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All Over The Waterfront (Update 4)

Update 1, March 17, 5:50 pm:  More details have been added about the various alignment options for the Waterfront West line through Parkdale.

Update 2, March 24, 7:55 pm:  Feedback from the TTC about Parkdale alignment details.  Details of Queen’s Quay public meetings added.

Update 3, March 25, 6:00 am:  The preferred option for the Kingston Road line is BRT.

Update 4, March 28, 11:10 pm:  The presentation from the March 25 public meeting on the Queen’s Quay redesign is now available online.  Note that this file is almost 18MB for those of you with slow network links.  The document is quite extensive, and I will review it in a separate post.

Transit planning on Toronto’s waterfront leaves much to be desired thanks to the patchwork of overlapping studies and projects for two decades.  Options for the portion between Parkdale and Bathurst Street have changed with the recent cancellation of the Front Street Extension, but no planning based on ths possibility has ever been conducted.

Throughout its history, planning for the waterfront has been fragmented and compromised to fit around whatever other projects had real political clout.  To help focus discussion of the waterfront as a whole, this post gives an overview of all of the projects and schemes from Long Branch to West Hill.

The Central Waterfront and Queen’s Quay

The original Harbourfront line (originally route 604, now 509) opened in June 1990.  This included the Union Station Loop, a substandard arrangement for transfer to the subway that the TTC originally claimed had a capacity of 7,000 passengers per hour.  Needless to say, demands far lower than this quickly overwhelmed the station.  Plans are afoot to substantially modify this loop (see details later in this article) in anticipation of major new demands from both the western and eastern waterfront.

The Harbourfront line operates from Union south and west to a loop at Spadina and Queen’s Quay, although service trackage connecting north to King via Spadina was installed as part of the Harbourfront project.  All of the original track predates the current standard for track construction with welded rails and acoustic isolation between the track and its surroundings.  This track is scheduled for replacement sometime in 2010 according to the TTC’s 5-year plan for trackwork contained in the current capital budget.

This could co-incide with construction activities to reconfigure Queen’s Quay itself as planned by Waterfront Toronto (see below).

East of Bay, the proposed LRT route will initially operate to Parliament Street pending the connection of Cherry Street through to a re-aligned Lake Shore and Queen’s Quay.  I discussed this scheme in my previous post on Harbourfront transit, but since then, more details have emerged about the street design east of Bay.

At a recent stakeholders meeting for community representatives, Waterfront Toronto presented details of the revised configuration for Queen’s Quay and its transit service from Bathurst east to near Parliament.  The materials from this meeting are not yet available online, but I can report on a few major issues:

  • The preferred design for Queen’s Quay, based on the international design competition concluded last year, is for the streetcars to remain roughly where they are today west of Bay, although there will be some changes in stop locations.  Queen’s Quay traffic will be reduced to the northern half of the existing street with some selected widening.  An outstanding debate is over a two-way versus a one-way option for this road.
  • The new eastern portal will bring streetcars to the surface for a stop at Freeland Street (one block east of Yonge).  From this location, the line will run along the south side of a narrowed Queen’s Quay in a design not unlike what is proposed west of Bay.
  • The south side of Queen’s Quay including what are now the eastbound lanes plus the sidewalk will be reconfigured for pedestrian and cyclist use.  Special arrangements are needed at a few locations near Bay (access to the Harbour Square condos) and Yonge (access to the Harbour Castle hotel).

Two public meetings are planned for this project :

  • Wednesday, March 25 at 6:30 pm, Harbour Castle Hotel, Metro West Ballroom.  This will be a formal presentation and discussion between 7:00 and 9:00 pm.  (Updated March 24)
  • Saturday, March 28 from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm in the Lakeside Terrace Room at Harbourfront Centre.  This will be an informal drop in centre where visitors will have a chance to review the plans and chat with staff.

Plans for Queen’s Quay have been evolving rapidly as Waterfront Toronto adapts to meet the needs of local property owners (access for servicing) and the tourism industry (provision for bus loading areas and parking).  Details of this work will be on display at the public meetings.

Gardiner Expressway EA

The proposed replacement of the Gardiner from Jarvis Street east to the Don River launches its Environmental Assessment with a series of public meetings in Etobicoke, Scarborough, Downtown and North York.

This will be a full-blown EA complete with an initial round for a Terms of Reference.  Typically, the ToR phase takes about a year and bores everyone to death.  However, it’s the only real “alternatives analysis” process we have in EA-land, and this is the stage where alternatives to be studied in detail are examined, included or rejected for the next stage.  The “do nothing” alternative is always there as a base case.

Cherry Street Redesign

The new design for Cherry Street has been settled for some time (link).  After considerable community discussion and design work, the layout will echo the new Queen’s Quay with a streetcar right-of-way on the east side of Cherry and road space on the west.  A good overview is in the TTC Report, or if you want all of the gory details, you can read through all of the background papers.

There will be a temporary loop on the east side of Cherry just north of the rail corridor pending a connection through to Queen’s Quay and the Portlands.

Lower Don Lands (Don Mouth / Cherry / Lake Shore / Queen’s Quay) & Port Lands

The many streets in this area will undergo major reshuffling to improve connections for transit and pedestrians in what is now a strongly car-oriented neighbourhood.  The plan includes:

  • A new underpass through the rail corridor embankment allowing enough capacity for road, transit, cycling and pedestrians between the Distillery District and the lakefront.
  • The Don itself will be freed from its industrial channelization as part of new parklands.
  • In the Port Lands, Cherry Street will be shifted west.

An overview of the plan from December 2008 pulls much of the information together in one place.  For more detail, review the project presentation.

A carhouse for the new streetcar fleet will likely be located in the Port Lands, and this project may accelerate construction of track through this area well ahead of what would occur if we had to await major new residential development and demand.  Connections to the streetcar system will likely be at Leslie and Cherry.  The TTC’s proposed map for the area includes a southerly extension of Broadview, but it is noticeably absent from the Lower Don Lands “preferred transit network”.

If all of the tracks shown on various maps were actually built, there would be many options for routes serving the lands from Bay east to Leslie, but the real question is how long it will take to actually develop the area.  Will the TTC (and the City/Province as funding agencies) make good on building transit in advance of development, or will we find ourselves with car-oriented suburbs in our last major downtown development?

I can’t help thinking of how Harbourfront has developed west from Yonge Street with a high density of residential and tourist land use, considerable servicing needs, and many demands for road space for traffic that will not be handled by even an ideal TTC service scheme.

Kingston Road

Almost forgotten among waterfront studies is the review of an LRT/streetcar service on Kingston Road in Scarborough.  This project got its start when Brian Ashton was on the TTC as a way of improving transit in southern Scarborough and stimulating redevelopment of the rather tired commercial areas on Kingston Road itself.

The proposal suffers from general neglect (it rarely appears on system maps such as “Transit City”), and there is the difficult question of a western terminus.  Should it follow Kingston Road to Bingham Loop and connect into the existing streetcar network there, or should it go to Victoria Park Station via Danforth and connect with the subway?  (A connection north on Victoria Park from Kingston Road is impractical due to road width.)

If the line connected at Bingham, what would the route into downtown be?  Via Queen all the way, or down Leslie, through the Port Lands and then west via Queen’s Quay to Union Station.  Whether the south route would be noticeably more attractive to riders is hard to say as the roundabout route could offset any benefit of transit priority on the new “LRT” network.

The project website was recently updated with announcements of three April meetings.

Updated March 25:

The current project newsletter reports that a BRT line running from Victoria Park Station east via Danforth and Kingston Road to Eglinton is the preferred alternative.  Mixed traffic running would occur only on Victoria Park.  The Danforth section would have a central bus lane, one traffic lane and one bicycle lane.  I find it quite astounding that the TTC thinks a single traffic lane is workable on Danforth.  This reminds me of the head-in-the-sand approach to LRT design for the Don Mills and Jane routes on narrow streets.

The technology choice is based on projected demand that, by implication, is not sufficient to sustain an LRT line.

Waterfront West / Union to CNE

The Waterfront West LRT (WWLRT) proposal has been around for nearly 20 years, but has suffered from incremental planning.  Originally [5MB] it would have served Ontario Place and new developments at the south side of the CNE lands, but this option was foreclosed by (a) Ontario Place’s short-sighted opposition to losing parking for a streetcar terminal and (b) the relocation of Exhibition Loop north under the Gardiner Expressway.  Once the line moved north, extension to the west by continuing the existing line became much easier, and the southern option was dropped.

This is only one of many anti-transit decisions taken over the years in the waterfront.  Put the streetcars where they are mostly out of the way even though, in the process, they also lose the potential benefit of actually going somewhere people want to travel.

There were several phases to the original proposal (see “The Longer Term Plan” on page ES-2 of the 1993 report linked above):

  • Construction of a new line skirting the south side of Exhibition Park to serve Ontario Place and then turning north to Dufferin Loop.
  • Improvement of the Queensway right-of-way including transit priority signalling, and extension of the reserved lane operation west to a new loop at Legion Road.  This was subsequently cut back to Park Lawn.
  • Implementation of new service between Dufferin Loop and Sunnyside either via Dufferin and King Streets, or via a new line in the rail corridor.
  • Implementation of a direct link from Dufferin to the core via Front and Bremner.

This shift to the north eliminated the purpose of serving redevelopment on the CNE grounds and Ontario Place, and left the route only as a new connection into Parkdale and southern Etobicoke.

East of the CNE, the line now runs in a reconfigured Fleet Street and turns south onto Queen’s Quay at Bathurst.  The intersection with Lake Shore at Bathurst (like its cousin at Spadina) is organized not for transit but for cars with extraordinarily long green times on Lake Shore.  Even when traffic is light, streetcars can wait a long time for a transit cycle to get through the intersection.  Will this be fixed?  I doubt it.

Planners decided that they needed a way to get WWLRT cars to Union Station without going through Bathurst/Fleet, and thus the Bremner Streetcar was bumped up in the priority list.

In one earlier version, the Bremner line was to begin east of Strachan and Fleet with cars turning north onto Fort York Boulevard (which becomes Bremner at Spadina), but this scheme was replaced with a branch north out of Exhibition Loop, down a ramp to the rail corridor, through the old Grand Trunk Cut under Strachan, along the south edge of Fort York and back onto the street just west of Bathurst.  This arrangement was announced with little notice and no public consultation in June 2008 by the TTC.  (It is described as the “Under the Gardiner” option in the linked report.)

This plan conflicts directly with the master plan for Fort York itself, but refinements are in the works to create a compromise that works for everyone.  The TTC’s dubious history at compromise leaves me waiting until I see a real plan before declaring that this problem is behind us.

East from Bathurst Street

Problems abound at the Bathurst Street bridge.  Although a replacement bridge project is already well advanced, it does not provide for GO Transit electrification that will require a higher clearance and, therefore, changes to the road profile.  This will affect the intersection of Fort York Boulevard and Bathurst.

The Bathurst Street Bridge project has also come in for criticism from the City’s Design Review Panel (see item 4).

Although there is a right-of-way included in Fort York Boulevard from Bathurst to Spadina, the problem remains of how a Bremner line can co-exist with the traffic south of Skydome.  Somewhere east of Spadina (or maybe even to the west), a Bremner line will have to dip underground to scoot around the Dome, the north side of the Air Canada Centre and into a connection with the expanded Union Station Loop.

At this point, I think it’s clear that much of this project is planned on a “make it up as you go along” basis given that the roads, as designed, do not generally provide for a transit right-of-way.

Front Street West

The Front Street Extension is now dead, and we can discuss transit through Liberty Village without the FSE’s “elephant in the room” effect.  Some have proposed that the WWLRT be shifted north of the rail corridor and follow Front (including a local road extension west from Bathurst).

This would have the advantage of removing the WWLRT completely from Fleet Street, but life gets difficult east from Bathurst.

The line could jog south over the new Bathurst Street bridge to Bremner, but this would add a pair of turns to the route and almost certainly major delays in service thanks to what passes for transit priority signalling in Toronto and the need for considerable transit green time for the turning movements (not to mention through service on Bathurst).

If the line continues east on Front from Bathurst, any transit right-of-way will take substantial road capacity from a street that acts as a ramp to the Gardiner much of the time.  Discussions about available road capacity downtown often treat existing road layouts as a given rather than considering the combined effects of new developments and transit additions to the streetscape.

Once a Front Street line reaches University, it meets a substantial problem at Union Station.  From York to Bay, Front will undergo a major transformation to be much more a street for pedestrians and taxis, not a through street for motor traffic.  The proposed new designs have no room for a transit right-of-way and loading platforms.

Finally, the new “city” streetcar fleet is planned to be single-ended cars, and a Front Street line could not simply end at a stub terminal.

Union Station

The TTC’s design for Union Loop has not changed much in the past year.  (A map of the design appears in recent notes from a Queen’s Quay Transit meeting at slide 48, right at the end of the document.)  The proposed changes would:

  • Add two tracks, one in each direction, outside of the existing structure.  Cars northbound in the Bay Street tunnel could choose whether to take the inner (existing) or outer (new) tracks.  These tracks would rejoin at the north end only to circle the tight loop, and cars could  pick either the inner or outer track southbound.
  • New platforms running much of the length of the new outer tracks will replace the very constrained loading space in the existing loop.  Cars will offload on the east (northbound) platform and load on the west (southbound) platform.
  • Crossovers will be provided so that cars on different routes can bypass each other, an arrangement similar to that now used at Exhibition Loop.

There will be a direct connection to the new northbound-Yonge platform of the subway which is at the same elevation as the streetcar loop.

The design proposes a connection into the GO concourse from the west platform, but this will require some change from the original scheme to allow for the new, lower concourse in the reconfigured Union railway station.  That concourse will be at the same elevation as the mezzanine level of the subway station.

Part of the new loop’s complexity arises from the connection to the Bremner streetcar tunnel.  The TTC has talked about undertaking the Union Loop project in stages, but it will be difficult to get the full benefit of the two new platforms without building much of the design in the first stage.

Parkdale & Sunnyside

The WWLRT heads west from the existing Exhibition Loop parallel to the rail corridor to Dufferin Street.  At some point close to Dufferin, the line swings to the north side of the corridor with the intention of running in or along the embankment.  The TTC’s preference has been to ramp up onto King Street some distance east of Roncesvalles through the Beatty Parkette.  This connection would route the WWLRT directly through Queen & Roncesvalles for connections with other routes as well as direct carhouse access.

Various designs for this leg of the WWLRT are available on the project’s public consultation site.

However, considerable opposition arose last year to the proposed alignment and how it would affect plans for revitalisation of the western waterfront.  That plan is now complete and it includes two options for the WWLRT:

  • Connect in to King Street as planned by the TTC.  This is described as the likely option given that the TTC seems unwilling to give up the alignment through Queen & Roncesvalles.
  • Continue west in the median of a realigned Lake Shore Boulevard to Colbourne Lodge Road (the main street through High Park, and the second stop on the Queensway right-of-way), then turn north to connect into the existing Queensway trackage.

The TTC talks about carhouse access on its preferred route, but this is a red herring because the carhouse is only a short trip east from Colbourne Lodge Road.  What will be more difficult would be transfers at Roncesvalles to and from the WWLRT.  There will be a tradeoff in simplifying operations at the intersection where a frequent new WWLRT service would have to compete for green time with the King and Queen cars, not to mention other traffic.

Plans are underway to add an east-to-north left turn lane at this intersection for autos, and that of course will bring a loss of through green time in the best tradition of “transit priority signalling”.  I am not convinced that the TTC has thought through just how this intersection would operate with all of the demands that will be placed on it.

At this point, the TTC has not published a response to the proposed Western Waterfront plan, and we don’t know which is their preferred way to get from Dufferin to Sunnyside.

Updated March 17:  The various schemes for the route between Dufferin and Sunnyside are shown in two sets of presentation drawings on the project site.  The first part (at pages 17 and 18) show major route options 1 and 2.  Options 1A and 1B differ only in the side of the rail corridor that the route will take west of Dufferin before it turns south to meet Lake Shore Boulevard.  Options 2A through 2C deal with various alignments between Dufferin and Jameson, while options 2i and 2ii show different ways of approaching the Queen/King/Roncesvalles intersection.

These options are evaluated in tables that actually appear in the second part along with major route options 3 and 4.  Option 3 contains many variations on routes including more substantial running in Lake Shore Boulevard.  Various sub-options include alternative places for crossings north to King or Queensway.  Option 4 is the most southerly of the combinations.

The tables on pages 3 to 10 of the second part show how these options were winnowed down to four.

  • Either the north or south alignment west of Dufferin is acceptable for group 1, and all three alignments are acceptable for group 2.
  • The Roncesvalles connection “ii” is preferred to running along King Street because this limits the effect on King itself and separates the connection with Queensway from the main intersection.  However, this would create a pair of closely spaced intersections that is bound to give traffic engineers nightmares.  Ironically, this alignment interferes with traffic in the proposed east-to-north left turn lane on Queensway.
  • Group 3 has a sub-sub-option of running parallel to King at the level of the rail corridor or at the level of King Street itself.  The latter option is preferred because this makes the route more accessible than if it is lower.
  • Group 4 (the southernmost aligment) option A (cross to Queensway at Roncesvalles) gets the nod because it, like other similar schemes, avoids building all the way to Colbourne Lodge Road.

Futher route selection work stopped last year to allow completion of the Western Waterfront plan.

(Update 2, March 24)

Recently, I received an update on the status of various alternatives.  The following text is from the TTC by way of the Project Co-ordinator.

The three alignments carried forward are all similar between Dufferin and Jamieson Avenue. They share the following traits:

South side of the Gardiner, crossing to the corridor between the Gardiner and CN Rail, with a stop at Spencer, crossing Dunn to stop at Jamieson.

To confirm, the following options beyond that point are all still under consideration:

3Bii – continues past Jamieson to Dowling where it crosses the Dowling Bridge and goes along the CN embankment to a station at Roncesvalles and joins the Queensway opposite the Roncesvalles Yard at a new signalized intersection

TTC has very recently developed a new option that will be called “3Bii modified”. This will be presented for feedback at the next round of consultations. It would continue past Dowling between the Gardiner and CN Rail corridor and rise up to cross the corridor east of Roncesvalles and continue in the embankment to a station at Roncesvalles to join the Queensway opposite the Roncesvalles Yard at a new signalized intersection.

3Ai – from Jamieson crosses back over the Gardiner to the centre of the Lake Shore and rises up from a point in front of the Boulevard Club to cross the Gardiner and CN Rail corridors east of Roncesvalles. It continues in the embankment to a station at Roncesvalles to join the Queensway opposite the Roncesvalles Yard at a new signalized intersection.

The option to continue to Colbourne Lodge was discarded based on additional cost, duplication of track, and poor connection to the Roncesvalles intersection.

Connecting to the King track at Wilson Park was discarded due to the complications of developing an effective connection to the Queensway at Roncesvalles. The intersection is already congested and it would become more so if another service were added to turn at that location. To improve the intersection would involve property acquisition and impacts on existing cultural sites.

All three options connect into Queensway at a new intersection west of Roncesvalles opposite the carhouse.  This strikes me as a rather odd design — two intersections in close spacing — that could be difficult to operate even though the primary conflicts would be between WWLRT cars and eastbound traffic on The Queensway.  The full design and signalling scheme, including transit priority, for this intersection need to be explained along with structural details of the proposals described above.

[End of update]

Southern Etobicoke

Finally, we have the service in Etobicoke.  When the Transit City map was drawn up, the WWLRT was shown as running all the way to Long Branch Loop at Brown’s Line.  Current service is provided by half of the Queen cars running through from downtown, and I have discussed the problems of this arrangement at length elsewhere.

Later this year, short turn operations will shift from Humber Loop west to the new Park Lawn Loop planned for construction in the summer.  This will improve service for the Humber Bay condos (at least the ones east of Park Lawn), but it won’t do anything for people living further west.

The TTC is now conducting a study of a transit right-of-way on Lake Shore.  There is some opposition to the proposed street changes from affected communities.  The situation is almost surreal with a reserved lane study for a street that now sees as little service as the TTC can get away with running, and where streetcars are rarely trapped in any congestion.

Summary

Keeping track of all of the studies on various parts of waterfront transit can be challenging, and I’m sure that there’s information I have missed here.  My faithful readers/commentators will fill in the blanks, no doubt.

49 thoughts on “All Over The Waterfront (Update 4)”

  1. Are you going to comment on the Scarborough-Malvern LRT (as you mentionned from Long Branch to West Hill in your introduction)?

    Steve: West Hill was the end of the old Kingston Road Radial car, and this counts as “Waterfront”. Malvern is decidedly inland.

    Ergo, no.

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  2. Hi Steve,

    If the WWLRT connection to Union loop is getting pricey, should the following alternative be considered:

    Since DRL subway is now on the books anyway, extend Phase I to Queen-Dufferin. Then, build a 1.5 km LRT tunnel between Roncesvalles and Dufferin.

    That would let Etobicoke South LRT operate off the Queen-Dufferin subway station, leave the subway open for future extension north-west towards Bloor, and focus the Union loop on serving Waterfront west and east.

    Steve: Extending the DRL to Dufferin from Union (or wherever it crosses Yonge) would cost well over half a billion, plus the cost of your proposed tunnel to Roncesvalles. You are proposing a billion dollar “solution” to a cost issue one-tenth the size. There is likely a career for you in a few agencies I can think of.

    Also, the DRL is by no means a done deal at this point.

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  3. Just curious- how has ridership been on the 29D that actually runs west out of the exhibition grounds? I rarely see people use it, although it seems to me that it would, combined with route 509, provide a fairly quick alternative to King Street.

    Steve: I don’t see this route often, but would offer a comment on trying to make this sort of trip. First, you need to be close enough to Dufferin not to require the 504 just to reach the bus route. If you’re already on the 504, you might as well stay there. Second, the 509 doesn’t run very often and you could make a rotten connection at Exhibition Loop. I suspect that the probable running time via the route you propose is at least as bad as the 504.

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  4. Steve said: Extending the DRL to Dufferin from Union (or wherever it crosses Yonge) would cost well over half a billion, plus the cost of your proposed tunnel to Roncesvalles. You are proposing a billion dollar “solution” to a cost issue one-tenth the size. There is likely a career for you in a few agencies I can think of.

    Let’s see: Extending the DRL to Dufferin, indeed can cost around a billion. LRT tunnel from Dufferin to Roncesvalles (1.5 km) will likely cost 100 – 200 M. Hence, 1.2 B is a reasonable total estimate.

    But the Bremner LRT proposal is nowhere near one-tenth of 1.2 B. The cost of WWLRT per Transit City is near 700 M, and almost all of that is slated for the connection from Roncesvalles to Union loop. (ROW already exists on Queensway west of Roncesvalles, while creating ROW on Lakeshore in Etobicoke was not on the table until recently.)

    Thus, it is 1.2 B for my proposal versus 700 M for Bremner LRT. On its own, Bremner LRT still wins.

    However, if DRL west is a likely future project, then my proposal is actually more cost-effective. That 1 B for DRL subway to Dufferin would have to be spent anyway. So, the difference between the two options boils down to 200 M for the Roncesvalles – Dufferin tunnel, versus 700 M for the much longer, and partly tunneled, connection from Roncesvalles to Union loop.

    Perhaps I should apply for a position in a nonprofit watchdog, overseeing the efficiency of public spending 🙂

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  5. There where three options considered to connect the WWLRT to Queensway. The two you listed, via Colbourne Lodge and via King Steet have been rejected by the WWLRT EA. They plan to make the connection just west of the Queen & Roncesvalles intersection in order to avoid of congestion of that intersection, but take advantages of the existing Queensway ROW.

    The presentation you link only says, “then we propose that the Streetcar cross the railway to the North at or before Dowling – in order to avoid a new bridge across Gardiner and Railway”. That can work with connecting west of Queen & Roncesvalles and is option 3B(ii) of the WWLRT, which is the one I was recommending.

    Steve: Thanks for the clarification. None of the materials online that I found were up-to-date enough to indicate exactly which route the WWLRT study now favoured. The “west of Roncesvalles” scheme will make for interesting traffic designs with two signalized intersections quite close together.

    I know that the WWLRT study has “rejected” various options, but that’s part of the reason the whole thing was put on hold pending the western waterfront master plan. I am going to contact the project itself to verify the situation.

    Meanwhile, the detailed design can be seen here (warning: large file, but it stands up to magnification to see the details).

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  6. Steve,

    I can see your point about the haphazard planning the Bremner streetcar line has been subjected to, but the solution to the narrowness of Bremner east of Spadina doesn’t look like it could be underground… wouldn’t there be conflicts with the Skydome loading dock and the Convention Centre?

    It’s a shame, but it looks like all of those meticulously-spaced little trees on Bremner will have to be sacrificed to a right-of-way widening of some sort… or maybe just make Bremner a pedestrian zone between Spadina and York?

    Steve: And I am sure we would quickly find that the “capacity” of Bremner has been factored into traffic projections for the reconfigured Queen’s Quay. The lack of inter-project co-ordination is quite staggering.

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  7. The Union station plans are rather revealing…
    * The amount of retail being proposed leads me to suspect the plan depends on this for a large chunk of funding.
    * Performing such major construction works while keeping the station functional (and prefably without clogging up completely every morning and evening) is going to be extremely difficult.
    * There is a surprising lack of mention of retail on the GO Transit concourse level.
    * The GO Transit concourse will have a higher floor than present… which leads me to worry that it will be even more claustrophobic than it is now. However, I’m assuming that it will mean the end of the mezzanine levels at the back. The best option would be to ensure the staircases are as open as possible (no enclsoed like they are now), to let light come down from the (glass-roofed) trainshed.
    * Speaking of staircases, are there are any new ones planned? The more the merrier.

    Steve: Taking your points in order:

    The amount of retail has actually been cut back from the original scheme. It provides some but not all of the funding. Worth noting is that a huge increase in capacity just for GO is required and some funding is coming from that source.

    I have not yet seen the construction staging plan, but it’s fairly clear that the new west wing structures will have to be built first so that the east wing can be closed for that phase of the work.

    The retail is concentrated on the lower level to preserve room for passengers on the GO level. I have not yet seen the final plans to know just how much convenience retail (e.g. coffee, newspapers) will be available “upstairs”.

    The new higher floor of the GO level means that the switchback mezzanine scheme now at the south end won’t be required. To give you a sense of relative spacing, the new GO concourse is at roughly the same elevation as the central VIA concourse (only a few inches different, I think).

    Yes, there will be more staircases. You can see some of this in the detailed presentation info.

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  8. Does the TTC expect there to be any “local riders” between Roncesvalles and Bathurst street or are they providing an express service with limited stops for the Toronto Lawn Tennis and Sailing Club and The Boulevard Club users. I am sure that they will make good use of this service. Is there going to be any way for residents of Parkdale to get to this route easily?

    Steve: Part of the design discussions involve making stops along the south edge of Parkdale easily accessible from the streets to the north.

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  9. There’s a whole raft of vocal opposition to the Lake Shore PRW. I don’t know if it’s any more vocal or (in my view) misguided than elsewhere. Councillor Grimes requested more meetings. As a result:

    “Planning is currently underway to hold additional “preliminary planning” meetings for the WWLRT. Meetings are likely to be held in late April or early May.”

    These would be somewhere from Mimico through Long Branch.

    Steve: Yes, I really don’t understand the push to drive a right-of-way all the way to Long Branch. If we had streetcars every five minutes stuck in traffic, I might have some sympathy, but when headways as low as 10 minutes can be considered “good”, and cars routinely take lengthy siestas at Long Branch Loop, the idea of wasting money on this part of the project is a travesty. It needlessly poisons a community toward the proposal when what they really need is much better service, not a repeat of the St. Clair upheaval.

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  11. Steve writes:

    “I really don’t understand the push to drive a right-of-way all the way to Long Branch. If we had streetcars every five minutes stuck in traffic, I might have some sympathy….what they really need is much better service”

    The way I see it, if there isn’t enough streetcar traffic to warrant a ROW, and route management remains iffy, then maybe the TTC should build a ROW and thus be forced to run frequent, reliable service. I did get assurances that, as part of the WWLRT, Lake Shore would receive more frequent service than it does at present. I forget if that was in the materials or verbal assurances from staff.

    “Build it and they will come.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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  12. As part of the patchwork of poor planning that plagues us, we’ve never really thought of restoring transit usage to Front St., including on the surface into the Union Station area, and also pushing the first phase of the DRL to the Queen/Dufferin area as a quickstart item.
    The WWLRT does try to fulfill two functions of improving east-west from Etobicoke to the core, but also with improving transit to the Lakefront areas.

    The best quick option for the Etobicoke in may well be to use smaller trainset of GO trains running every 20 minutes or so on the GO tracks and of course it would be complicated, but it could free up c. $500/600 M some of which could be used for studies of LRT backups and of better surface transit.

    Having the FSE gone does open up two options for better transit – one being through to the west, the other being something of the DRL line up to Bloor, assuming that the Blue22/GO mess doesn’t derail this needed line, and the cyclists can manage to have the higher/better use of this rare corridor go to transit, and I’m pushing that angle, though ideally we should be able to have both fitted in somehow.

    I favour surface for the most part, just because of cost reasons.
    But getting an express route into the core from the Queen.Dufferin area – or at least an expedited route – could solve a couple of problems in my view, eg. Queen/King poor service, while staking out transit on Front. for larger/longer service. Wellington St. is also a potential for some transit, though less so in the core perhaps.

    It’s uphill getting all of this stuff studied, because the politicians want to waste/spend money despite potential savings.

    We could also improve/get service to Ontario Place by doing a short quick loop of the existing LRT in the Ex area to go through the Ex to the front entrance area/bridge over the Lakeshore, then loop back up, and this would truly be a quickstart, with the added EA bonus of perhaps doing away with a stinking loud car race.

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  13. With respect to the Lakeshore ROW in Etobicoke, how much intensification do you foresee in that area? Is the ROW here being pushed in anticipation of westward continuation of the high-rise condo projects found further east? If so, then it seems like a rare bit of prescience on the part of the TTC.

    Steve: Some further redevelopment is likely eventually. The question is whether it is going to happen in sufficient quantity to trigger the need for a right of way in, say, the next 10 years. Also, the further west you go, the more likely that people living there will work to the north and west, not downtown.

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  14. Re: WWLRT & Southern Etobicoke

    As suggested in some comments on the St. Clair LRT post there is some opposition brewing.
    The Lakeshore Planning Council is bringing in Margaret Smith (of Save Our St. Clair) & Jeff Gillan (executive director of Corso Italia) for a public meeting
    Thursday March 26, 2009
    7:30–9:00 p.m.
    LAMP building, 185 Fifth Street (at Birmingham Ave. which is the first street north of Lakeshore)
    Planning Council Phone Number-416-252-9701 ext. 240

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  15. “The Lakeshore Planning Council is bringing in Margaret Smith (of Save Our St. Clair) & Jeff Gillan (executive director of Corso Italia) for a public meeting.”

    I’m not sure how much of a sideshow the Lakeshore Planning Council really is. The last meeting I was at was run farcically badly. I’m not going back.

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  16. From what i’ve heard is that part of the reason the TTC and the city are pushing so hard for the LRT to be built in southern Etobicoke is that the city wants to completly transform the whole Lakeshore strip in southern Etobicoke into some higher density buildings and they are proposing tearing down all the other small buildings. I think if the city and TTC get their way this is step one in their mega development and I think all residents should oppose this LRT in southern Etobicoke. There is 0% congestion here and we don’t need this area to become like a mini Cityplace.

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  17. The latest newsletter for the Kingston Road project indicates that the preferred solution is BRT using 2A from Victoria Park, Danforth, and Kingston Road. Centre-of-the-road BRT in dedicated is something that’s different to the rest of the projects discussed here.

    While this might well be the best solution for people on Kingston Road east of Kennedy, trying to get to the subway, it does seem to further fragment and orphan service on Kingston Road between Victoria Park and Danforth.

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  19. On the lakeshore “transit city” line:

    If we are getting single-end cars for the legacy network, and double-end cars for Transit City; and if we are not building the Jane line ASAP – therefore meaning the Transit City and Legacy networks will not connect – then just *why* is the lakeshore line considered a “Transit City” line?

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  20. For the WWLRT, I would prefer to see the route run along Lakeshore and connect up to Roncesvalles with a new bridge over the Gardiner.

    This would make Roncesvalles a true transit hub for LRT/streetcars and reconnect an entire group of neighbourhoods (Roncevalles/Parkdale) with a direct connection to the waterfront, like they used to have, before the Gardiner Expressway was rammed through.

    I also think it makes more sense to run it along Lakshore as much as possible to help bring better transit access to facilities along the lake. It would help with those parking problems that occur along the western waterfront during major summer events like Caribana, The EX, Ontario Place, Palais Royale, Air Show, etc…

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  21. Why don’t they just double end all the new LRVs so they can be interchangable between the two systems? Seems like a waste.

    Steve: Because we will need a few hundred cars to run on a network that has loops, not crossovers, and the extra cost of double cabs and double doors is not justified.

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  22. What’s wrong with starting out with some quasi-BRT services, like Viva in York Region, or what Brampton’s building, or the 700-series “Rapid Bus” routes in Los Angeles (distinct from the full-BRT Orange Line there). Wouldn’t that make sense in the short-to-medium term – with signal priority, fare pre-payment, queue-jumps and limited stops to improve transit reliability and speed with minimal capital improvement. In fact, I would suggest this for a number of the TTC’s busy bus corridors, some of which are getting Transit City, and some which are being left alone.

    If your’re going to go BRT like this, you might as well make it part of Transit City. A full BRT ROW in Kingston Road is ridiculous.

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  23. I’ve been pondering this. If they build a Kingston Road BRT, orphaning the current service between Victoria Park and Danforth Avenue, would it not make sense to extend the current Kingston Road streetcar service in mixed traffic, just a bit farther to replace the orphaned service? Either to Kingston Road/Danforth Avenue or better yet just Danforth Avenue/Birchmount where there seems to be no shortage of land for a loop.

    In addition to replacing the orphaned service, it provides much better continuity of service along Kingston Road from Woodbine to Birchmount, and finally ends the Kingston Road streetcar on a major transit route. (continuing up Birchmount and running back on St. Clair to Warden is tempting as well, though obviously a much more major cost).

    Steve: First the TTC has to decide that Kingston Road deserves better than a 20-minute daytime headway.

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  24. One disadvantage of choosing BRT over LRT for Kingston south of Eglinton, is the lost chance to connect the legacy streetcar network and the LRT network.

    With the Kingston link missing and the Jane South link uncertain, I even wonder if it makes sense to implement the Transit City LRT network using the “Toronto” gauge, or switch to standard gauge (which will increase the chance of purchasing cheaper off-the-shelf vehicle models).

    On the other hand, a potential advantage of Kingston BRT is that parts of it could be shared with other bus routes (Bellamy, Midland, Markham Rd.)

    One general traffic lane each way on Danforth might work, provided that the BRT lane is available as an emergency backup: when a car is stuck in the general traffic lane, or when a long truck is turning and needs more than one lane.

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  25. Steve: First the TTC has to decide that Kingston Road deserves better than a 20-minute daytime headway.

    Ah, but I only go that way on weekends – when the headway is every 11 to 12 minutes 🙂 And perhaps that’s the solution. Simply extend the Coxwell bus all the way to Birchmount 24/7. Though that would probably destroy the currently reliability of the Coxwell bus in rush-hour.

    As to the comments about if they are going to BRT, they might as well go to LRT. What’s the cost-difference between installing BRT compared to LRT? If it’s much cheaper, then it might well make sense to put in BRT, as it would be easier to convert it to LRT in the future, if/when passenger demand grows, and would also allow for the use of buses which carry less passengers than 3-car LRT vehicles.

    Seems to me to be a great solution for Danforth and Kingston Road east of Birchmount!

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  26. Nicholas, there is a problem with the idea. They narrowed Birchmount Rd. to one lane for the bike community. I can’t say for sure if it’s well used, but try telling the people in my neck of the woods to throw some tracks on the last two lanes on Birchmount. You wouldn’t get very far, plus it’s a twenty minute service on the 69 via birchmount and warden. (69 what an odd route) People are also complaining it’s a waste because there’s some seats on the bus that are not used. In due time Birchmount south of St. Clair to Danforth rd. is going to be more dense, (another nimby freakout for another 12-15 story building going up and what is now a visitors parking lot, to a transit only development. Could be mistaken but that is word of mouth at the moment, and the building is going up regardless of what the parking situation.) so I think the 69 will see an increase in ridership to a standing room point. But that is the situation in my neck of the woods.

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  27. I arrive at the same sort of conclusion as Sean Marshall, by a different route. If projected demand isn’t high enough to warrant LRT, is it high enough to warrant this project being on the list for a major projects? By all means, they should look for “quick wins” that can be done with bus/HOV lanes, queue jumps, etc. But a full-fledged road redesign? Looking beyond the Transit City lines, there are other corridors (Finch East being the most obvious example) that have a higher level of demand and seem like a better candidate for major improvements.

    Unless, of course, the TTC plans Kingston Road as sort of a BRT demonstration project — but that approach didn’t work so well for St. Clair as a precursor to Transit City.

    Steve: Kingston Road as a higher-order corridor is left over from Brin Ashton’s days on the TTC. It arises from the same sort of “planning” that got a South Kingsway extension of the Jane LRT proposed by Bill Sundercook and added as an option to be studied for Transit City. Nobody on the Commission has the guts to tell him it’s a hopelessly ridiculous idea.

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  28. If the “Preferred Option” for Kingston Road is BRT then they really should just not bother at all. What a joke.

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  29. It will be interesting to see how the Gardiner EA deals with that other elephant in the room; how the central waterfront will deal with 6000 cars an hour coming into it with nowhere to go now that front street has been killed in perpetuity. I have to admit the downtown political activists are geniuses; they’ll never actually state their goal of closing the Gardiner at the Humber bridge but by making the continued existence of the road virtually impossible, that is the inevitable outcome. I’m all for transit expansion, but I’ve never understood how it can be used to ship goods but maybe the TTC is planning to start pulling a few goods cars behind streetcars and running sidings into alleys to supply shops and restaurants. We’re told this doesn’t matter; that there’s no correlation between economic activity and good roads, yet interestingly there has been no net new job creation in central Toronto in the last 20 years. People yes, but the jobs followed the new 400-series highways the province built in 905.

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  30. I attended the waterfront Queen’s quay redevelopment meeting last night and here are some comments on it:

    They hope to increase the speed of the LRT to 17 to 21 km/h with an average stop spacing of 325 m.
    Platform widths will be 2.4 to 3 m.
    It will be a south side LRT with two traffic lanes to the north and walking, biking, Martin Goodman Trail to the South.
    Two way is favoured slightly over one way, mainly because a one way westbound would require the LRT tracks remain in concrete to provide for east bound emergency vehicles. They would like to put the tracks with grass between the rails.
    Charter bus parking would be provided under the Gardiner with bays on Queen’s Quay for loading and unloading of passengers.
    The Queen’s Quay merchants and retailers need the charter bus business to stay alive. They only have a three month window of good business followed by nine months of winter.
    The site needs to develop all year around attractions to keep people coming.
    The York Bay exit ramp will be redesigned, probably getting rid of the loop by starting farther to the west and being a straight down ramp.
    The PATH system is being extended south to Lakeshore Road in the new buildings and hopefully to Queen’s Quay.
    There will be a new south exit to Union Station.
    Construction would start, hopefully, in September of 2010 with the complete rebuilding of the North lanes while all traffic is diverted to the existing south lanes. When the north lanes are rebuilt then the south lanes would be torn up.
    The meeting was 99% positive with only a few objections to removing two lanes of traffic.
    The platforms at the new Union Station street car loop will be able to hold two car trains of the new LRV’s according to the TTC guy. If you look at the plan, the two north bound unloading platforms and the northern south bound loading plat form seem to be twice as long as the southern loading platform.

    Some other things that I noticed before the meeting that might be of interest:

    I saw two ALRV’s on King signed 504 CHURCH VIA KING.
    For collectors of outdated TTC signage the local area map at the exit from Union Subway Station to the moat shows that TTC service on Queen’s Quay is provided by the 77B and 510 routes. It is nice of the TTC to provide direct service from Swansea to Queen’s Quay.
    The 511 Bathurst service was a mess because the south bound curb lane was closed from Fort York Boulevard to Fleet and Fleet west bound was closed at Bathurst. That line really needs a loop near King to short turn south bound service to go back north.
    The west end York Concourse for GO transit is being used on a steady basis but not as heavily as the Bay concourse.

    Steve:
    I agree that Bathurst needs a short turn near King much like Spadina has. Hmmm … east on Adelaide, south on, oh, Portland.


    I like the plan that has the WWLRT line using the abandoned rail line and bridges to go under Strachan and then go under the Gardiner to get to Union. If this is doable it makes use of existing rights of way and stays out of Bremner Boulevard. The plan for the new loop shows the tracks coming out at the south end of the existing rail tracks. I would urge people to go to the open house Saturday if they are at all interested in the area.

    Steve: The main issue with the under Gardiner alignment is avoiding conflict with the Fort York site. I believe that most if not all of the problems at that location have been worked out. Robert’s term “coming out at the south end of the existing rail tracks” refers to the rail corridor as it crosses Bay Street.

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  31. Tom B, this is not a conspiracy. A lot of people would like to see the Gardiner taken down, and they are quite open about it.

    New jobs have appeared in downtown Toronto — two major new skyscrapers are going up by First Canadian Place right now. True, these white collar gains only offset the losses from deindustrialization.

    This deindustrialization is not unusual. Even in cities perforated by highways — say, Detroit or Atlanta — there is now little manufacturing being done in the cores. Toronto would still have almost no manufacturing left downtown even if we had bulldozed neighbourhoods to put in place the Spadina, Scarborough, and Eglinton expressways.

    Incidentally, streetcars are used for goods transport in parts of the Netherlands.

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  32. Robert Wightman commented on the meeting, “They would like to put the tracks with grass between the rails.”

    That is quite the change of heart from the TTC. A contact on the inside told me last year at one of the Eglinton-Crosstown LRT open houses that their track maintenance department frowns on ballasted-tie construction. He went on to wonder what they would think of about growing grass on the track bed in a way that suggested this would be further down on their list.

    This is popular in France and a number of other places, such as in Oslo: http://lrt.daxack.ca/Oslo/index.html

    Steve: Remember that this is Waterfront Toronto’s plan. There are a few big problems with the grass in our environment. First, if an emergency vehicle drives onto it, the grass needs to be replaced. It certainly needs to be watered. Hmmm … maybe we can have a water car. In the winter, ploughing the right of way will be tricky to avoid digging up the ground/grass or getting the blade caught on the tracks which will no longer be encased on concrete. How does Oslo handle this?

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  33. “Nicholas, there is a problem with the idea. They narrowed Birchmount Rd.”

    For the 400 metres from Kingston Road to Danforth, there is more than enough room in the 27-metre ROW for 2 dedicated tracks, and 2 of traffic. The Danforth BRT has 4 lanes, bike paths, and wide sidewalks in a 27-metre ROW.

    And then you also have the option of moving the bike lanes into the very wide strip of grass next to the ROW, because the entire thing is adjacent to a city park!

    Another issue for the Danforth section of the BRT. There’s no space for parking. There’s a fair bit of retail along Danforth east of Victoria Park, and unlike Bloor Downtown, it would appear that this retail is very car-dependent. I’m not sure they local retailers are going to losing 2 parking lanes and having bike lanes introduced. I’d think having them suffer 2 BRT lanes is enough, and bike lanes can go elsewhere (Gerrard/Clonmore/Hollis?), so that there is at least space for one row of parking.

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  34. Steve wrote, “In the winter, ploughing the right of way will be tricky to avoid digging up the ground/grass or getting the blade caught on the tracks which will no longer be encased on concrete. How does Oslo handle this?”

    Good question – though I was there in February 2008, the average temperature during my stay was +7C during the day, all the time the GTA was averaging -7C! 🙂

    I was about to speculate that it is probably handled similar to the way full railways have “flanger” signs to indicate where blades must be raised for switches, crossings, and guard rails. None of my photos show this to be the case, but I have to ask is this really a problem?

    I was thinking that LRT/streetcar tracks don’t have to have the flange ways cleared of snow, so plowing only requires a blade wider than the gauge that straddles the rails, but on our concrete encased tracks, the concrete is a little higher than the top of the rails. In Oslo, there tends to be a bit of crown to the pavement between the rails, though in some photos, it appears that there is a bit of a pavement transition from being level with rail heads to where there is a crown. One photo that suggests this is http://lrt.daxack.ca/Oslo/hires073.jpg

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  36. “I like the plan that has the WWLRT line using the abandoned rail line and bridges to go under Strachan and then go under the Gardiner to get to Union. If this is doable it makes use of existing rights of way and stays out of Bremner Boulevard.”

    Steve, can you please clarify?

    I thought the plan was to have WW run under the Gardner only as far as Bathurst and then Fort York/Bremner east from there.

    Are we now talking about staying “under the Gardner” all the way to Union?

    Steve: No, the line swings into the middle of Fort York/Bremner west of Bathurst at the point where there is a Gardiner Pier right in the middle of the road.

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  37. The only benefit I could see from the Kingston Rd. BRT is the potential tie-in with the DRT BRT along Hwy. 2. They’re still trying to figure out where to end the service with Scarborough Town Centre and U of T Scarborough being the top choices followed by Kennedy station. The TTC’s section would be able to facilitate this if they allowed DRT to use the corridor. I guess since the North Yonge subway is supplanting the BRT corridor they’re moving it here instead.

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  38. Leo Petr – my post probably came off as a bit reactionary (I do get worked up sometimes!) but I think that while most capital should go into transit expansion that in TO, we need to respect that roads have an important place as they serve a somewhat different need that transit is hard pressed to fill (goods movement). The cost of Front Street was a drop in the bucket when compared against the planned transit expansion in the city and would have facillitated the eventual taking down of all the elevated Gardiner (though it should not have been built until such a plan were in place with funding). The notion that it was a new “expressway” was absurd. I think taking it out of the Official Plan was pure “aha” politics and will be regretted 20 years from now when the elevated Gardiner may well have to be rebuilt from scratch, and, as an aside, there will likely be a new generation of emissions free small vehicles to buy.

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  39. Mark Gold wrote, “Looks like from the pictures … that the only place that Oslo has grass between the tracks is when the LRT is on traveling on a completely separate ROW”

    That is not correct. There is a stretch of median ROW on Kirkeveien for about a kilometre. The photo link in my follow-up comment above shows the Vigelandsparken stop about half way along this stretch. Another photo can be seen here: http://lrt.daxack.ca/Oslo/hires074.jpg Notice that the track bed does not have grass at the platform.

    There is also a couple of short stretches where a parallel on one side of the road ROW has grass.

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  40. Steve – thanks for posting my comments; I wasn’t sure you would. I guess what gets me worked up is the idea by some Toronto Councillors that the the transit/roads issue is a zero sum game, that transit “wins” have to come at road “losses”. Even Bill Davis after cancelling Spadina spoke of a “balanced” approach. Inner city expressways are clearly bad, but some modest network improvements like Front Street, where they might improve priorities like the waterfront should not necessarily be ditched to align with the optics of being on the perceived side of virtue. Keep up the good work though – you have been a great advocate for transit in that long period when we weren’t building anything at all.

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