Lately I have been distracted by other events, and neglected to post information about the Jane LRT Environmental Assessment.  The display panels from the open houses can be found on the project website.  Note that three linked “display drawings” showing the detailed route layout on an aerial view of the line are quite large with the fine details visible only if they are viewed at 100% size.

There will be a joint presentation of the Jane and Eglinton LRT:

Monday September 22
6:30pm to 9:00pm
Centennial Recreation Centre West, gymnasium
2694 Eglinton Ave West
(just east of the York Civic Centre and adjacent to York Memorial Collegiate Institute)

The Jane LRT design is, putting it mildly, challenging because of the narrow right-of-way available for the south end of the route.  Alternatives including underground construction or reduction in the number of road lanes are being considered.  These will be a harder sell in the Jane corridor than on other Transit City routes because of the lower projected demand relative to the community impact and the cost of an underground option.  This would place the line underground south of Wilson Avenue, but would result in much wider average station spacing (1km if underground, 500m if on the surface).

Oddly, the same language about running LRV trains because of the difficulty of managing close headways is carried over from other EA materials.  This gives us the absurb claim that it is difficult to manage a headway of 3’30” of single cars, and a 7’00” headway of trains would be operated for reliability.  Contrast this with the Eglinton LRT EA where the proposed headways are 3-4 minutes.

At York University, there are three proposed routes to link the Jane LRT with Steeles West Station.  One stays completely on Jane and Steeles, one skirts the campus on the west side via Murray Ross Parkway, and one goes through the campus.

Two Metrolinx proposals (shown on the map published by the Star) include a northern extension of the Jane line to meet up with east-west service in York Region, and truncation of the south end at Eglinton where it would connect to whatever is built in the Eglinton corridor.  Also omitted, thanks to the ever-present Blue 22 line, is any mention of a service via the Weston rail corridor to Union Station.  Both of these schemes for the south end of the line would leave the Jane LRT serving only the portion of the route north of Eglinton with bus service remaining south to Bloor.  These options should be examined if only to determine their impact on peak service demand and the origin-destination pattern of riders in the Jane corridor.

The refined proposals for the Jane route will come back to a second series of open house meetings later in 2008.