At the Empire Club today, Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi proposed that all of Transit City, except for the Sheppard East line, be put on hold pending a financial review.
Rossi may not be familiar with local issues, but he should at least know that Queen’s Park (and, for Sheppard, Ottawa) is paying for these lines, not the City of Toronto.
There are issues with Transit City about which I will write in coming days, but stopping the projects is hardly the correct approach. It smacks of simplistic anti-Miller campaigning — whatever David Miller did must be wrong and so we’ll stop, or at least slow down, the plan.
I will be generous and assume that the candidate may be badly advised, but this is the second gaffe of Rossi’s platform (the first is the proposal to sell Toronto Hydro), and I can’t help thinking he’s headed for an electoral graveyard.
Updated 11:30 pm: I am advised that Rossi is aware of funding from other levels of government, but is concerned about future operating costs. He might start by looking at the extension to Vaughan which is expected to increase net TTC operating costs after any incremental fare revenue by well over $10-million annually when it opens. The projected riding north of Steeles Avenue is lower than on the Eglinton LRT.
Steve Munro 
I do not see anything wrong with a candidate questioning Transit City, especially given the track record of the City and the TTC to NOT serve the public. Even if you disagree and think TC is our only chance for transit in the next 20 years (something I disgaree with), what wrong with a debate about it?
Living in Scarborough where the TTC is a joke, to be used only as a last resort, I can tell you getting shafted time and time again with crappy transit “plans” only to be told “Take our plan for TC or get nothing”, I’d be willing to wait another few years to get a better plan rather than get locked out of true alternatives to the private auto for the next 40 to 50 years.
I’m not just talking about new routes to downtown (which are needed and yes I support the Downtown Relief subway line and would be willing to sacrifice TC to gets started on it). I’m talking about traveling in and around Scarborough and Eastern Toronto.
What part of Transit City helps me get to The Beach on Queen? None.
What part of Transit City helps me get to Scar Town Centre, the closest place for a Loblaws super Centre/Wal-Mart to shop for my family? None.
What part of Transit City gets me to my job by the airport? Yes, the Eglinton line, assuming I want to take a 22 to 25 minute ride to Kennedy then a 78 minute ride to Commerce drive (official TC estimates), for a total of 100 minutes commute not including any wait time, transfer time, etc…So close to 2 freaking hours each way (FYI, it takes me 45 minutes to drive each way today).
I know everyone on this site loves LRT aka streetcars. I am not against their use, but used indescriminately, on routes not serving the best needs of the local population, and without proper subway/metro expansion, is just a huge waste of $8+ billion earmarked for transit in this city.
Steve: First off I must point out that a goodly chunk of the TC overall cost people gripe about comes from the underground sections of the route, especially on Eglinton. That’s a line that everybody agrees, and has for years, needs better transit of some flavour, and the only real dispute seems to be between LRT and a full-scale subway.
People talk about getting to the airport. That is NOT and never will be the primary destination of the line. It’s a nice-to-have, but you don’t build a transit system around it. The line is 33km long from Kennedy to the airport. At the subway running speed of 30km/h, that’s a one-hour trip even by subway from Kennedy to the Airport. Most trips on Eglinton will not be travelling the full length of the line, just as hardly anyone rides from Kennedy to Kipling.
You want to get to STC? I don’t know where you are coming from, but the SRT will be extended north to Sheppard and eventually to Malvern Centre. You want to get to the Beach? There is never, ever going to be rapid transit to the Beach. Get used to it.
What I find sad about many complaints on the subject of transit connectivity is that so many people think a rapid transit network (e.g. subway or skytrain) will give them the one-seat access to their own destinations that Transit City lacks.
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I doubt this guy is going to get anywhere. He’s saying all the right things to conservative Torontonians, but the fact that he’s a Liberal Party hack (and I say this as a long-time Liberal supporter) means that nobody on the right trusts him. You can look at the comments on the Toronto Star story covering these policy pronouncements as proof of that. But the fact that he’s introduced the idea of canceling Transit City to the mayoral race makes it possible that some other legitimate candidate might pick up on it in a plea to the very suburban voters these lines are supposed to help.
P.S. I just noticed there was another Andrew M commenting, so I’ve changed my screen name
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I don’t think it should be a surprise that one of the candidates would take this position. It does mean though that probably some of the others are carefully watching the public reaction to it and will adjust their platforms accordingly.
Rossi will get some support for this position, particularly among those who don’t use and understand the need for good public transportation. Many of those would also be the anti-union, anti-tax increase crowd who will rally around anyone with a maverick stance.
But I really think that Transit City is not well understood by a lot of people. I have discussed the buried part of the Eglinton line with a few coworkers who live in neighborhoods along the corridor, mostly west of Yonge Street. They all reacted with surprise when I told them that there would be a major long term construction project in their neighbourhood in the coming years. They did admit to seeing the Transit City advertisements but had no idea of the scope of the project. Now all they can picture is the scene along Sheppard East from a few years ago and the associated inconvenience.
I wonder if the inconvenience would be a reason cited by those who agree with Mr. Rossi’s position.
Steve: And the irony of this is that the counter proposal would be “build more subways”. The construction upheaval would be bigger because subway stations are longer.
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Since TC tracks and vehicles will be new, maintenance costs for the first few years will be almost zero. Operating costs will be lower than buses. What’s the issue here? I don’t get it.
Now if Rossi wants to stir up some fun, all he needs to say is that he’ll cancel TC for a downtown Pape-Queen subway. That would give Steve and I enough ammo to insult each other for about six months.
Steve: But I want a DRL running up to Eglinton. I think that both the Don Mills and Jane TC proposals are badly flawed by trying to bull through narrow streets. We will have to find something else to argue about.
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Steve,
Can you please tell everyone which “other cities” Light Rail works so well in? Can you also define what “works so well” means? What are your parameters?
Because if you look leading research by the Danish scholar Bent Flyvberg ( http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/ ), you’ll find that Light Rail (almost without fail) goes over budget by at least 50%, is never completed on time and is met with ridership that is approximately half of what was forecasted.
Mr. Flyvberg’s position has been verified by the American Planners Association, two separate Harvard economists, and the Department of Transportation in the States.
You’re fond of saying Light Rail works in other cities, but I’d really like to know which ones because the research and facts simply don’t support your claims.
Just look at St. Clair for a homegrown example (a light rail in streetcar’s clothing).
Steve: My examples would be mainly in Europe, although early Canadian systems like Calgary and Edmonton also come to mind. Without question, there are many examples south of the border (you need only go to Buffalo for a sample) where local transit agencies, primed by the availability of federal money that treated transit projects as construction stimulus, built lines that were inappropriate or over cost. These are fodder for all manner of studies “proving” light rail does not work. The same sort of thing could be done for subway lines, but there are fewer of them.
St. Clair, for all its problems, cost $100-million (not including vehicles or carhouse as we had them already) for a 6km rebuild. That is about 80% of the price of one station on the York/Vaughan subway extension.
About 30% of that had nothing at all to do with the “LRT”, but was for utility and other improvements done as part of an urban redesign project that ran concurrently, but was billed as part of the “St. Clair” scheme. There are design problems, not the least of which are some poor choices regarding intersection arrangements that were foisted on the plan by local councillors more concerned about a few parking spaces than on streets that works. Compound all of this with project cock-ups and poor operations, and yes you have a dismal showing. None of that invalidates LRT per se.
New LRT/streetcars are running in many cities carrying good all-day loads. The difficult issue, which Toronto still refuses to face, is that there is only so much road space, and giving more to transit means taking it away from cars. It is physically impossible to maintain the same roadway “service level” for autos while dedicating two lanes to transit regardless of whether it is streetcars or buses.
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I visit other websites that are mainly about transit here in the GTA and I am surprised that their seems to be a lot of people that are against these TransitCity plans. They quite often refer to it as ‘TransferCity’. I imagine public transit would only be acceptable to some people if each and everyone of them had a subway at their door directly to the place of their employment with no stops between.
No transit system is perfect, but this TransitCity plan, is a great step forward for the city of TO. Hopefully it gets of the ground and people like Rossi are always a minority. There are too many cars on our streets and I think TransitCity has the potential of removing a lot of them compared to some expensive subway extension here or there.
Steve: Oddly enough, the typical small suburban bus system winds up trying to give one seat rides to many, and in the process serves only trips going to major nodes. It’s a big jump to say “you have to transfer”, although this improves overall mobility. The key to making transfers work is to have reliable, frequent service so that there is no significant penalty to changing vehicles.
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A lot of the new LRT lines in the States go from the outskirts to their downtowns, because they didn’t have any form of rapid transit before. Toronto already has rapid transit doing so, the Yonge Street subway being the first.
People are forgetting that Toronto already has many forms of commuter rapid transit to its downtown, such as the subway and GO. With Transit City, they are expanding rapid transit across the top of Toronto, not just in one direction (downtown). They also forget that a lot of people use transit for other than commuting to work.
Yes, we still need a downtown relief line, and the sooner the better. The original plans for the Queen subway was MU streetcars (light rail). Will the DRL be heavy rail or light rail, I will have to leave that to the transit planners to bring up options to choose from.
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Steve, I appreciate your positions and we’ll agree on some points, disagree on others.
Case in point is my comments about using the TC proposed Eglinton LRT to get from Scarborough (I live in Guildwood by the lake) to my work near the airport.
I am NOT talking about talking transit to the airport, although I think it is a must have, not a nice to have (I take Piccadilly line in London to Heathrow about 4x a year. I see full trains carrying airport workers as well as travellers).
I am talking about the THOUSANDS OF JOBS, particularily in high technology, that have fled Toronto and located in Mississauga, mostly near the airport. My firm is Canadian, well know for making smart phones…we just built a campus to house 2,400 staff. Across the street Bell has 5,000+ staff in their new building. TD Bank has about 1,400 workers, HP has about 2,400 staff, Intuit has 1,200 staff, Microsoft, Apple, Ericsson, etc…
Within a few km radious of the airport I would bet there are over 50,000 people who work in high tech jobs, many of whom live in Toronto, Markham, etc….
Should we all drive to work? There is no GO service to most parts of Mississauga. Wouldn’t some transit from Toronto be a good thing? Yes, but not if it takes 2x, 3x or 4x longer than driving. Thats’ my point.
Transit is personal, we all make our own choice, and for me, TC will not affect my decision to drive and not take the TTC.
Steve: While I agree that there is a problem with the growth of major job centres around Toronto, the real issue here is that our so-called regional planning by Metrolinx is still very focussed on getting people into downtown Toronto. If there is a major node away from the core, its work trips will come not just from one direction (in this discussion from the east along Eglinton), but from many directions. Serving all of this with transit is a real challenge and is not well suited to a single, high-cost subway line.
Indeed, if we were doing subway-based planning, it would make more sense to be building a subway to existing nodes such as Mississauga than to greenfields in Vaughan. However, in both cases, the subway will be of little value to those who don’t live conveniently to it as their origin.
There is another basic conflict in TC versus some of the subway and regional plans. TC is designed to support the Official Plan whose overall goal is to encourage miedium density development along major routes rather than point developments at widely spaced nodes. LRT does that much better than subways. One need only look at the difficulty of reaching subway service from various points on Yonge north and on Sheppard. Even the Spadina stations are a km apart north of Eglinton.
Coming back to your commute to Mississauga: We hear a lot of talk about sustainability, and part of that requires shorter trips for everything — work, leisure, food transport. We can build a transportation system to encourage long commutes and serve them preferentially, or we can recognize the importance of shorter trips and build a system that gives them better service.
It’s ironic that because of municipal boundaries and locations of rail lines, we have GO trains run by the province and subways run by the TTC. If the sequence in which each mode came into general use had been reversed, people might be attacking subway plans for long trips such as the line to Richmond Hill. So much of the debate about alternatives turns on what people already know. “More of the same” has the advantage of familiarity and of avoiding hard decisions such as a change in the car/transit/bike/pedestrian balance.
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Actually, Eglinton’s LRT station boxes are about 150m, comparable to the subway, due to ventilation schemes and requirements that compete with other needs at mezzanine level. There’s less finishes for LRT as oppose to subway, absolutely, but the “box” size of stations from a construction perspective isn’t as big a difference as one would intuitively suspect.
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Karl Junkin says:
I also noticed this in the drawings and asked about those areas. In the initial drawings the station was finished to a length of just over 2 cars with a spot for a third car unfinished and beyond these was the “service areas” which are for ventilation, pumps, electrical and whatever else they want to fit in. I asked if that area could be used to lengthen the platforms more and the answer was “not easily.” They were also talking about running 3 car trains from the start instead of 2 on both Eglinton and Finch but that had not been decided yet.
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I am with Sean McManus on this one. From the perspective of this Scarborough resident, Transit City is starting to seem a lot like decision by the province to foist the ART Mk I on us. Then it was the province. Now it’s TC proponents who want to test out their LRT fantasies on my community.
There are genuine opportunities for LRT in the 416 and in Scarborough. I just don’t think that the routes picked for them are the right ones. Along Sheppard, the planned subway and curbside bus lanes east of McCowan could accomplish more than any LRT. I’d agree that LRT is the correct solution to connect Malvern to Scarborough Town Centre. However, I don’t agree that a major node like STC to Kennedy with light rail. That should have been a subway connection.
In short, Transit City seems like the imposition of a one-size fits all solution, just like the ART Mk I. If they’d pledged LRT for Vic Park or Kennedy or McCowan, or even Sheppard east of McCowan, nobody would be complaining. They picked the wrong corridors. And most grating for us, is that they are starting with Sheppard. That’s clearly a political decision to cut off the Sheppard subway at its knees and forestall future subway construction in the 416 (with the exception of those lines going out into the 905).
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“Steve: My examples would be mainly in Europe, although early Canadian systems like Calgary and Edmonton also come to mind. ”
Please stop comparing Transit City to the Edmonton and Calgary LRT. Those systems are grade-separated, and have gate arms to stop traffic at level crossings, making them true rapid transit systems that happen to use light rail equipment. Your suggestion that Transit City will work well, because these systems work well, is highly misleading.
Steve: I was talking about LRT working well, and there is a range of LRT implementations. You don’t need to build at the high end to have a workable LRT network.
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Thank-you Keith L, you stated the Scarborough concerns far better than I did.
The comment that no one in scarborough would complain if Sheppard was subwat to STC, and/or Kennedy to STC was subway, then LRT on Sheppard east of McCowan and LRT from STC to Malvern is bang on. Heck and LRT on Markham road would be a better choice.
I too, am tired of Scarborough being the transit experiment.
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Steve: I was talking about LRT working well, and there is a range of LRT implementations. You don’t need to build at the high end to have a workable LRT network.
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Fair enough. Can you please provide us with examples of cities that have built Transit City style LRT, that operate in a centre of the street ROW, stop at red lights, and that will rely on LRT to work on trunk routes with lengths ranging from 15 – 33 kms? I am curious to read about such success stories. If they really are that good, it’ll really ease my concerns about LRT. I haven’t found such examples but I’ll differ to those in the know to provide me with one.
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Keith L says:
January 23, 2010 at 1:03 pm
“I am with Sean McManus on this one. From the perspective of this Scarborough resident, Transit City is starting to seem a lot like decision by the province to foist the ART Mk I on us. Then it was the province. Now it’s TC proponents who want to test out their LRT fantasies on my community.
“There are genuine opportunities for LRT in the 416 and in Scarborough. I just don’t think that the routes picked for them are the right ones. Along Sheppard, the planned subway and curbside bus lanes east of McCowan could accomplish more than any LRT. I’d agree that LRT is the correct solution to connect Malvern to Scarborough Town Centre. However, I don’t agree that a major node like STC to Kennedy with light rail. That should have been a subway connection.”
You are right! Subways are nice, nice and expensive to build, nice and expensive to operate and nice and expensive to maintain. The Scarborough SRT has a current capacity of 4100 pphpd in the a.m. using 4 car trains on a headway of 3:30 with a capacity of 60 passengers per car. A 3 car LRT train will have a capacity of 6600 pphpd on the same headway or a capacity increase of 60%. If we run on a 2:30 second headway the capacity goes up to 9300 pphpd or a capacity increase of 125%. If they were to run 4 car trains on the same headway you would have a capacity of 12,400 pphpd which is 3 times that of the current SRT.
The Scarborough LRT will run on a completely separate right of way between Kennedy and Scarborough Town Centre. This line will truly demonstrate the high end ability of LRT and I wish that it were being built first. The existing Spadina, Queens Quay and St. Clair are examples of minimal LRT capacity.
The current Sheppard Subway has a capacity of 9600 pphpd on a 5:30 headway of 4 cars with a capacity of 220 each. The extension that you want to McCowan is 7.4 km long. The Spadina extension which is, I think, a little longer (8.7 km) will cost about $2.1 BILLION in 2006 dollars and will cost about $9 million per year to operate. I don’t know where you are going to get the money to build or operate you two new subway lines. The whole Transit City plan could probably be built for the cost of your two subway lines with money left over to expand into York and Peel regions.
Toronto is just beginning to recover from the devastation caused by the Harrisites. I am afraid that if Rossi stops the plans for a rethink then they will die. I am sorry that the people in Moore Park and Rosedale will have a slightly longer commute when they drive down Mt. Pleasant and Jarvis Street when it is cut back to 4 lanes but the people who live down there deserve some consideration for their quality of life. My next goal is to restore Avenue Road’s sidewalk to what they were before it was widened to 6 lanes.
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Keith L says:
I can! I have ridden on the following systems, all of which have some in street centre reservation running with traffic lights: Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Den Hague in the Netherlands, Köln (or Cologne) and Frankfurt in Germany, Oslo Norway, Gothenburg Sweden, Melbourne and Adelaide Australia, and finally Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and Shaker Heights (Cleveland) Ohio. To be fair Adelaide has 95% of its right of way in an abandoned railway right of way and the section in the downtown is a street that is about 400 feet wide. The Croydon trams in the outskirts of London also have a bit of street running.
There are probably other cities that have LRT services similar to Toronto’s 3 lines but I have not ridden them. The city that is closest to Toronto is Melbourne Australia. Imagine what Toronto would be like if the subway had never been built and instead all of the rail lines had electric frequent service commuter rail service and the street cars lines that existed in 1965 were still running with extensions into Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke and with most streets being the width of Spadina.
Metropolitan Melbourne has a population of 3.9 million so it is less than the Toronto Metropolitan Census area’s 8.1 million residents. So in closing there are a number of cities with Transit City type operations. Fortunately for them they have learned how to operate them correctly.
Steve: Although the Toronto CMA may be huge, the 416, which is the territory served by Transit City, is under 3-million. We are not reinstating streetcar service to Lake Simcoe.
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I am worried about getting “private experts” in to help decide on the transit path that the TTC should take. It reminds me of the “experts” in the 1960’s from IBM coming to help companies with their computer decisions, and (surprise) they come up with something from IBM. The same in the 1950’s and 60’s with the “experts” from GM recommending that cities abandon their streetcar network and replace them with (surprise) GM buses, resulting in ridership going downhill.
Have people ever been to, actually lived in, and used transit in other cities? We hear complaints about the TTC, when in reality it is one of the better transit systems in North America. There are better transit systems in the world, and (surprise) the TTC is trying to aim in that direction with Transit City and other improvements. There are roadblocks (ie. lack of subsidies) but the TTC is trying.
Your article on the 1952 TTC report is a good example on how the TTC used its own “experts” to make correct decisions. If we have to use outside “experts”, I would recommend use the European “experts” and not American ones.
Steve: An important issue regardless of whose experts we use is that road space is finite, and at some point motorists must, repeat must, cede space to transit. Yes, them’s fightin’ words in the “war on the car”. If we bury everything everywhere, we will also bury ourselves in debt and have far less to show for our investment than we could with a surface LRT system. Oddly enough, despite the many problems the TTC has with reliable subway service, we don’t hear calls to abandon subway projects because the TTC can be guaranteed to screw them up.
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Gothenburg [Goteborg], Sweden [Sverige]. I’ve used this system extensively myself, just not recently, but I can speak to it first hand that it is a good system. It is a city with a LRT network as the system backbone. It used to run PCC-like MUs up to 3-car consists, but has since switched to longer multi-articulated vehicles and no longer couples vehicles. The suburban parts of the system are often (but not always) grade-separated, and in the inner-city (plus some limited suburban areas) run virtually identical to Transit City’s style (with minor variances due to Sweden’s traffic laws and typical road conventions). Some short, limited stretches in the downtown core LRT network are mixed-traffic, or transit mall.
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Hold on folks, way off the original topic/article posted by Mr. Munro.
Robert Wightman says:
Exactly. That is the point of the original article, i.e. questions raised by a mayoral candidate as to the validity of the current Transit City plan.
NOT the theoretical maximum load/headway/satisfaction of an LRT running in a completely separate right of way, like if you changed out the Scarborough RT to LRT technology.
Steve: For the record, that is the plan for the RT — it will be converted to LRT and extended first to Sheppard, later to Malvern.
The current Transit City plan is, with the exception of the Scarborough RT, the model used on Spadina, Queens Quay and St. Clair, which Robert W. cited as examples of MINIMAL LRT capacity.
THAT is what myself and others are ripped up about. Not an arcane debate about the merits of different transit modalities. It was about the positions expressed by Rocco Rossi that QUESTIONED (sorry to use capitials so much) the curent plans of TC.
Steve: I’m going to jump in here because there is an extremely important difference between the TC lines and the St. Clair, Spadina and Harbourfront routes. The TC stops are further apart, but more importantly, so are the places where traffic can cross the LRT right-of-way. This makes a big difference in the speed the line can achieve. Fewer crossings also mean fewer traffic signals that can be screwed up, although I am guardedly optimistic that some of the St. Clair problems will be fixed by adjusting the signals (they have already found at least three locations where they were not set up properly). The big difference with TC is that we are not talking about congested central area streets, but suburban arterials. You cannot map the design or experience of one onto the other.
The lowest end of LRT planning. The one that operates only in the centre of the street. The one that “serves” enormous stretches of Scarborough but FAILS to cover any of the 3 large hospitals in Scarborough. The plan that FAILS to connect to many city funded ventures, including the busiest library in Toronto (Cedarbrae; at Markham and Lawrence) outside of the reference library, a rink, Olympic size track, and enormous pool facilitioes at Birchmount, and the Zoo (which is a very important facility for families with kids, e.g. splash park, ed services etc…and a big first class display of all types of animals, flora and fauna).
That plan is what Rocco was questioning, and I question it also, regardless of whether or not I vote for him.
Steve: As I understand it, Rossi was questioning operating costs, not where the lines were going. Unfortunately, his remarks were in a press scrum and there is no information on his website clarifying his position. If anything, I suspect a hard nosed look at Transit City would give Scarborough much less transit, not much more. The fundamental problem is that transit investment is for the long term, and it never looks good for early years. Indeed, that’s the very argument anyone supporting the subway extension to Vaughan would use.
I have some issues with the need to fine-tune of the TC plan, of the rigid “keep to the plan at all costs” approach that preserves ridiculous proposals such as the Don Mills LRT running on the surface down to Danforth Avenue. I will address these issues in a separate post. For the record, if anyone believes that I support every item in TC without change, they’re wrong. The TTC (and their political masters) do themselves no favours by refusing to talk about alternatives.
However, when talking about what the plan connects or misses, it is important to see this in the context of the Official Plan whose transit corridors served even less of Scarborough than TC. One major difference is that the OP does include a Finch East route, but there’s nothing in the far east end of the city serving, for example, UofT Scarborough campus. I will return to this when I write about the TC plan itself.
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I am glad Rocco Rossi is bringing up the issue of Transit City, and how this current city leadership has pushed this project through, without really telling the public, that these lines will provide almost no benefit over the current bus routes. Scarborough residents will still have no true rapid transit. The entire Transit City project has to be stopped now, and the TTC has to do proper studies, tell residents just how much time we actually are going to save, how many new riders will be attracted, etc.
As it stands now, no one seems to know what Transit City will actually do. They are just trying to get it built before people complain to stop it.
I would like to comment about Melbourne, Australia. If their system is so good, how come they have a transit modal share that is less than half that of Toronto’s? Transit usage in Melbourne is actually pretty low, and their entire Metropolitan Rail network, carries only 350,000 people a day.
Steve: That statement does not jibe with claims at Wikipedia where the daily riding count is 680,000. Their own website says 400,000 daily users, but they may take more than one trip each. This rail network is roughly their equivalent of GO Transit which carries only 217,000 on its rail and bus network. Total annual riding for various Melbourne systems is just under 500 million annually, comparable to the TTC.
Streetcars and Transit City LRT are good for certain routes. But not for rapid transit, which is needed in many parts of Toronto. And I think Rocco Rossi will bring up the issue well that these Transit City lines are not rapid transit, and that we are spending billions to really not improve the commute for anyone in the outer reaches of the city.
Steve: If I actually hear Rossi propose a subway network, then I will believe he isn’t just trying to cut back on transit spending generally.
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I’d like to comment on Mr. R’s speech. It appeared to be disconnected from reality.
(1) Just about three days before his speech there was an article/notice in the Scrb. Mirror about an EA to revitalize hwy. 401 from Warden to Brock (whatever that is supposed to mean).
(2) On the day of the speech Durham region proposed a long term plan to build LRT lines to both Sheppard LRT and Ellesmere/McCowan areas.
Therefore – if the mayoral candidates start to cancel and/or delay Mr. Miller’s/TC plans then nothing will be ever built,because there may be other parties to the projects.
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Robert,
Whether the rest of TO can accept it or not, no Scarborough resident is going to be happy transferring at Kennedy. And that’s the problem. Yes, they can increase the capacity by adding longer cars. Yes, they can improve the transfer by putting in on the same platform (which is still not guaranteed). LRT proponents just don’t get it. What pisses people off is the transfer, not the ride. The rattle trap of the SRT is bearable cause it’s short. Nobody likes it. But we put up with it. But if we get better cars to ride in that still does not solve anything. You still have the transfer. Talk to any Scarborough resident. They will all say the same thing. “Why the hell is that ride there? It’s the most useless transfer ever.”….unless the city is going to propose relocating the soul of Scarborough from STC to Kennedy and Eglinton.
LRT is not going to take away the sense that Scarborough residents only get second-class transit solutions and are the dumping ground for everybody’s transit idea. Why can’t they experiment in North York or Etobicoke for once? Why should we always be the ones who have to transfer?
And that does not even take into account the issues McManus raise which are obvious to Scarborough residents: no links to any of the hospitals in Scarborough or any of our civic facilities (save UTSC and whatever’s around STC). It does not even link Don Mills and STC! Yet, remarkably this plan is supposed to facilitate local transit use? Did they even bother asking Scarborough residents where we travel to? Hint: We drive way too much, so ridership patterns of today don’t tell the full story.
As for the examples you put up. Any of those lines 30+ km long and built as an alternative to a subway? And do any of those lines link the on-street and grade separated portions like we are planning to do on Eglinton? I would like to see an example that’s analogous to what’s being done with Transit City (Eglinton in particular is worrisome) in its entirety. No pieces of it. There’s lots of examples that have pieces of Transit City. In some we see exclusive centre-street ROWs. In some we see grade separated ops. I’ve even seen LRT run underground. But I have yet to see a LRT run full across town in a major city, as an alternative, parallel to a main subway line that mixes on street and grade separated operations. Show me that one somewhere and let’s study it and see how well it worked out for them. If it proved to be as flawless as our subway/bus combo it’ll get my vote.
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An LRT line on Ellesemere would have made more sense than Sheppard. It would have connected STC, Centennary Hospital, UTSC and onwards to Durham along Hwy 2.
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Transit City is a flawed undertaking because of its scope and as a citizen I too am questioning whether it’s really value for money. The Sheppard East LRT project, for instance, has ballooned from $550 million to $930 million to over a billion dollars in only a few years before a single shovel has even breached the ground. Don’t be surprised if another $100 million or more gets tagged onto the final budget. And for what? The 85 Sheppard East bus carries all of 28,000 riders per day the majority of which stem from west of Neilson. Yet the LRT line is planned to go to Rouge Park? Okay, okay Meadowvale but still investing $80 million per kilometre to pick up a handful of riders east of Neilson does not sound rational. And the Sheppard-Progress area will soon have its SRT line to divert some commutes, siphoning them away from the Sheppard corridor entirely. For less money you could invest in 401 bus trippers or dedicated bus lanes down Sheppard East which exceeds 36m in width and in several locations has the option of side-of-roadway routing. Of course using that billion to extend the subway a couple kilometres even if just to Warden would shave 10 minutes off bus commutes and attract higher ridership volumes. Extending that subway line incrementally by a few kilometres every 5 years until it reaches Scarborough Centre doesn’t break the bank and reassures constituents that their transit concerns are being met. Sheppard East (and Finch West for that matter) is not Queen St. A transit stop isn’t needed every 500 metres on corridors where density is always concentrated around the major intersections. But no, the city must build something that may actually take decades to reach capacity because of closed door meetings hastily rushing through a transit project before Miller leaves office.
So you see, Transit City is an obstacle block preventing the city from getting what it truly needs. I’d rather see every last cent of Transit City invested in jump-starting the Downtown Relief Line subway than go towards streetcars through suburbia. If we want to improve transit service quality in the suburbs what ever happened to Bus Rapid Transit? Does it take $60-$80 million/kilometre to put into place dedicated road dividers/partitions or raised pavement down the median, bus shelters with prepaid boarding (e.g. YRT VIVA), queue jumps and advanced green/red transit signals? Creating a ROW down the median of St Clair only cost $100 million or $16.6 million per kilometre. When the TTC can in one breath say that BRT can carry up to 5000 passengers per hour per direction yet in the next can justify building the Finch West LRT which it forecasts will have a maximum of 2800 pphpd by 2031; one has to take pause and critically assess whether we the public can really have faith in anything they tell us, when the truth is always coloured by their own biases.
I could care less about the politics involved; I just want fast, reliable and affordable transit options ready for my disposal when I need it. When will the TTC remember that it is an essential public service first and foremost, and a profit-conscious business secondary?
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The only ‘dumb and brainwashed’ person here is you, Andrew. Subways are way too expensive: that’s why most cites don’t build them anymore-also, they’re ‘troglodyte transportation’ as one city councilman, Gord Perks put it in an article in Eye Weekly. Steve has presented the evidence here for Transit City quite well, and the general plans have been online for months now, plus there’s a website that tells the truth about LRT’s (Transit City in particular.)
Any musings about Transit City by you are just nothing but red-baiting and Miller-bashing because you can’t seem to understand what Toronto really needs due to your (most likely) reading of right-wing media like the National Post and The Toronto Sun – put down those wastes of trees and pick up something about the world that’s not a pro-car organ.
Better yet, try traveling to some other cities that have LRT lines and really how they work, and why Toronto wants to build them – also, find out why most cities are trying to reduce automobile use as well.
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Solex,
You should visit Delhi, India. And tell them the brand new subway they built is out of fashion. Ditto for several places in China. Or how about Barcelona.
Subways are only expensive if you build them the way the TTC does.
As for everybody building LRT….those who are building LRT are doing so to fill in gaps in their already expansive subway systems. Europeans would laugh at the suggestion that they should build LRT as an alternative to a 30+ km subway route across the largest city in their country.
Steve: Delhi and China have demands at levels that easily justify subway construction. The Transit City routes do not. Eglinton, the heaviest and longest of them all is 1/3 underground through the most critical section. As and when demand builds up, the subway portion could be extended but the technology would stay the same.
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Andrew is right…I get a kick out of people who believe everything Steve says. Some of you people are indeed brainwashed and contribute to the irritating ‘we cannot afford this’ culture. Even Councillor Pantalone has expressed his frustration with that culture. Subway construction is expensive because of massive stations (i.e. along the Sheppard Subway line) and incompetent managers (TTC and the City of Toronto) who always go over budget.
‘Transfer City’ is the one area of transit that Steve and company have it wrong. Does it make sense to invest millions to build an SELRT today and then invest billions to rip it up for a Sheppard subway extension tomorrow? Maybe you people are but I am not ready to throw my hard-earned taxes out the window.
SELRT supposedly left the station but with work starting on the eastern section of the line, the subway extension to STC is very much alive! Sorry but there is a very good chance that Sheppard will not be an LRT from Don Mills to Meadowvale once the new sheriff is in town!
BTW…the people from Save Our Subways have the right idea and will be successful with most of their plan!
Steve: In the interest of balanced coverage, I will publish comments like this even though I don’t agree with them.
Sheppard will never, ever have the demand necessary to justify a subway extension. If some politician decides to play to Scarborough residents with such a project, you can forget about seeing any transit construction anywhere else for a very long time.
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Alright, Keith, I’ll meet this challenge of yours with details of the Gothenburg system. Just for the record though, Gothenburg has no subway (the soil conditions don’t really allow it as an option), and the LRT network IS their rapid transit network.
The Gothenburg system interlines out the wazoo, so you’ll get a sense of something like 80% of the network with just 3 lines’ worth of details (there are 13 routes).
Line 4; Green; Mölndal – Angered (pronounced “ang-Eh-rehd”)
From the suburban core Mölndal Centre [Mölndal Centrum], the LRT runs in the centre of the road up Mölndal Way [Mölndalsvägen] to the Korsvägen stop, then along South Way [Södravägen], jog via Engelbrekt Street [Engelbrektsgatan] to King’s Port Avenue [Kungsportsavenyn], which at the canal crossing becomes East Harbour Street [Östrahamngatan], all in the middle of the road like most of Transit City, until it plows into Brown’s Park [Brunnsparken], where the whole network more or less converges (except one line), and is a transit mall up North Harbour Street [Norrahamngatan]. Molndal Centre to Brown’s Park is 6.7km. On the north side after passing through Gothenburg Central Station (next stop after Brown’s Park), about a half-kilometre’s worth of transit mall cruising, it jumps on to the commuter rail corridor (an exclusive ROW like a subway, but at-grade) to Old City Square [Gamlestadstorget] (a 2.5km non-stop run), and then in an at-grade exclusive ROW (grade-separated at road crossings) to Hjällbo (about 5km non-stop (!!!)), followed by a 4km run that is mostly underground (it’s mountainous terrain, but there are two stations in the tunnel) to its suburban terminus at Angered Centre [Angered Centrum]. That’s about a 18-19km line with characteristics very similar to Eglinton’s.
Line 6; Orange; Kortedala to Länsmansgården via Sahlgrenska Main Entrance (the biggest hospital in the region). This is a U-Liner type service (Line 2 (Yellow) is also a U-Liner).
The line starts at April Street [Aprilgatan] in the suburb of Kortedala in an exclusive ROW (grade-separated from street crossings) via All Saints Church [Allhelgonakyrkan] and Kortedala Square [Kortedala Torg], about 1km of route, after which it immediately goes underground for less than a half-kilometre before running at-grade again. About 2km later, it enters the centre of Artillery Street [Artillerigatan], at the Bellevue stop, but only for about 0.3km, when it continues along Artillery Street, but on the south side of the road, for 0.6km, when it meets a junction with the exclusive ROW at Old City Square. A little less than a kilometre later, it leaves the exclusive ROW again and runs in the centre of the road along Ånä Way [Ånäsvägen] and Ride Mountain Way [Redbergsvägen], before entering Stamp Street [Stampgatan] which is an interesting arrangement of a two-lane street, one lane dedicated to northbound LRVs, and the other shared between southbound LRVs and southbound private cars. It then runs in the centre of Skåne Street [Skånegatan] after crossing the canal at the base of Stamp Street, and plows into the Korsvägen stop, interlining very briefly with Line 4 down South Way to a tunnel portal. It has been running in some form of shared-street operation for about 4km. The tunnel is about 1km, and takes the line to Gold Heath Way [Guldhedsvägen], in which it runs down the centre of the road to the Sahlgrenska Main Entrance stop about 1km down the line, and 0.5km beyond that the street becomes Per Dubb Street [Per Dubbsgatan] which is mixed-traffic for 0.2km, at which point it enters an exclusive ROW for a major wye, and runs in an exclusive ROW for about 0.5km, before running up the centre of Linné Street [Linnégatan] for 1.2km. It then turns onto South Alley Street [Södra Allégatan]/Park Street [Parkgatan], which is two lanes dedicated for LRT both directions on one side of the road, and one lane of one-way traffic on the other side of the road (this street is also a forest, very dense concentration of mature trees very close to the downtown core), with another road (New Alley Way) on the opposite side of the forest one-way in the opposite direction. It then jogs via Viktoria Street and Vasa Street before running up West Harbour Street [Västrahamngatan] to North Harbour Street where it enters Brown’s Park with the rest of the network (2.2km since leaving Linné Street). After passing through the transit mall for 1km (it’s on North Harbour Street for longer than Line 4), it jumps on the 1.2km-long Gothen River Bridge [Götaälvsbron] in its own lanes in the middle of the road, and then jumps into an exclusive grade-separated (at-grade) ROW after crossing the bridge all the way to the terminus at Warm Front Street [Varmfrontsgatan] in the suburban area of Länsmansgården, 7km of exclusive ROW later. Line 6 is ~25km in total route-length.
Line 6 is a very varied example using several strategies to navigate the various parts of the city, and really shows just how truly flexible LRT can be. The TTC could gain a wealth of knowledge from this line alone.
Line 11; Black (yes, they ran out of colours); Saltholmen to Bergsjön.
Starting way out by the shore at Saltholmen, the first 1km of this line is in mixed traffic. It then enters dedicated lanes to the side of the road that looks like an exclusive ROW, and although crossings are few and far between, they are not grade-separated. This model runs for 4km, at which point it jumps into Transit City-style centre of the road operation for about 1.7km. It then has 0.6km in mixed traffic, followed again by 1.1km of more Transit City-style design before merging with the Line 6 portion between Linne Street and Brown’s Park (2.2km), also Transit City-style. At Brown’s Park, it merges with Line 4 between until Old City Square (3.5km), which is either transit mall, or shared corridor with commuter rail (note that it is a shared corridor, not shared tracks), where it merges again with the Line 6 for 4.4km (mostly exclusive ROW), going farther north than the 6 by about 2.5km to Bergsjön (exclusive ROW, mostly underground (mountainous terrain… the “berg” in Bergsjön means “mountain”)). Line 11 is about 20.5km long.
It’s not identical, but it is comparable. It has many parts of the system that have the same fundamentals as Transit City, including streetscapes that we would be very lucky to have (trust me, I know, I’ve been down these streets) that are to some degree made possible by the presence of LRT. Gothenburg also has a separate LRT network configuration of 4 routes than run all night.
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Oh, oh. Rossi made to the US blogs, where the TTC is as one of, if not the best, transit systems in North America. See The Transport Politic for their view from the states.
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Steve,
I can concede on Delhi and China. But do you think the Spaniards are off-base for continuing with their subway expansion in Barcelona or Madrid?
Steve: Madrid built a huge amount of subway because they got big subsidies from the European Union and the national government. Now they are building LRT.
As for Barcelona, their new Line 9 is quite long and wanders through an existing built up city. Annual ridership is forecast to be 130 million by 2020. Phases I and IV have a cost of about 4-billion Euros for 27.7km or about $144-million Euros/km. At the current exchange rate of about 1.5, that’s C$216-million/km. However, the tunneling method is a single bore deep tunnel with stacked tracks or side-by-side tracks. This method is comparatively easy in Barcelona because they are tunneling through rock. In Toronto, this scheme was originally proposed for Eglinton, but was abandoned in part because of the depth needed to remain completely clear of structures above and to provide sufficient structural strength above the tunnel to brace the two sides of the road. Very deep tunnels make for very deep stations.
You can read about the Barcelona line (in Spanish) in this pdf as well as a progress report from October 2009.
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It’s time to lay to rest the notion that LRT is being built by other cities because their metro systems are “built out”. This is simply false, and does not justify subway construction in Toronto. This subway envy must end.
Keith:
Most cities have stopped building metros due to cost, future demand, and travel patterns which show a growing number of riders traveling between suburbs, and using buses for LOCAL travel. Paris’ latest plan is designed to improve local travel within the suburbs, and between the suburbs. Sounds a bit like Transit City.
Europeans would laugh at the suggestion of building a subway line when the demand doesn’t even justify a subway. They would wonder why not just build LRT, and save a few billion? Europeans tend to have more common sense than North Americans.
Of course it is hard to reason with people who have subway envy.
Steve: To keep Paris in context, there is also a proposal for a high capacity, circular subway line to interconnect all the “spokes of the wheel” in Paris’ radial layout. The projected demand is much higher than LRT can handle. However, other outer lines in Paris are being built with LRT.
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Sean McManus says:
I never said that the TC plan was MINIMAL LRT but that the current system with its pre-existing restraints is minimal. It will be interesting to see how Queen’s Quay East is built because they were talking of running two car trains on it. This is an area with absolutely no pre-existing development so hopefully they can build it to maximize the benefit of LRT.
Keith L says:
Most of the lines in Melbourne radiate out from the downtown which is a harbour. There some routes which are over 15 km in length so if you went from the northwest to the south east you could do a 30 km plus trip by LRT. Melbourne has many routes which are in centre reservation of wide suburban streets and others which operate in 4 lane streets like downtown Toronto. Some are even on totally separate rights of way but these are not in the majority. Below are the links to the 4 longest routes that I found plus their tram and rail map.
Route 75 Zones 1 and 2
Route 86 Zones 1 and 2
Route 109 Zones 1 and 2
Route 112 Zone 1 only but 70 min route time
Map of Melbourne trams and rail service
Keith L says:
I have ridden the subway in Delhi, all be it on a Saturday, and its patronage was less than that on Spadina or Harbourfront. I cannot state how it loaded during weekdays but when I road it everyone had to pass through an airport like metal detector and then be wanded. I can just imagine how well this would work at Union or Queen St. I have also had the privilege of riding 5 of the 10 top street car lines in the National Geographic’s rating, Toronto, Hong Kong, Melbourne, San Francisco and New Orleans as well as many other lines in the world. While the TTC does have a lot of problems it is a hell of a lot better than most of the other lines in North America.
The TC LRT network hopefully will be faster and more efficient that St. Clair or Spadina, but Spadina which is a more mature line than St. Clair which is carrying a lot of people and seems to be doing a very good job. It can be improved, especially if Toronto gets off its ass and gives more priority to transit and less to cars. Because of all the indecision over the past 40 years and the stupid decisions that were made Toronto cannot afford to build subways everywhere that you would like. Instead of saying no to everything that is proposed why not let something be built and see how it works. St. Clair is still a work in progress and it will take more than 1 board period to work out all the bugs.
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Ok, in the interest of focusing debate, I see 3 positions from the commentors:
1) Transit City is a great plan. LRT perfectly fine for all new transit construction. Main argument is cost savings vs other technology. Mild to strong anti-subway/metro bias. Unstated but likely feel that people who exclusively use private auto in Toronto are selfish and not open to new ideas. Variety of reasons this group also feel confident in the TTC and the City to pull Transit City off without a hitch.
Completely convinced that the slightlest hesitation in proceeding with Transit City “as is” will eliminate Canada’s largest city from any form of funding for transit for eternity. Almost certainly do not live, work or ever visit Etobicoke or Scarborough.
Steve: You run aground when you start making snotty comments about where people live and their biases. I worked in Scarborough from about 2000 until I retired in 2009. Robert Wightman lived in Scarborough in his youth, and now lives in Brampton. I could make extremely insulting comments about people who live north of the 401, or even worse, beyond the 416 boundary, but I choose not to. Many of them can make quite cogent, well reasoned arguments without putting me down for living in Riverdale. And, in case you have not been paying attention, I have already stated that Transit City “as is” needs some changes. However, I have been busy moderating this conversation and with other activities in my life. Argue your position, but don’t assume that you can denigrate the opinion of others as a cheap way to make your point. Of course, if you’re a Tory, you do that sort of thing every day.
2) LRT is great technology. Cost advantages, comfort and site seeing potential compared to other modalities. Neutral to mild bias against subways/metro. Transit City is flawed plan but has potential, just needs lots of input from people in this website. Belief that the reason so many people in the GTA use private auto is that they have not been to European cities where LRT are the main or only form of public transit. Never allowed to mention London Tube system.
In their heart of hearts they know we need the DRL in the worst way, but afraid that if they speak up Toronto could lose all transit funding from all levels of government. Committed to working with the City and TTC to bring them up to speed and improve the plan. May have been to Scarborough once in the last couple of months, but quickly left before dark.
Steve: More generalizations and flat out errors. People in the GTA use autos because they have no alternative in many parts of the region. Traffic congestion is worse, and travel times longer the further out you go from the core. London got rid of its streetcars like many other cities after WWII rather than rebuilding, but is now investing in LRT as are many other UK cities.
Also, as you may have noticed, I have been writing about the DRL before it was fashionable to do so among the subway set. You may be interested to know that one of my first reactions to the proposed Transit City network was to talk about the Don Mills subway.
3) Feel that Transit City is a plan hatched by downtown folks and bureaucrats with no understanding of Etobicoke, Scarborough and most of North York. Don’t really care what transit is deployed as long as it’s a true alternative which mean’s it’s fast, goes where people want to go, and overall worth switching from private auto. Convinced current LRT plans are an insult and waste of money unless the routes are changed dramatcially (possible exception of Eglinton), and TTC and City committ to continued subway expansion within the 416. Big supporters of the DLR and many would scrap all of TC for the start of DRL. No faith in TTC or the City.
Likely to live or work in Scarborough and Etobicoke and have tried to get to places in North York not on the Yonge line without success. Plan on taking this up with their councillor, MPP and Metrolinx, and will start writing to the editors of The Mirror and other local paper in attempt to stop plan as it exists today and have it adapted to meet the needs of the residents, especially change to routes. Do not believe funding will evaporate for transit because transit is political gold right now. Appreciate Steve Munro even if they do not always share his love for LRT.
Steve: They particularly appreciate me because I correct all of their spelling mistakes unless I think they are complete bozos, in which case I publish their comments raw, delete them, or blacklist them as spammers. Sadly, the third group also has a belief in the Tooth Fairy, and will set up a special Tooth Tax to pay for future transit construction. Many people in the outer 416 will wear dentures, but there will be dentists on every corner where there once were gas stations.
In all of this, there is far too much us-vs-them, too much LRT is bad, an unworkable evil plot to subjugate the suburbs whose manifest destiny would be revealed with only a few dozen subway lines, preferably one to each blogger’s house.
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I need some clarification here regarding TC.
I thought that since funding is secured from other levels of government for the lines and council having already approved TC, that a new mayor can’t stop this from going forward? Didn’t the other levels of government sign on for funding so that construction actually starts?
If somehow, the next new mayor convinces the council to postpone TC then what are the odds that future levels of government are going to be as interested in doing partnerships with the city and give funding for transit?
I’m a little confused by this and just want some serious expansion of our transit system to actually go forward. Not bogged down in a game of contiuning agendas and politictical hot potatoes.
Personally though, I think Smitherman is going to take it….
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Keith wrote, “Can you please provide us with examples of cities that have built Transit City style LRT, that operate in a centre of the street ROW, stop at red lights, and that will rely on LRT to work on trunk routes with lengths ranging from 15 – 33 kms?”
Some of these have already been mentioned, but I’ve added links to the details:
Cleveland
London (Croydon)
Melbourne
Oslo
Pheonix
Pittsburgh
San Diego
Buenos Aires has a small pre-metro LRT that is mostly in the road, and the downtown portions of the systems in Denver and Minneapolis are in the road.
[The remainder of the comment is cut off here. If Calvin leaves the rest in a separate comment, I will splice them together.]
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Keith L. wrote:
You should go to Germany. The U-Bahn system in Cologne works exactly this way — tunnelled through the city centre and inner suburban areas (where it functions exactly like a subway) and running in the median, with traffic lights, farther out. This is a common concept in the German Stadtbahn systems. It’s hardly the crazy, untried idea that some are making out to be.
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While I agree with most commentors about how Rossi’s remarks are about Subways vs LRT, I believe there is something else involved that most people do not consider. I don’t know Rossi myself but our social circles do overlap in some areas and this is how I understand his position.
Rossi is pro-transportation, but not necessarily pro-transit. From what I gather, one of the initial drafts of his campaign centred on trying to fix Toronto’s transportation issues, to make getting around the city a whole lot easier. This explains his position against more bike lanes: they make it more difficult to get around the city and the current transportation network does not help. The reason for his opposition to Transit city in his mind is simple: it does not handle cross regional trips that are rapidly becoming the norm in the GTA. This is why he would rather support the more expensive Spadina Extension to the middle of nowhere than Transit City. From what I hear, the responsibility for LRT schemes belongs to the 905 area and not Toronto, Toronto should have a network of subways which would then be able to link to the LRT and make cross-regional transportation a lot easier.
As I see it, Rossi and myself would think alike in many areas regarding this issue. The only difference is that I actually support TC and think that Toronto badly needs this whereas Rossi has grander (and potentially more expensive) plans.
Steve: Taking off from this argument, I think the question is where the boundary lies between an area that is dominated by subways and one where LRT is the more appropriate mode. Because of “subway envy”, as it has been called, there is a sense of entitlement that all of the 416 is “inside the line”. The same, however, will hold true for parts of the 905, and that sort of argument can go on forever until we have trains every two minutes to North Bay, but don’t dare take any road space from the highway network.
The problem with subways as the primary solution is that there never will be many of them — Toronto, especially suburban Toronto, is not Manhattan or central London — and if we adopt a subway-only stance, large swaths of the city will be more than a convenient walk away from a subway station. Good service on the bus system will also be essential, but we cannot be sure of getting even that. It is impossible to have a subway stop outside every major destination because they all grew up in a road-oriented, not a subway corridor oriented setting.
Also, I have to challenge the idea that we should only be catering to very long trips. This fails on two counts. First, because many trips are not long “regional” commutes, but shorter journeys well within the capability of good surface transportation. Second, because we keep talking about sustainability and redeveloping our city region to be focussed closer to home, to reduce the need for long trips, but we keep building a transportation system that facilitates long ones.
Finally, we have the perception, overdone by some, but no thanks to the way the TTC delivers projects, that LRT is somehow second rate. I know that there is a faction within the TTC who would love to build nothing but subways, and the organization spends far too much time telling us why they cannot run good surface routes rather than doing all they can to improve service.
Oddly enough, one big issue on surface routes is parking. Everybody wants to be able to park, and yet the biggest contributor to congestion on many streets — which affects motorists too — is the amount of road space taken up by parked cars and the small but significant obstructions caused by vehicles getting in and out of parking spaces. If someone wants a transportation solution, attacking bike lanes is only the tip of the iceberg, and a convenient way to avoid the obvious. If you want to free up road space, get rid of parking, or at least substantially expand the no stopping window for the peak periods.
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Steve wrote, “[The remainder of the comment is cut off here. If Calvin leaves the rest in a separate comment, I will splice them together.]”
Sorry about that – I was originally going to add a comment about Pheonix but decided to add it to the list with a Wikipedia link (I don’t have a page on it yet). I then forgot to cut out what I started at the bottom – my bad!
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Stephen Cheung says:
January 25, 2010 at 10:04 am
Have you ever ridden the Bloor Danforth Subway from Kennedy to Kipling? It is a long, boring tedious ride. Now add on an LRT or even an SRT trip on top of that and you will be either brain dead of suffer from severe numb bum when you are finished. It is not the TTC’s responsibility to get people from Peel to York or Durham. That is the job of Metrolinx, to link together the areas within the 905, while the TTC provides transportation within 416. Granted for shorter, cross border trips there needs to be better co-ordination between the local agencies.
How do bike lanes make it more difficult to get around? Oh I see you don’t want to share the road with them. When I drive in Toronto I search out the streets, like Greenwood, Lansdowne, Harbord, etc. that have only two lanes of traffic plus bike lanes because they have proper turn lanes and a one lane in each direction road with turn lanes usually makes better time than two lane in each direction road without turn lanes. I think that the proposal for Jarvis will make the road faster during most of the day.
I drove St. Clair from Yonge to Caledonia and back around noon today and the auto traffic moved well except for a two block section leading up to Dufferin and this is because the city allows cars to park up to about 30 m from the intersection. Between Vaughan and the east portal to St. Clair West Station no parking is allowed and the traffic flows quite well. There need to be a no parking zone one block before and after Dufferin as well.
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I think you and I would agree that suburb-to-suburb subways won’t work here, primarily because most suburban-only trips would require bus rides at both ends of the subway trip.
As for the anti-TC sentiment, most people here weren’t around in 1965 when our streetcar system was at its peak, so they have no idea what’s possible. They associate the bad service with the technology itself, but the problem has always been fleet size, and this will only get worse. If you tell your readers the streetcar service frequencies on a minor street like Harbord in 1965, they won’t believe you.
What really bugs me about the LRT advocates though is their complete silence on the new streetcar fleet. They should be out there pushing for 400 small vehicles, not 200 double-sized ones. The fleet size needs to go back to what is was in ’68 if we’re ever going to improve the service. Otherwise, we need to can the nostalgia and work with a bus fleet that isn’t going to be short all the time.
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