Congratulations to our neighbours in Kitchener-Waterloo for embracing an LRT line in their city. Unlike Toronto, with a would-be Mayoral dynasty whose grasp of transit and municipal finance can be breathtakingly mean and shortsighted, K-W has decided to proceed with a rail spine for its transit network.
Now is the time for Queen’s Park to accelerate support for LRT in Mississauga and Hamilton. Get off the pot and show people what surface rail transit can do.
Read details in The Record.
More info on the Region of Waterloo site.
Steve Munro 
Congratulations Kitchener.
Obviously you don’t have a short sighted mayor who thinks nothing of wasting thousands of dollars already spent on planning/ environmental assesments.
Of course I realize that mayor Ford will just brush aside any great achievements made in the LRT world outside of Toronto.
Maybe we should send him south to review the recent LRT funding for cities in the USA ….and hope he stays down there (sorry fellow Americans).
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Thanks. We really got to thank the grassroots efforts of TriTAG.ca, which did a heck of a lot of legwork, talked to a lot of people, and organized two rallies in order to bolster support for the LRT option. I think that, in the end, they really made a difference.
Now to get shovels into the ground!
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Even a dyed-in-the-wood subway “big-got” wouldn’t oppose LRT in small cities like Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, or Mississauga. That’s not what the debate in Toronto or on Eglinton is all about, and you know it.
Besides, is it really all that different? What would you make of this?
Too subway-ish for median street rail?
Steve: The built form of cities does not magically change at the border of the 416. Do you honestly expect me to think Hurontario is different from Finch or Sheppard, or the west end of Eglinton?
As for the South Shore, just go to Guelph where trains trundle down a sidestreet to get out of town, an area where GO plans to double track the on-street trackage and, eventually, electrify.
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This is a dream day for me. I grew up in K-W and spent countless childhood hours drawing lines on maps and envisioning riding rails through my home town. At the age of eight, I dreamt those rails under ground. Silly things like infrastructure costs and demand projections hadn’t yet crept into my reasoning. By the age of ten, I’d discovered LRT and adjusted my transit fantasies accordingly. In the intervening twenty years, I’ve been told by more than a few people that it is a crazy, impractical dream that would never be built and was not worth the effort of considering. Today, I stand victorious along with all of the other dreaming eight years drawing lines on maps.
As for Mr Ford, I look forward to the day when he grows up and starts thinking like a ten year old.
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That South Shore installation is great. I remember from my childhood noticing the on-street trackage on Queen’s Quay in Toronto and I wish that Redpath still had a rail connection. Around here we are far too afraid of any interaction between rail and non-rail traffic (not to mention light vs. heavy rail).
Slight correction re: Guelph, assuming you’re talking about Kent St. As can be seen on Google Maps, there is no street running at that location, although it does feel like street running when looking out the window of a train.
Also the line is already double-tracked through downtown Guelph, although I have no idea the condition of the second track — for all I know it could need complete rebuilding to be used regularly.
Steve: Right you are. I’ve ridden that track many times, but somehow it always felt like a single track line, possibly because we were always on the same (north) track and never passed a train going the other way.
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Forgot to say: this is a happy day for Waterloo Region. Although as someone who lives in the City of Waterloo, it is to this city’s shame that our mayor was one of the two who voted against. And I thought she ran on a “green” platform in 2006.
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I guess the 2 who voted against wanted a heavy rail subway with all the bells and whistles and density that it requires.
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Congratulations Kitchener-Waterloo! Enjoy the benefits, and transformational change that surface transit will bring to your city. K-W area moves ahead, while Toronto stalls.
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Congrats K-W. Toronto will regret scrapping Transit City.
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Currently living in Cambridge, I’ve been keeping up on the updates for this proposal, and I’m glad that the councils have finally agreed to go forward with the plan. I just wish this (or any other LRT line for that matter) could have been completed a couple of years ago to act as an example for Toronto of what LRT can be like.
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You’ll still be able to ride your rails underground in Kitchener, the plan has a subway loop for downtown Kitchener (southbound on King, northbound on Charles). I agree with the concept of the Region’s plan, just not with their specific vision. Hopefully, if the project goes over-budget like RIM Park, they won’t spend millions of dollars just to find out why.
Steve: Hmmm … will there still be a “RIM” after which to name a park by the time the line opens?
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Good to see it pass and nice to see the local paper finally get it right in coming down on the side of something that makes sense. That paper was responsible for killing off the downtown 40 years ago and has been fighting ever since to assuage its guilt.
Now the question to Hudak should be – will he guarantee the money keeps coming? The Tories want to make inroads in the area, but the most adamantly against the project are already Tory ridings. There is no win for them in opposing this, before the election.
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W. K. Lis: Actually, of the two opponents, one of them objected to the cost, and though express buses would be more ‘flexible’. The other is just angry that phase one doesn’t reach into her constituency.
Mapleson: The plan separates the two directions through central Kitchener (and also in Waterloo, though that’s apparently going to be re-examined) but the tracks are still above-ground, operating at the side of the street. Avoiding the need for tunnelling is part of the reason why the route follows a railway corridor around south-west Kitchener instead of going straight under the Conestoga Parkway.
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Any talk of the “excess” LRTs from the Transit City order being redirected to this project? Or would Toronto rather pay the penalty then have a rolling reminder of its stupidity close by?
Steve: That’s a question for Queen’s Park as the Transit City cars were ordered by Metrolinx. This begs the question of whether they are a truly attractive car for KW, and whether they might be an “in kind” contribution to the project’s cost.
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“I guess the 2 who voted against wanted a heavy rail subway with all the bells and whistles and density that it requires.”
Here’s what I know about the vote, taking what I have to say with a grain of salt as I heard this second-hand and wasn’t at the meeting itself.
Four councillors, including Regional Chair Ken Seiling and Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig, declined to vote, citing conflicts of interest. Of these four, I believe three had previously expressed support for the proposal, including and especially Ken Seiling. Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig was strongly opposed. He wanted LRT to run the full length of the line from Conestoga Mall in the north to downtown Galt in the south, and thought that Cambridge was getting the short end of the stick. He argued that if Cambridge had to live with BRT/BRT-Lite, then the rest of the region should too.
I know for sure that nine councillors voted in favour, but I’ve heard conflicting reports about the two who voted against. One of the two was definitely Waterloo mayor Brenda Halloran, who cited community opposition that she heard when she campaigned door-to-door. In my personal opinion, I’ve not been impressed with her handling of the whole matter. She wasn’t initially opposed, but clearly got cold feet, and her tactics have tended towards avoiding taking responsibility for making a stand. She advocated for a community referendum on whether or not to build the LRT — a proposal that was shot down overwhelmingly.
The other ‘nay’ was a Cambridge councillor whose name escapes me at the moment. I’ve heard that she actually voted for the LRT proposal, but voted against the phasing option. So, like Doug Craig, she likes the idea of an LRT, but dislikes the idea of having Cambridge wait for it.
You have to understand that Cambridge has long felt itself to be the odd man out in the Waterloo Region arrangement. Kitchener and Waterloo are pretty close in their demographics and their outlook such that it’s hard to tell where one city begins and the other ends just by looking at the streetscape alone. Cambridge was formed by provincial fiat. In 1974, the provincial government created the Region of Waterloo and forcibly amalgamated a bunch of smaller towns into the new city. It’s pretty definitively separated from K-W by Highway 401, and its outlook has tended towards that Highway, and east towards Toronto. There’s been some resentment over that forcible amalgamation ever since, and the fact that it doesn’t mesh quite so well with Waterloo Region as either Kitchener or the City of Waterloo. So, delaying the implementation of full LRT operation to downtown Galt was a bit of a hot button issue for them.
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“You’ll still be able to ride your rails underground in Kitchener, the plan has a subway loop for downtown Kitchener (southbound on King, northbound on Charles).”
That’s not accurate. The only underground section to be built is a length to get the LRT beneath the CN railway tracks north of Victoria and south of Wellington. Provision will be made for an underground stop there.
The block of King/Victoria/Duke and the railway tracks have been confirmed as the new site of a transit hub, which will handle many of Kitchener’s buses, as well as intercity buses and VIA and GO Trains. The underground stop will connect with this development. The Region of Waterloo has already spent $6 million to expropriate this land, and the hub should be open in the next few years — possibly at the same time as the LRT.
The LRT will come to the surface at King and Victoria and proceed around Kitchener’s downtown core at grade. Southbound trains will run via Victoria and Charles, whereas northbound trains coming up from Charles will follow Benton/Frederick and Duke to Francis before returning to King Street.
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Just a few additions and corrections to some points mentioned in previous comments.
There will be no underground portion, unless you include an underpass at the crossing of the GEXR North Mainline in Kitchener. The loop in downtown Kitchener will run along Charles and Duke Streets, one block on either side of King Street (the main street), at street level.
There has definitely been talk of approaching Metrolinx to see whether they would be interested in selling us their excess Transit City LRVs. I think the odds are pretty good that this will happen. It could be a very good deal for both parties.
As someone who attended last night’s meeting where the plan was approved, I offer the following additions and clarifications.
There were five councillors who sat out: Regional Chair Ken Seiling, Kitchener councillor Tom Galloway, North Dumfries mayor Rob Deutschmann, Cambridge mayor Doug Craig, and Cambridge councillor Jone Brewer. The latter was absent because she is recovering from a car accident, and the rest were forced to sit out due to possible conflicts of interest.
(I emphasize the “possible” because some of the conflicts seem a bit tenuous. Galloway was advised to declare a conflict because his employer, the University of Waterloo, is located next to the route. Others have relatives who own property near the route. I believe that council will be sending a letter to the province asking them to update the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act to resolve the ambiguity that has forced so many members of council not to participate.)
Four of the councillors who sat out would have voted for the plan, and one, Doug Craig, would have voted against it. He has long campaigned for BRT over LRT because it would allow Cambridge to be part of the first phase of construction. A couple of years back, he actually led Cambridge city council to hire a consulting firm to poke holes in the Region’s analysis of LRT vs. BRT and presented a report to Regional Council that (quelle surprise!) argued that BRT would be a better investment. But his voice was thankfully absent last night.
As for the motion, it was split up into many parts and each part was voted on separately. The selection of LRT as the preferred technology was approved 10-1, with Waterloo mayor Brenda Halloran being the only dissenter. The preferred staging plan, with initial construction of LRT in KW and “adapted BRT” in Cambridge passed 9-2, with Halloran and Cambridge councillor Claudette Millar opposed. Other parts of the motion and various amendments passed 10-1 or 9-2. Halloran voted against every part of the motion, including amendments to reduce the local tax burden by using budget savings from debt retirement and provincial uploading to fund LRT. She insisted that she had heard from her constituents loud and clear that they wanted BRT instead, despite many other councillors saying that the emails they had received ran about 80% in favour of the proposed plan, and opinion polls indicating 50-60% public support for a plan involving rail in some way. Her performance may come back to haunt her during the next municipal election, given a recent poll in which 64% of respondents from Waterloo said they were more likely to vote for a politicians who support plans to build LRT.
To their credit, at least three councillors who campaigned against the project in October’s election voted in favour of it last night. Todd Cowan, Les Armstrong, and Geoff Lorentz all had changes of heart after speaking with staff and becoming familiar with the project. I was impressed to see that our local politicians — with one notable exception — have kept their minds open and are not allowing ideology to trump smart planning. It was a satisfying victory.
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I cannot wait until this line is open and operating. People in Scarborough and Etobicoke can look at Kitchener-Waterloo with envy and dream of what could have been in Toronto. Of course, those same people in Toronto who voted for a mayor who canceled Transit City won’t blame themselves for a lack of transit improvement, they will blame politicians.
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An unfortunate coincidence: RIM announced layoffs the day after the LRT was approved. Given that RIM accounts for a huge percentage of the Waterloo Region economy, this is bad news.
I hope that the LRT project can attract more of a diversity of employers to K-W. Being overly dependent on one employer is risky for a local economy.
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Thanks for the corrections, Sylvan!
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It makes sense for Metrolinx to seek to disperse the LRVs if the contract penalties for reducing the order to fit their new Toronto network are onerous. I can’t see why they wouldn’t be suitable per se since this is a clean-sheet-of-paper implementation which in theory should be open to a variety of cars without caveats like wire-free running which introduces proprietary technologies. It would be a sole source contract so no doubt other manufacturers will find willing listeners in opponents of the project.
As for diversity of employment, a place like Cambridge with its auto sector might have been a good place to have placed an LRV manufacturing line. Instead Thunder Bay, which will probably never see a streetcar run in our lifetimes and which already enjoys lucrative heavy rail and subway contracts, cranks them out 1000km from the nearest LRV customer.
On Guelph, I noted on a recent trip to Kitchener how decrepit the south track is there, not to mention the short blocks and frequent level crossings west of the station. Google Streetview gives some idea as to the difference in condition between the north (left) and south (right) tracks. While GEXR are being stubborn about improvements to the alignment pleaded for by VIA and now GO, I suppose we’ll see the weeds grow higher still.
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Even if there were no penalty to Metrolinx for their LRV order, ordering through them ought to be one of Metrolinx’s reasons for existence. It is highly likely that an entity already is ordering X LRVs would get a better price to add Y LRVs to that order than for some other entity to go it alone with the order of Y.
Steve: And it saves the overhead of going through a full specification/bidding process.
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Richard,
I don’t think Scarborough people will be looking at KW with envy.
The fact of the matter is that the transport needs of Scar are vastly different than those of KW. And what fits KW does not fit Scar.
As it is the the KW LRT is going to take 39 minutes from Conestoga to Fairview Park Mall, due largely to the in street operation on sections. Compare that to driving which only takes 15 minutes.
With such long travel times like that, will ridership appear? We will have to see. But this is not rapid transit.
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Michael: Yes, if you’re travelling all the way from the southern mall to the northern mall (is this a popular commute?) the car has the advantage in terms of speed. But that’s because it can take highways that bypass the city centre.
Public transport’s core constituency is the people who are going to one of the two central areas, or between them. In these slower and more congested areas, the trains have the advantage, because they run in reserved lanes and have priority at signals (which Waterloo seems more able to manage properly than Toronto has been).
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“As it is the the KW LRT is going to take 39 minutes from Conestoga to Fairview Park Mall …Compare that to driving which only takes 15 minutes. … With such long travel times like that, will ridership appear? … But this is not rapid transit.”
Most people don’t go from one mall / transit terminal to another. Those are just good endpoints for the line, and sure, a direct express bus between the two would be faster than the LRT. It just happens that in between those points, the LRT (and not the highway) is able to connect: the RIM campus and a large technology park, the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University, uptown Waterloo, Grand River Hospital, and downtown Kitchener — among other things. Between downtown and Fairview Mall (which is surrounded by high residential density) would be 15 minutes. Downtown to uptown would be 15, or to the University of Waterloo would be less than 20 minutes. It would be less than 10 minutes from UW to Conestoga Mall.
When parking costs both time and money, those are all competitive trip times, which is why the iXpress (the bus that currently travels that corridor) is a very busy and frequently overcrowded route. Average speed (which would be 25 km/h between Conestoga and Fairview) matters less than how much city you are able to reach in a given time.
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I think it matters. This is a central transit corridor and many people will be going long distances, because that is what they currently do. People go to Fairview because it is the largest mall in the region. People from Cambridge to to UofW, etc. These trips have to be made competitive also.
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Surface road-median LRT is perfectly suited for medium-sized cities such as Kitchener-Waterloo and Mississauga/Brampton but major arteries such as Eglinton and Sheppard Avenues running through or within proximity to some of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in a metropolis quickly approaching three million residents (with another 3 million visitors daily) does not fit that description.
K-W and Mississauga/Brampton also have superior highway networks with lines accessible to most of the populated areas in those regions. Toronto essentially has only one east-west highway (the Gardiner only goes halfway across the city) and one complete north-south highway. Since NIMBYism/fear of expropriation, divided communities, eyesore complaints prevents the completion of the Allen and the 400/Black Creek to the Gardiner nor the widenng of roadways to acceptable widths (75 metres) wherein surface lines would have minimal impact; the only option left is to tunnel, trench or elevate transit lines.
These, among other reasons, emphasize the seriousness of building more fully grade-separated mass transit lines crosstown complemented eventually by the DRL. It’s a pity the commuter moving function of mass transit expansion continually gets lumped in with “city-building” aspirations; which distracts or downplays the real issue of moving large volumes of people across the city as quickly as possible with guaranteed frequency and reliability.
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Could it just be that when LRT is up and running in places like Kitchener and Hamilton and Mississauga, that Torontonians will see examples of successful transit that is more effective and efficient than buses stuck in stop-and-go traffic and cheaper and easier to build than subway lines?
We have been sold a false bill of goods; ‘Subways are better than streetcars’ by the mayor. It appears now that he had no idea what he is talking about when it comes out of his mouth, as evidenced by the fact that his dream of turning LRT to a full subway line on Sheppard (and ‘maybe one day’ on Finch) is about to turn into a pumpkin at midnight some day soon.
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“This is a central transit corridor and many people will be going long distances, because that is what they currently do. … People from Cambridge to to UofW, etc. These trips have to be made competitive also.”
Sure, they should. But making the LRT fast for long distances would force it out of the most important nodes. A BRT along Conestoga Parkway / Highway 8 would make more sense to compete with trips that use those highways.
But that said, no, most trips are not that long; average commutes are around 7 km (this includes all modes). There are several stops on the iXpress currently where at least half the bus usually gets off – University of Waterloo, Charles Street Terminal, Fairview Park Mall. Most people are not going halfway across the region on a regular basis.
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Michael, driving to your destination is usually faster than taking public transit in most cases. Just because the LRT, subway or commuter train may not be as fast as driving, it doesn’t mean improvements shouldn’t be made to public transit.
My commute from Scarborough to work using public transit consistently took 105 minutes. Based on the distance to my destination and the time it took, the bus averaged a speed of 15.35 km/h. Transit City’s LRT’s were supposed to average speeds of 23 km/h, which would cut the trip down to 75 minutes. That is still slower than the 45 minutes it would take to drive but it is a significant improvement for people who rely on or choose to take public transit. It’s a savings of 30 minutes one way or 60 minutes in a day. On top of that light rail has a higher capacity than buses, which theoretically provides a less crowded and more comfortable ride.
The inner-suburbs have a lower density than parts of the city closer to the downtown core. On top of that, the demand on routes such as Sheppard are complex. During rush hour, riders use the corridor to make long distance commutes. Off-peak hours, the demand on the corridor is local. LRT is faster than buses and has the flexibility to meet the demands of long distance and local commuters.
Subways are faster than LRT and suit the needs of long distance commuters but do corridors such as Sheppard and Finch have the ridership to warrant such high capacity? Then again, an empty field in Vaughan doesn’t warrant such high capacity.
A subway extension on Sheppard would be great but it would put the TTC further into the red. The Sheppard subway is a ghost town off-peak hours. On top of that, building every single high capacity line in Scarborough to Scarborough Town Centre (STC), as Ford suggests, doesn’t reduce commuting time because most commuters still have to take long bus rides to get to STC to access the rapid transit lines.
Transit City placed lines across entire corridors in a large network designed to move people across the city. While the plan is not perfect, it makes more sense than two subways (Eglinton LRT-subway and Sheppard subway) converging at STC. I prefer subways but in Transit City we had a plan to bring rapid transit to 600,000 Torontonians in a few short years (2 years or in 2013 in the case of Sheppard). I’m happy we will be getting a subway line on Eglinton but Sheppard and Finch get no transit improvements only talk of transit improvements. On top of that, the soon to be renovated Scarborough RT will not be extended to Markham and Sheppard as an LRT line.
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In 1973, Kitchener Transit took over from the local PUC’s, the trolley buses down King where ended and we where given a day when everybody could take whatever bus they wanted for free. At the age of 9, I took off alone up and down Ottawa Street on the #3 and then on the #7 all the way up to King and University (with a corn field across the street from WLU) finally heading home to the East End on a #8 Loop bus.
Things have changed. (On a side note, there is nobody online detailing Waterloo County/Region transit history before GRT, not even an article on wikipedia – somebody really should to give context to decisions.)
*****
Is there a study of who takes the #7 line from where to where? The ixpress is busy, from what I’ve seen, but the #7 is busier and would provide the bulk of trips along the LRT.
I’m also interested in the politics of the proposed express bus service into the LRT indicated in the route map for stage 1. They all seem politically motivated or based on suppositions, not unusual for transit planning in the area.
It looks like what it took to get support was to promise certain councillors an express route.
Does anybody living there know where those lines came from?
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Mikey: I agree that transit expansion must be driven by the need to efficiently move people around the city, not by attempts at social engineering.
I don’t agree that the refusal to extend Allen or 400 / Black Creek is NIMBYism; it is in fact common sense. Toronto’s population well exceeds the level at which adequate highway and road capacity can be provided to all private autos. Adding a few highway links would simply shift the gridlock points around the grid, rather than eliminate them. Basically, that would be a waste of public funds that can otherwise be used for transit expansion.
Steve: Extending the 400 would take out a swath of housing, churches, schools and part of High Park. Extending the Allen would take out chunks of the area west of Forest Hill, part of the Annex, and area now occupied by UofT. It would also dump a pile of traffic onto downtown streets that they cannot handle. All of this has a value, and that value is much higher than someone’s ability to drive from Newmarket to downtown Toronto unhindered. When people talk about road expansion, they treat the area through which these roads would be built, and the areas around them that would be affected, as “free”, but they have a value, and the city would have suffered if those roads had been completed.
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Very rough with many ‘gaps’:
1888 horse-car railway service
1895 line electrified
1910 line double tracked
1923 single truck Birney cars purchased
October 1st, 1916 City of Berlin is changed to Kitchener
May 1st, 1939 Crosstown bus service begins using fleet of Yellow Coaches
Public Utilities Commission operates these 5 buses
December 27th, 1946 Streetcar operations ended
January 1st, 1947 Trolley bus operation begins
February 1st, 1971 Exact fare
January 1st, 1973 City of Kitchener takes over transit from Public Utilities Corporation and name is changed to Kitchener Transit
March 26th, 1973 Trolley bus service ends
September 1980 Dial-A-Ride ends
January 1st, 2000 Kitchener Transit & Cambridge Transit become GRT
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Ontario goes to the polls about 4-5 months from now and it’s anybody’s guess as to whether or not the current government’s going to be tossed out. If it is, the Kitchener-Waterloo LRT might become stillborn if funding from the province through Metrolinx isn’t available unless K-W can figure out a way to finance it themselves if it comes down to that.
It’s a real shame that finally, for the first time in years, real progress on transit improvement in Toronto got so completely shut down due to a change in government and the same thing may be about to happen on a province-wide scale this fall.
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“The ixpress is busy, from what I’ve seen, but the #7 is busier and would provide the bulk of trips along the LRT.”
The 7 is also more frequent than the iXpress, unfortunately, making it not really a fair call to say that the 7 is busier. If the frequencies were reversed, the iXpress would take away much of the 7’s ridership. They both travel mostly the same corridor, apart from the 7’s branching at the ends – which most potential riders have difficulty understanding.
“I’m also interested in the politics of the proposed express bus service into the LRT indicated in the route map for stage 1. They all seem politically motivated or based on suppositions, not unusual for transit planning in the area. … Does anybody living there know where those lines came from?”
Yes – they were developed at UW on the basis of data on existing commute patterns; politics has not played any substantial role. Frankly, the express bus network has not been in the limelight much. The idea is to redesign the entire transit network with LRT as the spine and a network of supporting express and local bus routes arranged in a somewhat grid-like fashion.
“And a continued #12 that doesn’t hook up with Fairview”
That’s actually the first of those supporting express routes, which will be rolled out in September. The 12 will be realigned to travel entirely along Westmount, and the Fischer-Hallman express will cover Fischer-Hallman Road from Block Line to Columbia Street. K-W has few long north-south corridors, but this will result in three of them (up from just one) having coherent corridor bus service.
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It’s ggod to see that Toronto will no longer be the only city in Ontario with local rail transit except for Ottawa. Let’s hope that Mississauga and Hamilton bring LRT on line and make Ontario the LRT capital of Canada much like California is the LRT capital in the U.S.
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Steve said: “Extending the 400 would take out a swath of housing, churches, schools and part of High Park. Extending the Allen would take out chunks of the area west of Forest Hill, part of the Annex, and area now occupied by UofT. It would also dump a pile of traffic onto downtown streets that they cannot handle. All of this has a value, and that value is much higher than someone’s ability to drive from Newmarket to downtown Toronto unhindered. When people talk about road expansion, they treat the area through which these roads would be built, and the areas around them that would be affected, as “free”, but they have a value, and the city would have suffered if those roads had been completed.”
I agree with your assessment, and do not support extending Allen or Hwy 400. However, the network capacity argument might be more convincing to the general public than the neighborhood preservation argument. Theoretically, the aforementioned highways could be extended underground without damaging the neighborhoods. That would be hugely expensive, but for people who don’t closely follow the topic, the numerical value of that cost does not say much.
The network capacity reasoning, on the other hand, can be made pretty obvious: there is no major city with significant car ownership level that does not face gridlock during the rush hours, no matter how many highways it has.
Steve: An “underground” highway has costs too. Even assuming the tunnel could be built without damage to the neighbourhoods above it, there is the small matter of interchanges. In the original plans for the 400 south and the Spadina/Crosstown, some of the worst effects were at points where the expressways linked to local streets and to each other. This is not just a matter of network capacity.
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One of the things that killed the Scarborough Expressway was the fact that most of the residents in Guildwood Village realized that any gains from reduced travelling time fo them would soon be eaten up my commuters from Durham using it. This, the feared, would increase the noise level and fumes in their neighbourhood and require a widening of the road. They would rather have their slower commutes and a little more peace.
If people want to live in the 905 or 519 area then they had better be prepared for longer commute times.
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Mikey says:
“Surface road-median LRT is perfectly suited for medium-sized cities such as Kitchener-Waterloo and Mississauga/Brampton but major arteries such as Eglinton and Sheppard Avenues running through or within proximity to some of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in a metropolis quickly approaching three million residents (with another 3 million visitors daily) does not fit that description. ”
I am sick of this stupid argument subway advocates make in concluding that since Toronto is the largest city in Canada that it needs a subway network. That is by far the shoddiest logic.
How many times must we tell you subway advocates: Subways are not justified on Sheppard, Finch, or Eglinton (according to the Eglinton EA). And our status as the largest city in Canada alone says nothing about ridership.
Steve: I will jump in here and observe that if the 3-million people lived on Sheppard Avenue, then we might have a case, but you cannot count the fact that someone lives at, oh, Broadview and Danforth, as justification for a subway on Sheppard. It’s density and demand patterns, not regional population, that drive this decision.
Here are a few examples of statements (unbacked by any facts or statistics) that make subway advocates wreak of ignorance:
1. “Sheppard/Eglinton justifies a subway”
I invite you to look at the EA’s for Sheppard and Eglinton.
2. “Big cities build subways, not LRT”
Anyways, Los Angeles is the second largest city in the U.S. (the largest in California), and uses mostly LRT (a significant portion at grade), but not a lot of subways. So stop spewing this garbage.
Steve: I suppose that Calgary and Edmonton are not “big cities”. More to the point, many cities have a mix of subways and LRT, including hybrid implementations which show a fundamental principle of LRT, its flexibility. And I won’t bother with European examples because we all know that “that kind of city” just wouldn’t work in southern Ontario.
3. “Subways last longer than LRT”
Seriously, what the heck does this mean? Which components of subways/LRT are you talking about? Tracks for both technologies last 25 years. Looking at other infrastructure (platforms, stations), there is a lot of subway infrastructure that has no equivalent in surface LRT (escalators, elevators, station booths, etc.), so one can’t compare the longevity of subways and LRT in this way.
I do have faith that there are subway advocates out there who are much more intelligent than this.
Steve: The argument about longevity showed up most recently in the bilge of the municipal election from a candidate who now hopes to be elected in a downtown riding. It’s crap for precisely the reason Jacob noted — where the technologies are comparable, the longevity is the same.
Streetcars last the same length of time as subway cars (about 30 years), and the major problem with age these days is the obsolescence of the electronics. The H4 subway cars are the last we have that still use mechanical controls that, oddly enough, don’t wear out or go obsolete anywhere nearly as quickly as the electronic ones.
Street trackage has worn out far more quickly than it should have in past decades because it was badly built (I have written about this at length elsewhere). Subway track is renewed regularly (remember those diversions, the times when the line opened late, when it didn’t run at all), but most of this work occurs out of sight because no road construction is needed. The subway signal system is being replaced, and the escalators have almost all gone through one complete replacement, not to mention many major overhauls.
LRT on the surface does not need all of this infrastructure along with its capital and maintenance costs. The trade off is that the trip is not quite as fast, and the stations are closer together. Total trip time for some trips may actually be shorter when access time is taken into account.
Yes, I too have faith that there are intelligent subway advocates. I am one of them, although I start from the premise “show me why LRT won’t work here” rather than assuming limitless funding of whatever monument to political ego and engineering triumph happens to be on the table.
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Michael D
Thanks for the info. Did the Region publish the forecast model based on trips, because I can’t find that info in the documentation nor on WPTI’s website? Sorry, but having worked with planners at UW, I don’t automatically expect expertise to be useful. 🙂
It figures in the push to get the main line that nobody would be talking about the express lines; but if the idea is to create grids to feed the spine, it’s the proper implementation of those feeder lines that will provide the basis for a well used LRT. You don’t want to rig it so people have to use it; however, it would be a good idea to at least give a large swath of the city a chance to get there on an express bus.
If they want to create a true grid, they’ll have to feed expresses. Local suburban service is not set up to support a grid system, at all. I realise that’s a major conceptual shift for GRT, to move away from bus lines going from suburb to downtown. GRT service still is trying to shoehorn people into where the city travelled in the 50’s. If they did use a true grid system, (as much as you can in two cities not built on grids since 1940) people will get where they want to go, as against being constantly pushed to Charles/Duke Street, which has been the approach since the days before Kitchener Transit. Although Carl Zehr would have a fit, it would probably get more people going downtown, in the long run.
And, like it or not, once they add the GO service, people will begin to discuss GRT in terms of its potential to make GO service to that area viable. Waterloo Region is a large and complex market to figure out how to work with GO. GO seems to prefer its customers to drive to the trains. Waterloo should probably try to avoid that, if they can.
There are no direct express routes to the GO hub. I saw an earlier map that fed people from the Highland/Fischer-Hallman area; not sure why that’s gone. Lack of current usage I suppose. But, there is a potential, if a grid is created, for 2/3 of the west side, basically everybody north of the Expressway up to Waterloo to take that route. Surely not everybody in that area wants to only go North South. I’ve gone along the roundabouts up and down Ira Needles and got up to 130 kph along Fischer Hallman ; so I recognise that’s how much of the traffic currently flows, or has been planned to flow. Its a real shame that the obvious east west arterial to the downtown, Victoria Street, has constantly ignored as a potential express service, mainly because not that many people live within 200 metres of it east of Fischer Hallman.
That, and I also wonder how people expect a person living in the other big suburb area of Block line/Westmount area will get to the GO Station without a car. I’ve taken some of the local buses out there and they are not exactly quick to get you places.
It just seems the local routes will be expected to handle the bulk of the feeding into the LRT while the express routes are either ones that make sense (the #12) or being implemented to make it look like there is an attempt to feed the LRT.
People happy with the LRT decision might want to look now to how to get people going on GRT in general. The system needs a serious rethink and this is one of those rare opportunities when it could be possible to make necessary changes.
Steve: A challenge for KW is that the GO train, as it will exist later this year, is not exactly the centre of the universe. Should a transit system gerrymander itself to serve two trains a day each way with nothing on weekends? By the time the LRT opens, there may be (there damn well should be) better train service, but that still won’t make the station the central demand in the network. This is an example of a general problem in many GO-feeder transit systems, especially those with significant travel demand to places (and times) other than the trains.
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