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 
Steve: Keith L submitted three comments. I have consolidated them here to simplify the thread.
Lots of points here. I’ll try and touch on some of them.
Karl: Do you really want to compare a city of half a million to a city of 2.5 million souls? Ottawa has stubbornly stuck with BRT for so long, does that make it the right solution for Toronto? Conversely there are cities the size of Gothenberg with subway/metro lines. And I would never argue that it’s a good deployment of precious transit dollars.
Steve: If we’re going to make comparisons, and use STC as the centre of the world, then Ottawa or Cologne are not bad places to start. One cannot take the millions of people in the Toronto CMA and treat this as a justification for high capacity transit serving local trips within one part of the region. STC does not have, and is unlikely ever to have, enough demand coming to it along one corridor to justify a subway. A BD connection, for example, will be useless to people coming to STC from at least 2/3 of the possible origins to the east, north and west.
STC is not downtown, it is a suburban node, and I believe that a network of LRT lines is what it needs.
Will Oxford:
Cologne is the size of Ottawa. And guess what? Ottawa’s getting LRT too. That does not make it necessarily right for Toronto. Particularly for a place like Scarborough Town Centre. I can concede grudgingly on Eglinton. But terminating the subway at Kennedy when all of Scarborough’s city life centres around STC is an indefensible decision.
Steve: If we’re going to make comparisons, and use STC as the centre of the world, then Ottawa or Cologne are not bad places to start. One cannot take the millions of people in the Toronto CMA and treat this as a justification for high capacity transit serving local trips within one part of the region. STC does not have, and is unlikely ever to have, enough demand coming to it along one corridor to justify a subway. A BD connection, for example, will be useless to people coming to STC from at least 2/3 of the possible origins to the east, north and west.
STC is not downtown, it is a suburban node, and I believe that a network of LRT lines is what it needs.
Calvin: Correct me if I am wrong but don’t systems like the Pittsburgh, or the Croydon Tramlink make heavy use of grade separation, full segregation and exclusive ROWs? If that’s what Transit City was going to build, they’ve got my vote! For example, if they built an LRT from one end of the city to the other along the Finch Hydro Corridor, I’d be cheering! But again a good chunk of those systems you cite seek to separate traffic from the rails as much as possible. Or where they do go through streets, they don’t always use busy streets or sometimes simply designate the street as a transit mall. We aren’t doing any of this with Transit City, save some grade separation along Eglinton where it’s absolutely necessary.
Steve: There is also the Sheppard connection west from Consumers Road under the DVP into Don Mills Station, underground connections to the Yonge and Spadina subways on Finch West, and the completely grade-separated converted SRT/LRT. As for Eglinton, I would hardly call 10+km of grade separation a small undertaking. Yes, it’s necessary, but your characterization implies that it’s minimal.
Yet, to be honest, despite my reservations about mixing at-grade and below grade operations along one line, I can tolerate the Eglinton LRT. I also support the WWLRT, Finch West LRT and the Don Mills LRT.
Steve: Just to keep my own position clear here, my view is that the Don Mills line should end at Eglinton where it would meet the DRL east leg. The line south to the Danforth will have to be grade separated anyhow, and it might as well be an extension north of the DRL subway as this greatly simplifies transfer movements at the BD interchange. I have held this position for many years, and have a number of rather vigourous discussions with TTC folk about the folly of trying for surface operation on either Broadview or Pape.
I also believe that taking Jane south of Eglinton is not a good idea, and it would be better to make Jane a branch service running from Eglinton West Station.
The ones that don’t seem to make sense to me are Sheppard, Morningside, Jane, and the SRT replacement. Sheppard seems designed to kill the Sheppard subway. Why else is it going first? If improving transit was the absolute goal, the DRL and the SRT replacements would be going before any Transit City line. But they pick Sheppard. A better entrance at Don Mills and curbside bus lanes on Sheppard where possible (easily done past McCowan) would have achieve much of their speed and capacity goals in the interim while they worked on a subway extension till Agincourt at least.
Morningside and Jane were both chosen on the basis of socio-economic need, not ridership. If a rapid transit link is required to the Scarborough campus, does it not make sense to run it along Ellesmere from Scarborough Town Centre to the UTSC, touching on some new development and the hospital?
Most grating to me is the SRT replacement. Instead of starting on a subway now while the SRT is still up and running, they want to close the SRT for years while they convert to LRT. Yeah, the mayor and the TTC chair are really showing their concern for Scarborough commuters there. All that pain for what? To leave the only urban growth centre and transportation hub in the 416 without a subway connection.
I can understand the need for a connection to Malvern (I am from there). But I don’t want the rest of Scarborough penalized for my benefit. Ideally, they would have built the subway link and then a nice at-grade Transit City style LRT down Progrees and hydro corridor from STC to Malvern Town Centre.
Finally, two general points. First: cost. I don’t buy that the cupboard is empty. If there’s $15 billion to pay for Transit City, there’s $15 billion to spend on transit in other ways. I don’t recall the province or the feds saying, “Thou shalt only build LRT with this money.” They paid for what we asked with Move Ontario. We asked for LRT….Heck, we didn’t even ask for the DRL up front! Next is the focus on capacity. A lot of Transit City’s arguments seem so focused on capacity matching with very little consideration for the benefits of speed, particularly for commuters. This basically excludes benefits for anyone who doesn’t live near the corridor. For example, would a rider at Finch and McCowan heading to the Yonge line benefit from the SELRT? Would a rider at Markham and Ellesmere heading to Kennedy station benefit from Transit City? Or what about riders in Rexdale (where neighbourhood life centres around Albion and Rexdale not Finch) not travelling anywhere along Finch?
Again, that’s not all to say I am blatantly opposed to LRT. I am not. I just don’t think LRT as implemented in Transit City is well done or prioritized correctly for what the city needs. I would have liked to have seen a mix of solutions. Some of the Transit City lines as proposed, some low-end BRT (curbside bus lanes) and some subway construction. $15 billion on just LRTs is madness. And it’s really the end of subway construction (except for maybe the DRL) in Toronto. Because if subways are too expensive now, what’ll be the answer in 20-30 years?
Steve: I really have to object to “$15 billion on just LRTs” because this ignores the fact that among the most expensive parts of the lines are the underground sections which, if the need ever arises, can be extended. This is not “just LRT” and stating the issue that way misrepresents what Transit City is doing. I will leave additional comments to a separate article.
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Maybe BRT is the best solution for Scarborough. Everyone complains about the onerous amount of transfers, mainly one at STC, and another at Kennedy. So what if every single bus into STC continued on a dedicated ROW down to Kennedy Station? One transfer, gone, with a similar level of service. We could buy some artics for peak supplementary capacity, and to use on the busier routes as well. The thing about an Ottawa-style implementation is that it is great when you have a common high-demand corridor with a million different feeder routes into it, such as is the situation in Scarborough.
Steve: That’s great if you want to go to Kennedy Station. However, it is not the centre of the universe and neither, for that matter, is Scarborough Town Centre.
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A DRL up to Eglinton only makes sense if the Eglinton LRT is a subway (and a double Y Eglinton-DRL connection would be nice). Having said that, trains will eventually reach BD already crowded from the north, and you would just be creating another post-1978 St. George situation — ie., the transfer will gradually lose its attractiveness for BD riders as ridership on the DRL north of the Danforth increases. The whole idea is for BDers to go downstairs at Pape, board an empty train (like St. George pre-1978) and get a seat, so I would say that the DRL needs to operate as an exclusive adjunct of the Bloor-Danforth subway, just as the University line was before Spadina was connected in.
Also, with an Eglinton subway, the Don Mills and Jane LRTs would have nice neat termination points at Eglinton that make sense. Eglinton’s numbers are way underestimated. The BD interceptor effect from N-S feeders was never factored in to Metrolinx’s projections.
I have to disagree about STC though — it is the logical termination point of Bloor-Danforth. It wasn’t in 1985 when the RT opened, but it is now.
As for an LRT corridor in the Finch ROW, the racoons and squirrels over there would probably get more use out of it.
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Just wanted to comment on Stephen Chung’s post:
The idea that subways are for long distance, LRT is for local is quite broken. It has more to do with the how the line is operated rather than the technology used. Using German transit as an example, the Bloor-Danforth line is like a U-Bhan. Frequent stops that are designed for inner city travel. The Yonge-University-Spadina line is like a S-Bhan, with spaced out stops in the suburbs but with frequent stops in the core, thus making it more appealing to suburban-to-city riders.
Due to the design of North American cities, most rapid transit lines follow this latter approach. Transit City is looking to be very similar to many LRTs found in Europe, which act as enhanced feeders to metro lines and have similar stop spacing of 500m. The problem is that these lines operate in areas FAR denser than what is found in the former boroughs. So in Europe you may see lots of people getting on and off despite how close the stops are, with TC at many times the streetcar will stop to let on and off only a few passengers at a time.
If Rocco Rossi wanted to review the stops on the lines, so that they would be perceived as major transit lines like the subway and SRT, then I’d back him completely. Instead he wants to halt work on them while he reviews the costs. Last time this happened was in the early 80s with Network 2011, and we all know how much of that got built…
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IF, however, every other DRL train turned at Pape, then you would have a perfectly fine balance.
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Keith L wrote,
All of the cities I mentioned, possibly with the exception of Phoenix, make varying use of exclusive ROWs, but the examples were cited because they also make good use of median ROWs. In other words, they show the flexibility of LRT technology.
I partially agree with Keith in that the Transit City plans are far too “median oriented”. Sheppard is ideal for this, as the road allowance was designed for a seven lane road and only the portion west of Pharmacy currently uses this space. That said, east of Neilson, a side of the road right of way may be feasible.
More importantly, parts of Eglinton should be side of the road instead of median (Richview expressway lands, and the portion from the east portal to Don Mills. I have some similar concerns for Finch West as well.
I have said before that the conversion of the SRT to LRT will be a showcase of how LRT can provide equivalent to subway service instead of being second rate. I personally hope that the extensions to Sheppard and Malvern are implemented without using any median running. Following the plans laid out for ICTS extension, it could follow the same alignment for less cost by reducing the length of tunneling and most of the fenced-in isolation.
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M. Briganti wrote about a DRL connection at Danforth, “the transfer will gradually lose its attractiveness for BD riders as ridership on the DRL north of the Danforth increases”
Perhaps it will. We can only make educated guesses at what future travel patterns will be like. Consider that if the east leg of a DRL goes up to Eglinton, that eastern passengers might find it easier to get downtown by going over to Yonge partly because the trains coming south are not as packed as they are today because many riders coming into Eglinton station from the east have a better way to get downtown. There will be riders who will just prefer to stay on the BD train unless they are heading to a new area served by the DRL.
It may even end up that service patterns may dictate that maybe only every other train, or only two out of three, need only go up to Eglinton and those changing from the BD line will not find every train filled with north-of-Danforth riders.
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“Rossi may not be familiar with local issues…”
Then he shouldn’t be mayor.
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M.Briganti wrote:
I have also been concerned about the “order” (is it official or not?) for the larger streetcars, both in terms of the expected longer headways – even there, will there be only 5 people on the 506 car at times? – and the footprint on the street and in terminals. I’ve thought it odd to go big only, rather than a mix, as we currently have with ALRVs and CLRVs. Some routes, I think, would be best served by using exclusively larger vehicles, like the 501 and 504. Others, like the 505, could generally operate just fine with smaller ones. And some routes may be best served by smaller vehicles during off peak hours, and larger ones during rush hours and special events – the 511 comes to mind.
However, seeing as it’s been decided to build transit city to a standard gauge, that would suggest that we’ll be looking at different vehicles anyway. It seems to me that for the most part, these higher capacity Bombardier cars would be better suited to Transit City than for the legacy routes.
Steve: Yes, the order is official for new streetcars. The TTC claims that it will not cut service on a 1-for-2 basis on most streetcar routes, and that the ratio will depend on the existing level of service and the backlog of demand for improvement.
That said, I don’t trust them to hold to this especially during the off peak. If they could actually operate a reliable 10 minute headway, I might not be disheartened, but we all know that this means three cars every half hour, of which two will short turn.
It is likely that even if we got “smaller” cars, they would be more akin to ALRV length and we would be looking at wider headways anyhow. The experience on Queen and Bathurst suggests this is not good unless the TTC cleans up its act on service management. That’s why I have been so strident about this issue knowing what is to come.
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Hi Steve
I think that Ted the Planner has missed the point in labelling people as the “we can’t afford this” culture. Funding for public transit is going to be scarce in the coming years as governments deal with increased debt loads and revenue problems. The reason people are questioning price tags is simple – where are you going to find the funds to build all of those subways? Where are you going to find the funds to operate and maintain them? Just look at the example of Sheppard and the projections for the Vaughan line. There is no point in overbuilding transit.
You may also believe that Steve has brainwashed people or that they follow him like lemmings but the truth is there is not enough demand in the suburbs to support heavy rapid transit. If you examine what Steve says you will find that he does support tailoring transit to fit the densities that it is expected to serve (DLR , for instance). The only way to get rapid transit to the suburbs is LRT. The lower construction costs and the flexibility will make it a better fit for the neighbourhoods that it will serve. Remember that it will be serving post war neighbourhoods that were designed for automobile transportation with buses as an afterthought for those who could not afford a car. As a result you will not find the heavy population densities that are needed to justify subways. Remember, too, that it is designed to replace bus routes that are already at or near capacity. Increasing capacity with a subway is pure, unnecessary, overkill.
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M Briganti said:
Not quite true; the whole idea of the DRL is to relieve congestion at Yonge and Bloor. Whether it intercepts people who are currently making their way west to Yonge or south to B-D from east/north of Flemingdon is irrelevant; what matters is that they head downtown on the DRL rather than through Yonge and Bloor.
Also, I don’t quite understand what you mean by
given that the ELRT is only above ground from Don Mills west to Brentcliffe, which has I believe only one traffic signal to contend with (at Leslie)… It will operate almost exactly as a subway will from Don Mills to Yonge and beyond, it’s just different trains.
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To get a nice overview of current and planned light rail systems in North America, see
http://www.lightrail.com
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I’d like to wade-in on two subjects.
(1) Use of German or German names. The Germans like to give exact names to subjects almost to the point of being ridiculous. The names S-bahn a U-bahn started many years ago and described the vertical level on which its vehicles operated – Untergrundbahn – Ubahn – subway. Strassenbahn = street rail – streetcars (or tramways in proper English). Stadtbahn – City rail (in Berlin mainly on the elevated ramps). Then the population explosion and new technology have confused the terminology – The people of Stuttgart re-mapped and re-gauged their network and renamed it from Strassenbahn to Stadtbahn, in Vienna there are quite large vehicles running Stadtbahn in tunnels in city core and on the surface in the suburbs.
(2) Confusion in T.O. about the routes or their structure – Mr. A.G. once said that LRT on Sheppard will be only temporary and that within 15 or so years it will be changed to subway anyway. That’s not going to happen, as future TTC management and/or contractors would not dare to dig under LRT running every 4 to 5 minutes. In other words – the governance (all levels of government) have to decide what they are willing to build and finance before the first shovel is going to hit the ground.
Steve: If the Sheppard line only had a 15-year lifespan as LRT before it completely filled up and needed conversion to subway, I would agree that the modal decision is needed now. However, the demand projections 30 years out don’t support this approach. Indeed, demand models are notorious for modelling car networks better than transit ones in that they consider corridors, not discrete routes. It may be better to have an LRT on Finch and on Sheppard, and yet I suspect that “demand” for a Sheppard line includes a swath from at least Ellesmere to Finch.
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Calvin Henry-Cotnam says:
January 26, 2010 at 9:33 am
I agree and disagree. I don’t agree that a subway from Kennedy to STC is not feasible or unwarranted. Certainly, the folks who drafted the RTES thought a subway would be needed. And the case for a subway has only grown stronger as more jobs, residents, retail and government services have gotten concentrated around STC.
That said if the conversion to LRT is going to be railroaded through, I don’t understand why it has to be grade-separated the whole way. If the big benefit of LRT is its ability to save money while keeping speed and capacity up why not use it? Why not run the LRT at-grade along Progress past McCowan? It would save money and at least allow for the addition of a stops at Markham and Milner. Grade separating the thing the entire way is a serious waste of resources that could have been used elsewhere (or even spent on extending the line further North). Kennedy to STC, I can get. And Milner to north of Sheppard needs to be decked (I don’t think a tunnel is necessary). But from McCowan till Milner it can run along the centre of the road. And from Sheppard till Malvern Town, it can simply be trenched (no need to bury/deck over). That can save money and add a few needed stops which would really add a lot of functionality to the line. These changes would showcase LRT. As planned, the line is just a downgraded ART extension using LRT trains.
Steve: You hit on a burning issue in my own critique of what the TTC is doing. They insist on having complete grade separation of the SLRT to guarantee service reliability. This tells me a lot about how well they expect to be able to operate the line, but also that their focus remains on external interference (the infamous traffic congestion excuse) rather than their own internal screwups. Indeed, the Metrolinx analysis of this line recommended the Progress alignment.
The one issue worth looking at is the size of trains that will run on the line as this affects both land requirement for stations and pedestrian volumes at station locations. Shorter trains also imply shorter headways and more interference with/from traffic at grade crossings.
Depending on the capacity we assume for a Transit City car, a two-car train would have a design capacity of, say, 300-350. On a three-minute headway, this gives a capacity of 6,000-7,000 per hour. Longer or more frequent trains would up this figure, but there are physical limits.
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One thing that does confuse me about TC is this apparent focus on ‘local’ or medium distance travel. I really don’t understand how TC facilitates this in practice. The routes that were picked were subway feeder routes. They were not routes that people hop on and hop off from on a regular basis (save Eglinton) and that’s going to be less likely with TC’s wider stop spacing and reduced frequencies (compared to the bus today). I don’t get how this improves travel for anybody other than commuters who live along the lucky corridors. Is it really going to encourage more off-peak ridership than say more frequent bus service and the current or shorter stop spacing?
Steve: Actually, the Finch West bus today has a lot of local riding, as do other routes in the proposed network. The crowd leaving Finch Station is not the same crowd that’s on the bus by Dufferin Street. On a longer term perspective, part of the rationale of TC links with the Official Plan that will see substantial changes in the developed character of the TC routes as well as increased use of transit for non-subway feeder type trips between suburban areas. It is important to see not just what is there today, but what is hoped for in a few decades.
Coming back on topic (my apologies to Steve for digressing so much), I think Rossi has gotten a bit of an unfair rep. He’s not as anti-Transit as he’s been painted out to be. Or at least I didn’t get that impression by his whole speech. I think he remains concerned about the fiscal health of the city. And certainly if the Sheppard LRT is only going to add to the burden, it should be reviewed, just like everything else (I’d expect more tolls and registration taxes to be tacked on too). If the LRT is as efficient as claimed (in that it replaces lots of buses) then why is everybody worried? If it is efficient compared to today’s bus service, it’ll pass any review.
Steve: Rossi took a swipe at the TTC “digging up roads” and this was a clear allusion to St. Clair. By extension, “digging up roads” for LRT lines is a bad thing. However, a lot of that digging was for utility and other streetscape work, not for transit. If we build subways, as indeed we will do on Eglinton, there will be much more substantial upheaval at stations for the excavations than there would be with a surface alignment.
Rossi plays to the motorists who think we can go back to the great days of the 50s when road space would just keep expanding for everyone. Get those pesky transit vehicles and cyclists out of our way and let us just drive — that’s the subtext of what he is saying.
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There is no place across this city, barring the DRL, where further subway building is justified cost wise. Otherwise, there would be more serious private companies trolling for public dollars to do a joint project.
We will have enough vanity projects sucking up operating dollars and/or capacity with the Vaughan extension and the Sheppard line, let alone the potential of that Richmond Hill nonsense.
I look forward to the day when I and others who moved into this city post amalgamation are in the majority so we can finally get down to having serious discussions about how the whole can work, and not just how one person’s part deserves more.
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Hold on a second- what is wrong with this so-called “we can’t afford this” culture? If I’m not mistaken, we really can’t afford this. So shouldn’t that be the culture? When it comes to subways, one needs to have a pragmatic attitude knowing that money from Ottawa flows very, very slowly if at all, and maybe to keep in mind that we can’t afford a hell of a lot, so we need to work wisely with the money that we have. If some time in the future the GTA were to uncover some sort of money tree and decide to use its newfound fortunes on transit expansion, I think this whole debate would be very different. But that is quite unlikely.
Steve: I am even more amused, as someone who spends a lot of time on the “left” side of the political spectrum, to hear how a pro-LRT position also lines up with the right’s hold-the-line-on-spending outlook. As for newfound fortunes, my experience is that the economic and political cycles are such that between the time new money falls out of the sky and we get an agreed-to plan to build something, we have either changed governments or fallen into a recession. Transit has to be something we can afford now and on an ongoing basis, not on winning the lottery.
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Gothenburg’s population is more than half-a-million, it is a little ahead of Mississauga, and about the same as Ottawa. Since you like to talk about Scarborough, let’s bring Scarborough directly into the picture; Mississauga’s population is a little ahead of Scarborough. Gothenburg is roughly star-shaped as a built-up city, measuring about 16.5km across two arms and about 18km across a near-perpendicular set of two arms, while Scarborough is roughly triangular in shape measuring about 16.5km across both the base and the height. This means that Gothenburg and Scarborough likely have similar built-up land area and are not very far apart in population. If Gothenburg gets by with LRT for serving its downtown, then Scarborough can definitely get by with LRT for serving its downtown. That’s just an indisputable fact, because Transit City consists will be longer than Gothenburg’s vehicles.
As for Ottawa’s BRT, Ottawa’s BRT is a BRT on steroids, including an extensive stretch that is fully grade-separated and loaded with both feeder terminals and radial lines converging into downtown Ottawa. Ottawa’s BRT infrastructure isn’t cheap, and even Metrolinx acknowledges the high costs of such bus infrastructure. Even with all that money, the capacity of Ottawa’s BRT is less than half of Transit City LRT’s. In fact, Transit City can provide more capacity than Ottawa’s BRT (with 60 articulated buses an hour) on a 5-minute headway (12 3-car LRT consists an hour), which can be achieved with on-street operation and no grade separation at far less cost than Ottawa-style BRT.
The same RTES that thought a subway to Vaughan would be needed?
Steve: If memory serves, the RTES also used a flawed demand model that completely ignored the presence or future expansion of GO Transit. This dumped all riding from the growing suburbs on the proposed subway system thereby inflating the “need” for the lines. Demand “modelling” is a very political process.
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Re Jiri S:
“The name is an abbreviation for the German ‘Stadtschnellbahn’ (meaning “urban rapid railway”)… The S-Bahn is a railway that serves metropolitan traffic as well as direct regional traffic… By contrast, U-Bahn trains are underground and serve urban city centers, and count legally as a kind of tramway in Germany, while the S-Bahn legally are a type of railway.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Bahn
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Can we please stop with the “we can’t afford this” arguments. With an estimated cost of $15 billion for Transit City when all is said and done, the money is clearly there. It’s just a matter of how we spend it.
And I am generally more optimistic that we can raise more money for transit now. There is a level of awareness amongst the general public about the importance of public transit and transit issues that was not there in decades past. I even think that if the public is provided with half-decent transit they’d actually be willing to support it through tolls, fees, higher fares, and even higher taxes. But that requires a genuine discussion with the public and a real effort from transit operators to focus on customer service. Pictures of TTC employees sleeping on the job or leaving a streetcar unattended while they grab lunch, a refusal to implement newer fare payment media, lack of fare integration, etc. are all the kinds of issues that will keep transit from being viewed as a sound alternative to automobile ownership and therefore a worthy investment for transportation dollars. Fix the image and real issues transit in Toronto has and the money will follow.
Steve: Regardless of whether we get $5-billion or $50-billion, we should spend it wisely. If we suddenly feel rich, and build expensive monuments to every city in the GTA, we won’t build many of them.
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I don’t see anything wrong with the TTC insisting on full grade separation with a Scarborough RT conversion. Where is it written that light rail has to be semi? Once upon a time, ICTS was considered light rail, and now it’s not?
Steve: I too have no problem with the RT being completely grade separated, but just wanted to point out that the alternative had been on the table. I suspect that if this had been an LRT project from the outset, they would have come at the alignment differently and would not have simply pasted an LRT implementation onto the already decided ICTS scheme.
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Granted we seem to have $15 billion. That isn’t a lot of money these days, especially when you want a network of shiny new subways. If we had $100 billion, and had it in our bank account, not in some far off political announcement, we could build all the subways we want. But we don’t and thus can’t afford this kind of pie-in-the-sky fanciful planning.
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We could look at mode separation rather than full grade sep., like the C-Train.
As for “we can’t afford this” – if we can “afford” the Steeles-Highway 7 subway, we can “afford” a lot more subway.
The problem is… we couldn’t “afford” that extension, but we’re building it anyway.
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Keith L wrote,
I agree with this, though my previous comments only dealt with the right of way north of the 401. At grade operation along or near Progress is a good idea, especially given that the buildings near the intersection of Bellamy and Progress are a good source of riders. This could extend until it has to cross the 401, though I suspect that the cost of elevating it from Markham road would not be out of the question given the area.
My comments about the alignment north of the 401 are that it should remain separate from roads, except for railway-style level crossings. The long tunnelled section could be eliminated, thought there are some benefits to a grade separated connection at Sheppard, even if connecting tracks still have to be at grade. North of Sheppard, a stretch runs along parkland where it can be placed at grade without the need for fencing. Grade crossings at the few road crossings between there and Malvern Town Centre instead of any elevated portion would substantially reduce the cost of construction.
I still strongly suspect that the money committed could take the line all the way to Malvern Town Centre if these ICTS-necessary frills are removed from the project.
Steve wrote,
This is precisely why this Richmond Hill resident is opposed to the “Richmond Hill nonsense” (credit to OgtheDim for that!). Living between Major Mac and Elgin Mills along with many others who are further north than the proposed subway will extend to, I cannot see the benefit of having to take a bus to a new subway station where I have to funnel into at least two sets of stairs or escalators (if they are working) to get down to a subway for a one-seat ride from Highway 7 to downtown. For the same money, we could hop on an LRT much closer to my home that could take me to a same-platform change to a subway train at Steeles. Except for anyone living within a two minute walk from a proposed subway station north of Steeles, the LRT alternative will provide a faster trip downtown for everyone else.
Steve: Alas, that town north of the 416 has subway envy in a very bad way, especially as someone else will pay most of the cost of building, and all of the cost of operating it.
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Jonathon said:
Surely we don’t have $100 billion, but a reasonable expansion of the subway network can be achieved for much less.
How about this:
1) Extend Sheppard subway to Kennedy, and build LRT east of Kennedy. Extra cost compared to just Sheppard LRT – about $1 billion.
2) Replace Eglinton LRT with subway from Yonge to Pearson (and defer the eastern section). That can be done for $4.6 billion already allocated for Eglinton, no extra cost.
3) Proceed with Finch West LRT as planned.
4) Proceed with SRT-to-LRT conversion and extension, as planned. (The transfer at Kennedy may be a nuisance, but SLRT will have good speed and sufficient capacity, so let’s not pay for a new subway tunnel.)
5) Build DRL subway from King/Spadina to Eglinton/Don Mills. This will be expensive, perhaps $3 billion or more, but is required by all accounts – even if the rest of Transit City is built as per the original plan.
Steve: Actually, the eastern side of the Eglinton line probably has more demand that the western side, but the latter always got the attention because (a) it was cheaper to build especially if it started from Eglinton West Station, and (b) the lure of the airport connection.
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Going to go a bit off topic … considering this thread has turned into a Subway vs LRT debate:
I’m looking forward to seeing the new design scheme for the S(L)RT. IF the line going to share the same carhouse with Sheppard, does this mean there will no longer be a grade seperation when the SLRT and the Sheppard LRT meet. The plan shown back in June illustrated that the Scarborough RT would pass under Sheppard with with a station at that point. Now that we know the technology will be LRT, will there still be an underground station or would the Scarborough LRT just stay on surface and turn onto the Sheppard tracks?
If the latter is the answer, the TTC has alot of explaining to do. Back in June they stated that one of the reasons why they chose the more expensive tunnel options was to make sure no green space was lost, like the park that resides in the old rail corridor.
Steve: Yes, the TTC has a lot of explaining to do. They ran a public participation process where, allegedly, both technologies were on the table, but all ofthe drawings were clearly oriented to having two separate technologies with ICTS on the SRT. Anyone could see that the designs would be different for an LRT line, but the TTC was too busy stacking the deck. Now that they have officially changed their minds, they owe everyone an updated design. The online versions are out of date, and there is no planned public meeting to look at an alternative.
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Just as side note after reading all the comment on the thread, I think it’s only appropriate that we respect each other’s views. I certainly don’t agree with all of Steve’s views on transit. That being said, to call people brainwashed or idiots “I’m talking about both lrt and subway advocates” is a bit childish. It’s great that we’re all passionate about transit, and having these intense debates just shows how much we care about our city and how we want it to grow in the future, but let’s not get carried away.
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Steve: This item has been slightly edited by inserting paragraph breaks for clarity, to tidy up the spelling and to create a hotlink.
Rossi is right in one regard, recall Transit City. That someone else is footing the bill for it is not a good enough excuse to waste allocated transit dollars that truly stems from the taxpayer’s pocket. It is really our money being spent, and the voice of the citizenry needs to be heard out. On-of-touch bureaucrats in Ottawa and Queen’s Park whom do not ride transit daily, do not know in great detail what areas of Toronto are heavy congested; where needs alleviations and the depths of the relief needed. They can only go by what the TTC tells them, which is colored by their own political biases.
Only in a world where the current TTC brass thinks that building new stations to this level of magnitude is warranted that the notion of expanding out the subway in parts of the city that are already densely populated can seem unreasonable.
Light-rail is not a substitute for corridors which easily could handle over 10,000 pphpd were routes coordinated to serve the requisite stations and neighbourhoods where traffic would be high. A $7 billion light-rail project around a major artery like Eglinton is a disservice. A subway line built in phases offers up a real opportunity for sustainable growth and TOD intensification around the station sites. People are not going to leave their cars at home in droves for that, to stand at exposed island platforms to take over an hour to get across the city. No way. This may actually force more residents back into their cars due to mass construction on the surface of major arteries for years on end; affecting local businesses and commerce, and affecting residents’ transit options.
Why does Transit City not include a single provision for improving the transit services through central downtown east-to-west? Why is Miller only waiting until the end of his term in office to suggest we build a DRL? Why did the TTC cancel the $3-$5 million EA report on DRL feasibility yet has the money available to puke up grotesque monstrosities like the $130 million “artsy”, “futuristic” Steeles West Stn design above? Why is all the money going towards projects the majority of the city’s population will never have a need to ride on daily?
Sorry if that sounds like a regionalist perspective but corridors like Eglinton and the DRL are of far more public worth to the entire region and the money should be going towards ways to improve higher-order transit services in the CORE first, PERIPHERY secondary. It doesn’t matter how direct your commute from suburbia to downtown was if it’s far less convenient to get across the core once off the subway. Why is it that 3 suburban urban centres (Vaughan, Richmond Hill and Mississauga) are located within a few kilometres of major preexisting commuter railways which feed into downtown Toronto; yet zero efforts are being made to better integrate these lines to their urban developments?
Why is it Toronto butchering its own redevelopment potential (along Sheppard East, Eglinton, DRL path) for the sake of extending subways into other cities, by building excessively large station facilities which discourage on-site development potential with leasing of the air rights above stations? Something smells putrid here and let’s not kid ourselves in thinking that any of these transit projects are truly being built with the daily transit customer in mind.
Relocating the bus-to-train transfer station a few kilometres deeper into suburbia is a mockery of what local service metro subways were designed to do; cater to actual preexisting built up and densely populated areas. Since when has the subway replaced GO Transit for interregional travel? Are we going to wait until the trunk subway lines are so clogged up with commuters whom were funneled either by Transit City lines or meandering extensions to highway corridors, before we realize that gee, maybe another east-west subway was needed to siphon away some trips? Transfer City = FAIL!
Steve: I can sympathize with some of your statements, but there are a number of factual errors that must be corrected. First and foremost, the subway extensions into York Region are not Toronto’s doing, they are thanks to political machinations at Queen’s Park. Moreover, they are definitely not products of the Miller administration.
Transit City was deliberately not designed to serve high capacity, core oriented commuting trips. The whole idea is to beef up routes in the suburbs where transit demand is expected to exceed bus capacities in the coming decades, and to support intensification of suburban housing on major streets. The real market for a lot of this is not to get people out of their cars (especially those who are commuting long distances) but to give better service for existing riders and provide a real alternative for the many new residents who will come to the TC corridors. If any agency should be the target of your ire, it’s GO Transit which, starved for capital, has dragged its feet for decades on major service improvements. Even those will mainly serve core-oriented trips because that’s where the rail lines go.
The design of the new stations on the Spadina extension is dictated by a few important facts. First, Toronto has large trains, and the stations must be 500ft long to hold them. Second, the depth of the stations is dictated by bored tunnel construction which must be far enough down to avoid hitting varioud things like utilities, and to deal with the hills and dales of Toronto’s geography. Third, the need for dual exits, lots of escalators and elevators is driven both by the building code (fire safety) and by accessibility requirements. Making the stations actually look nice adds a small amount to the cost. If you want classic TTC bathroom stations, you may want to talk to all the politicians and residents who complain about how sterile our system looks.
The TTC recently called tenders for the DRL study. I know that the City tried to cut that study out of the budget, but as far as I know the study is going ahead. My real concern is that it be a fair study of options, not a whitewash for a “no DRL” position.
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Steve said: “Actually, the eastern side of the Eglinton line probably has more demand that the western side…”
Yes – but this is because buses 54 Lawrence East, 51 Leslie, 100 Flemmington, 56 Leaside all use Eglinton East to get to Yonge subway.
If DRL subway reaches Eglinton / Don Mills, then 54, 51, and probably 56 will terminate at the DRL station, instead of running to Yonge.
Steve: Yes, although the 51 and 56 don’t contribute much. On the west side, the intercept point is Eglinton West Station. This is a good example of a more general concern I have with people hollering for subways everywhere. The larger the network is, the more spread out the demand will be. Eglinton will carry lots of people, but many of them won’t go a huge distance on it before transferring to something else. Also, better service stimulates off-peak riding and changes the ratio between all day and peak demand. This all makes projecting current riding patterns onto the future a bit tricky, especially when the network becomes more finely grained than the demand model.
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You know, I wish people would stop blaming Richmond Hill for this – it was Thornhill (both the Markham and Vaughan side) who killed the Viva Rapidway development, and it was largely based on the residents and businesses on Yonge noting the (superficial?) similarity to what St Clair was being turned into, and imagining the disruption they’d have to deal with – and assuming subways would not disrupt them in the same way. (Yes, there are big holes in that “logic.”)
You’ll note which politician is most publicly attached to the Yonge North extension – Peter Kent – PC – federal member for Thornhill.
Richmond Hillers will still get the rapidway where it can be built (north of Elgin Mills, and south of Major Mack) which can be converted based on ridership into LRT. (At that point the Town will have to deal with trains taking lanes instead of buses in mixed traffic.) Completion is slated for 2013, but that’s only as far south as Highway 7.
Incidentally, I’d doubt that the City would extend the subway to Steeles anyway without the subway going further north – Steeles to Finch could be rebuilt to properly accommodated bus and eventually LRT traffic…
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Steve wrote,
Oddly enough, the SubwayNow group was spearheaded by Markham’s Jim Jones, with their Mayor Frank Scarpitti getting in the photos with his ‘thumbs up’. Richmond Hill’s mayor and council, along with York Region’s council were more of a “oh, yea, we’ll go along with that!” effort in the matter. Of course, now that the children have been shown the new shiny toy (translation: subway envy has taken root), replacing it with something else will be a difficult effort.
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PSC said,
I’m not so sure about that. One aspect of increasing capacity on Yonge will involve running trains more frequently once the signalling system is upgraded, but the limiting factor will be the turn back at Finch. This can be alleviated by extending the line to Steeles and running only half the trains there when short headways are needed on the core of the line (similar to the St. Clair West turn backs that will be moving to Glencairn and eventually to Steeles West).
This ‘half-capacity’ extension will be a suitable replacement for the current load of buses on Yonge. That stretch of Yonge has 10 full time bus routes running along it (not counting various branches: TTC 53, 60, and 97; YRT 5, 23, 77, 88, 91, and 99; and Viva Blue) plus 5 rush hour routes (not counting ‘express’ versions of the all day routes: YRT 300, 301, 302, 303; Viva Pink). I am not counting TTC routes 42 and 125 as they would likely still use Finch as their terminus.
Though I am generally against the “another kilometre or two” subway extensions, this is a reasonable exception due to the high volume of buses involved currently. I would, however, prefer to see this extension without an intermediate station at Drewry/Cummer, as that is an unnecessary cost given that bus routes 42 and 125 would provide decent service to Finch station.
Steve: I concur that Cummer station is superfluous for bus feeders. The real question is whether the $100-million or so it would cost would be recouped in redevelopment at that corner. Is the low rise mall, for example, a site for development?
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Actually, south of Steeles does meet the 10,000ppdph demand threshold that makes subways economically viable, while north of Steeles falls short of it, gradually falling farther and farther away the father north you go. At Steeles itself, there was a ~3,000ppdph jump in demand. The numbers for extending the subway to Steeles do support it. The numbers clearly don’t support it going north of Steeles, though, especially in the Metrolinx BCA where they are using 2021 figures instead of 2031 figures specifically to avoid GO Express Rail Richmond Hill service’s influence on the demand modelling, because they cite that demand will fall on the Richmond Hill subway below the low figures already projected in 2021 once GO Express Rail Richmond Hill service is implemented (that’s not the only thing that raises eyebrows in that BCA, either). The City has a strong incentive for extending the subway to Steeles without going further north; it’s called being consistent.
The station at Cummer/Drewry is pretty cheap. It would not have a bus terminal like other stations, not even a tiny terminal like Greenwood. There is some development already taking hold in this area without a subway, but furthermore, the subway should provide local service, not replicate a GO line (a mistake already made between Eglinton and Finch). On top of all that, the TTC wants to amalgamate the 42 and 125 into a single route, with one branch looping west of Yonge to have higher frequency on Cummer and less on Drewry. Having both buses continue as separate routes to Finch via Yonge increases the number of buses, vehicle-km, staff hours, and fuel consumption daily by a fair margin since Yonge is always heavily congested in this part of town. And lastly, if the TTC has 42 and 125 not going to Finch, all YRT services including Viva not coming south of Steeles, and Finch buses replaced by the Finch LRT to Don Mills, then the TTC can sell an extremely valuable piece of real estate that the current bus terminal sits on, and get some new ridership living almost directly above Finch Station.
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M. Briganti said:
I wouldn’t be too quick to say what is and isn’t the logical termination point for the Bloor-Danforth line. For example, depending on how Metrolinx’s long term plans for the Lakeshore East line will impact Eglinton and Guildwood GO stations, it may be more logical to place the termination point somewhere between Kingston & Eglinton and Kingston & Morningside rather than Scarborough Town Centre.
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You’ve talked before about Metrolinx failing to look at the network as a whole if not enough funding is granted to build all of Transit City.
Right now, Don Mills and Jane aren’t funded. I have a feeling that they’ll fall through the cracks after the current round of LRT construction is finished (10 years or so from now). Attention may turn to the DRL or the Yonge line (neither of which have currently received funding commitments), or there may be another recession.
Do you think the Province has chosen the “correct” lines to fund? If you had to cut two lines from Transit City b/c of funding constraints (or get the equivalent in cost savings somewhere else), what would they be and why?
Steve: Rather than answer the question here in detail, I am planning a separate post on “Transit City Revisited”. Stay tuned.
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Sorry, to be clear, I was not referring to whether the numbers support the Yonge Extension to Steeles, but rather the political will. The costs for mobilization of the TBMs, construction of the necessary massive bus / LRT terminal at Steeles and demolition of the existing tail tracks without York Region participation is, in my opinion, not likely within the City of Toronto. This project was initiated and is being carried by the Region of York right now.
Building the subway only from Finch to Steeles is not “another kilometer or two” but rather a whole standalone project. You don’t get “another” kilometer until you have the first kilometer(s) already happening.
As for the GO RH all-day express rail service, I’ll believe GO is serious about that when I hear about the Doncaster Diamond grade separation and the twin track construction through the Don River valley. This project is likely to be more than $0.5B all on its own, and it does not eliminate the local / intermediate transit needs from Highway 7 to the subway end-of-line either… I’m looking forward to the TRCA, MOE and DFO responses to any plans for the required massive construction work and new bridges within the valley. But perhaps that discussion belongs in another thread…
That said, I would support any transit upgrade over buses in mixed traffic on Yonge.
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Nick L said:
Really? So all the municipal, provincial and federal services, huge amounts of retail and a bunch of condos are going to be located at Kingston/Eglinton or Kingston/Morningside?
The logic of terminating at STC has a lot more to it than raw ridership stats. Even from Metrolinx’ point of view, with STC slated to be a big bus hub, why would the logical terminus be anywhere other than STC?
A distant second would be Kennedy. But of course, the city won’t allow rezoning to build another STC around the terminus of that subway line.
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Steve says
Just to add to that, it would have been nice to see GO Transit evolve into a BART like system, where it acts like both a subway and commuter line; instead we got a downtown oriented lines that are shared its corridors with CN freight.
I’m pretty sure if our GO Transit lines were like BART, we wouldn’t be pushing the TTC to expand subways into the 905’s.
I have alot of issues with Metrolinx’ plan to create express Go service on some of their lines. To create such frequent head ways in isolated corridors that serve no immediate community is troubling to me.
Creating a BART like system maybe a bit more expensive but at least it wouldn’t be downtown oriented and it would take the pressure off the TTC to expand subway to places like Richmond Hill and Vaughan.
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Karl Junkin wrote,
Does the TTC own the property of the regional bus terminal? For some reason, perhaps the name of the terminal, I thought that GO owned it. As for the TTC bus terminal, it could be sold, but here’s a wild idea…
Use it (or part of it) for the LRT station. Have the LRT alignment turn off of Finch coming from the west. When the line is extended east, at least to Don Mills, a right of way next to the hydro corridor would be better between Yonge and Don Mills (or even the Seneca campus) and could be easily accommodated by this jog. Of course, there’s that whole issue about Hydro One not wanting transit along their corridors.
The plans to combine 42 and 125 into a single route make sense, and a simple station might be a good idea, particularly if development charges in the area could pay for it. The one thing I missed saying, and surprisingly no one jumped on, is that the 97 would still provide local service on Yonge.
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It does kind of make sense… ridership on Finch East between Yonge and Don Mills is light at best, mainly transfer volume. A route through the hydro corridor is ideal especially if that segment only exists as some sort of missing link, and it would also have better access to the eventual GO Express line at Old Cummer station. The bus terminal at Finch will still be needed, however, seeing as quite a large part of it exists to handle the 39 Finch East.
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