors open. (Of course, the SRT cars manage to have snowdrifts inside them even when the doors are closed, but that’s another matter.)

Later, the TTC seems to have figured out that running a line with six trains where the operator can easily see trains in front of them isn’t all that hard, and the quality of service improved quite a lot.

Finally, about last Wednesday (March 27), a miracle! A train pulls into Kennedy station without its marker lights flashing (the tell-tale sign of manual operation), and it behaves as if it is being run automatically.

I checked with the TTC to find out whether they had finally activated the new, replacement ATO system for Scarborough, but, no that won’t be ready or a few weeks yet, and they have revived the old one. The saddest part is that they never really needed it in the first place, but it’s a showcase for our technology, don’t ya know.

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An Unhappy April Fool’s Day

If you were looking for this site on April 1, there’s a good chance you found it off the air.

This was caused by an equipment fire in an internet hotel through which service to my host passes forcing a shutdown, rewiring and rerouting of various networks.