Toronto Council, after over a day and a half’s debate, has approved the construction of a Sheppard East LRT from Don Mills to Morningside by a vote of 24-19. This completes the rout of Mayor Ford’s subway plan and returns transit plans more or less to their position when he was elected. The Mayor vows to fight on, but now sees this as a future campaign issue.
Today’s debate was, for the most part, more civil and organized than what we heard yesterday, except for an outburst from the Mayor and a speech showing his passionate hatred for streetcars.
Now the ball is in Metrolinx’ court to come up with a construction staging plan allowing for the year-plus delay. During the debate, some members of the pro-subway faction claimed that, according to private conversations with Metrolinx, work would not start on the Sheppard LRT until 2016. My own sources tell me that this is not true, but we must await a definitive word from the Provincial agency.
The Sheppard LRT decision also ensures that the Scarborough RT extension will be part of the plan with the new LRT line running, initially, to Sheppard Avenue and using Conlins Road carhouse as a base. A motion by Councillor Cho, which passed as part of the package, seeks funding for extending the SRT/LRT northeast to Malvern Centre and the Sheppard LRT south via Morningside to UTSC campus. “Streetcars” might reach Malvern only five decades or so after the TTC’s original proposal.
A number of additional motions related to long range planning and funding of transit expansion. These were referred to the City Manager for future reports. Strangely absent in the discussion was any mention of the role Metrolinx and its “Big Move 2.0” might take in these discussions.
The details of the decision are available online.
This is an important day for Toronto. We are on track for an LRT-based plan and for a more detailed evaluation of our transit future than we have seen for decades. Talking about one line at once, about fundraising for one project at once, is no longer an accepted way of building the city. Leaving the debate to a secretive Provincial agency is no longer acceptable, and the City is clearly setting out on its own review. Co-operation is essential given the funding arrangements, but Queen’s Park must stop hiding from the transit planning and financing files.
Finally, a personal note. Throughout this debate, I have been gratified by the broad understanding of transit issues displayed by many Councillors, advocates and media. This blog and my own advocacy have helped, but there is the compound effect of so many people working with an informed sense of the topic. Congratulations to everyone who had a hand in this victory.
Steve Munro 
Great day … I just dread all the antics that I’m sure the brothers Ford and Mammolitti will force us all to endure over the next few years. One real concern I have surrounds signal priority on the new LRT lines. I didn’t see anything in the display panels, what type of signal priority has the TTC decided to go with if the Transportation Department will let them? In trying to educate myself on the options wouldn’t predictive priority be the best bet for reliable headways?
I wonder what dangers there are for other city agencies throwing wrenches into the design/implementation.
Steve: Part of today’s motion quietly transferred responsibility for a lot of the details of implementation to the City Manager thereby preventing the Mayor from interfering by holding up approvals in his office. I think we will see more of this tactic ensuring that the staff work for Council, not for the Mayor, who will find himself more and more powerless in his waning months in office. David Miller found himself in that position simply by announcing he was not going to run again. I can only imagine how thoroughly ignored Ford will be.
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Even though the Sheppard LRT has finally been approved will the $8.4 B dollar funding still be in place despite the $16 Billion dollar deficit?
Steve: Queen’s Park has repeatedly said that the $8.4b is safe from cuts to other parts of the budget. The real challenge now is to get additional revenue tools in place at either the City or Provincial level.
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Steve,
Toronto needs to have it’s own Transit Funding Strategy. For the past 2 days council has been fighting over how to spend the handouts instead of creating a long-term viable transit funding strategy. As we have seen in the past, funding from provincial sources is not reliable.
Other good news today is that Councillor Mary Margaret McMahon moved to create a Funding Strategy for transit and it was supported by both the left and right and that I believe will over the long-term be the bigger success from today.
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From what I saw, there was broad consensus on the city undertaking a wide-ranging study of overall rapid transit priorities. (Apparently Metrolinx has dithered itself into irrelevance.) It will be interesting to see where that leads.
And though I hate to be less upbeat than your closing note, I do worry that there’s still a long way to go in public understanding of this issue. With their penchant for oversimplification and their easy detachment from reality, Team Ford won’t hesitate to spin this decision as an insult to the hardworking folks of Scarborough who could get around much more easily if not for a “billion-dollar boondoggle” purely driven by politics. Someone needs to clearly and forcefully make the point — again and again, until the last ballot is counted in the next election — that Rob Ford’s subway extension on Sheppard would be a huge waste of money that the city doesn’t have.
Steve: I am particularly happy that the City has seized the question of new revenue streams, a topic that Metrolinx spends a lot of time discussion at informal community meetings, but little as a matter of public policy. As for The Big Move 2.0, I am sure they are doing lots of work, but it needs to be in public. Increasingly Metrolinx is an outfit that runs a bunch of trains and buses, and spends an inordinate amount of effort drumming up “good news” about what they do.
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Karen Stintz certainly has surprised me with her firm position on Sheppard East LRT over the past weeks. I can only hope that she also reverses her performance from this year’s budget debate and fight for increased transit funding next year. It has also been a little surreal to see Councillors Luby, Lee, Moeser, Parker, and Cho to line up with past oppenents.
On another note: John Parker needs to be made speaker. Frances Nunziata is far from impartial, is very rude (especially to Anthony Peruzza), interjects way too much with her own opinions and insults, and doesn’t appear to even know the rules.
Steve: Changing the Speaker requires both a two-thirds vote of Council and agreement of the Mayor under current rules. But, yes, Nunziata is en excellent example of the influence the Fords have on those who work for them — when you are arrogant bullies, those who are part of your gang feel they can get away with anything. A decent Mayor would hand Nunziata out to dry and “encourage” her to resign.
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I think we have to analyze how it came to this point. It would be easy to say it was all Ford’s fault, but in all honesty, Rob Ford was a byproduct of an existing anti-LRT stance with the general public and I don’t think Rob Ford would have ever been elected if the public was truly on board with Transit City. Although it doesn’t seem important now with the win, we have still have to address it if we want to prevent Ford and friends from getting more power next election cycle, and to prevent him from messing with the now LRT operating budget.
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Congrats Steve and transit advocates!
I’d also like to thank “Subways Are For Everyone” for the rigorous campaigning in the last few days. We probably couldn’t have achieved this result as easily without their efforts.
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I think the claim that Sheppard LRT construction might not start until 2016 came straight from Gordon Chong, during the (mostly Rhetorical) Questions of Staff period Wednesday morning. Chong said he’d heard that in private conversation from the Chair of Metrolinx. It’s good to hear a counter (or any additional data at all) from an independent source.
Two other assertions I’ve heard over the past two days (I’ve been sitting through the meetings) that puzzle me a bit:
— Chong also asserted that operating costs for LRTs are much higher than those for subways. He claimed he based that on figures from APTA, and you can find them right there on APTA’s web site. I spent half an hour over lunch, and other time at odd moments during the meeting Wednesday, looking around http://www.apta.com, and couldn’t find any such figures; the nearest I came were the many different statistics in their annual Fact Book, from which one might synthesize some such numbers if one tried really hard and made some assumptions.
I’d like to know the basis for that assertion, if only because I don’t see how such a general assertion could stand: surely operating costs vary widely in different cities and lines and operating conditions. Any idea where Chong’s numbers really come from?
Steve: I am going to do a write up on Chong’s report, just to drive a well-deserved stake through its heart, in the next few days. I believe that he used average per passenger (or per passenger mile) operating costs for LRT and subway systems in the USA. This is totally misleading because, by definition, the subway systems exist only in very dense corridors (many over a century old) where the higher absolute cost of running a subway is spread over far more passengers and miles.
— There seems to be an assertion floating around that LRT will cost $1.5 billion more than planned, either because of the Sheppard line’s diving underground to Don Mills station, or because the Eglinton line may require a little more tunnel east of the Don crossing. Doesn’t the Sheppard plan, hence budget, already account for that? Are the Eglinton additional costs really that high? Where are they getting this stuff, and has it any validity?
Steve: More Chong fiction. The tunnel into Don Mills Station was always part of the plan. As for Eglinton, Metrolinx has been considering options that, bluntly, should have been dealt with some time ago, but thanks to some bad planning and terrible neighbourhood relations, were frozen in place when Ford cancelled Transit City. Probably the biggest issue is the loss of time, and the inflationary effect this has on the projects.
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One of the gratifying developments in this debate was the refusal by some of the better spoken Councillors to let Ford set the terms of reference. The Mayor wanted to frame the topic as “subways vs. “Streetcars”” (even though he means LRT.) This is not an accurate depiction at all. When I hear Councillors who are pro LRT with respect to the Sheppard debate, respond to the suggestion that they are “anti subway” by saying (words to the effect of) “No I am not anti subway or pro LRT. Each has its proper place and I will support each where it is necessary” it is very refreshing. For too long Mayor Ford has been allowed to set a framework of fundamental untruths and then the debate proceeds from there. (As an example – If we don’t cut Libraries what else do we cut? Ford has previously been able to avoid the response that maybe any cut is a bad idea.)
It was also illuminating to hear Rob Ford’s temper tantrum. When we get angry we often inadvertently speak the “truth”. Anyone who was fooled into thinking that a caring pro transit Mayor was trying to deliver the highest order of transit to beleaguered suburbs should hear him say – in virtually so many words – that his real concern is the fact that the “streetcars” which he hates might get in the way of his SUV. In his ill-considered campaign to create division between various parts of the City (Downtown vs. Suburbs) the supposed beneficiaries should understand that they were merely pawns in his “get out of my way when I’m driving” agenda. (Ford needs a clear open road because it is hard to concentrate on obstacles while illegally talking on his cell phone.)
Steve: I am waiting for Ford’s rant to show up on YouTube so that everyone can see what the real Mayor Ford looks like.
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Thank you for all of your hard work, your dissemination of information, and your activism and advocacy, Steve. Sanity prevailed today. Let’s make sure these lines get built so that all of us in Toronto get the transit we deserve.
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This is good news. We can finally get moving on transit expansion in Toronto, unless a Provincial election messes it up.
That being said, there seemed to be a lot of confusion at Council yesterday about the differences in operating costs of subways and LRT’s. Doug Ford and the American Public Transit Association claimed LRT’s are more expensive to operate on a passenger-kilometre basis, yet Josh Matlow claimed this was not true.
I would have figured LRT’s would be far cheaper due to the lack of tunnels, indoor stations, escalators, lighting, elevators, security, ticket agents etc.
Are there any figures which can clear this up?
Steve: Please see my response to an earlier message. Also, some of this depends on how major capital maintenance projects are booked. For example, the TTC has been repairing the tunnels north from Eglinton to Sheppard for several years, but this is a “capital” project and does not show up on the “operating” budget. That’s only one example of how reported “costs” of subways can be lowballed.
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Thank you for all you do Steve! I do hope you find yourself on the Transit Commission as a citizen voice. We need you!
Just out of curiosity, how does this day compare for you to when you saved our streetcars the first time?
Steve: This is far more than the 1972 decision because, to begin with, there’s 40 years of history and a much deeper understanding of how this really sets the path for transit’s evolution. In 1972 we only saved the streetcars, and fights to have LRT taken seriously were in the future (lost alas to Queen’s Park’s ICTS fantasies). Today, we saved not only LRT, but seized the transit agenda (and much else in the city) away from a Mayor whose destructive behaviour gravely threatened many things in Toronto. I am very proud of Council — it worked the way it is intended, not as the pet monkeys of a tinpot Mayor still fighting with the worn-out slogans of his last election.
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Now convert the Sheppard Stubway into LRT for a through ride. Either that or fill it in! Make it a land fill for garbage!
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So happy to hear about service to UTSC!
Thanks Steve for all your hard work and passion.
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I am not sure if it has been mentioned anywhere else on this blog but could anyone enlighten me on 3 things. 1 if it is at all possible to extend the BD line to STC, using some of the SRT existing infrastructure with the adjustments to fit a TTC Train, and if it can be done how much that would cost? Would it cost more than an extension of the Sheppard line to STC or would the cost be about the same?
Steve: The subway cannot be extended to STC on the SRT’s alignment for various reasons. First, the tracks at Kennedy lie east-west, not north-south, and a major reconstruction at Kennedy would be needed to point the subway in the correct direction from somewhere west of Kennedy crossover (the point where the track turns out of the old hydro corridor into an east-west alignment). Next, the curve at Ellesmere is far too tight for subway trains, and this entire structure would have to be redesigned. The right-of-way is quite narrow south of Ellesmere Station, and I don’t think there is room for two subway tracks carrying trains which are much wider than the existing RT rolling stock.
An alternative alignment has been proposed continuing east from Kennedy and then swinging north. This cannot happen immediately because various structures are in the way, and the most likely route north would be under Brimley. New stations would be needed at various points (Lawrence, Ellesmere) and, as I understand things, getting into STC itself is a bit of a challenge because of existing buildings. I am sure it could be done, but the point is we would be building a totally new subway line at a cost that could easily hit $2.5b or more. Yes, we are spending a lot on the SRT replacement, but that will get us all the way to Sheppard with provision for future extension.
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Steve wrote, “Today’s debate was, for the most part, more civil and organized than what we heard yesterday…”
A few of us notice this, and concluded this may have a connection to Councillor Mammoliti’s absence. 😉
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Steve – This would not have happened without the advocacy of people like you. Kudos and thank you.
As you pointed out, it was also heartening to see some councilors reevaluate their positions with better information. I just hope, that the execution does not cause a major setback to the “cause”.
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I rather enjoyed this comment by Stintz, the effective Mayor of Toronto, that I read (later removed) in the Sun:
To Ford: What’s the point of a throne with no power? Why call someone mayor if they do not have the support of council to enact their will?
Steve: The abusive way that Ford and his followers have treated their opponents — right from that first day with the loathsome inauguration speech by Don Cherry through to the all-night show-hearings of the recent budget debate — puts him in a very special place in my heart. It’s one thing to simply be my opponent, but someone I could respect. Ford has earned the loneliness of a totally ignored politician, yesterday’s man, and all of the contempt the public and media will rain down on him. He is a blight on the reputation of Toronto it will take us a long time to erase, but we have started.
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Clouds on the horizon? How much danger of a provincial government turnover? What would the conservatives do if elected? There is unlikely to be a demonstration LRT line by that time. Construction will be in full swing in 2014 about the time of the next election. Hopefully this will not weigh too heavily on the subway side for projects not started.
The St Clair issue is obviously phoney for anyone who has been there. But a lot have not (particularly from Scarbouough) and know only about the construction issues.
Steve: The Conservatives elected provincially? Please don’t make me laugh. The GTA isn’t anywhere near that stupid, especially when Toronto and surrounding cities saw that real “Conservatism” means supporting that blowhard in the Mayor’s office. I also hope that the NDP, who I generally support, don’t get the bright idea of trying to bring down the government too soon. They can be far too sanctimonious.
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Now that Sheppard LRT is back on track (no pun intended) I’m now wondering what kind of changes, if any might be made from the original plan. I see from before on this site that certain Transit City proposals are apparently of the table now I now wonder what will end up being done with other Transit City proposals which are still in the pipeline.
Steve: This is a topic worthy of an article in its own right, but for now I will just savour today’s victory.
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The transit users are the champions.
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Rob Ford:
Presumably that doesn’t apply to multi-billion-dollar subways, though.
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Now that I think about it, Toronto City Council is very similar to High School. With Ford being the crazy monkey that everyone hates/ignores.
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Hi Steve:-
I hate to say it, as he normally doesn’t say much unless it’s loathsome or totally inane, but Bobbo Ford said something last week that is a statement I truly and wholeheartedly embrace! What was said at VP and Sheppard, and I paraphrase and add just a weenie bit o’ my own commentary in it, ‘we’ve got a billion dollars, let’s get the shovel in the ground and build us some rapid transit, rapidly’!
City Council, the ball’s in your court. Let’s make history!
Dennis Rankin
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Rob Ford’s fulminations against the “damned streetcars blocking up our roads” are happily recorded in the video attached to this CBC article. I suppose this is a “downtown vs. suburbs” issue insofar as it shows that Ford believes his SUV deserves unfettered progress along Queen without the 501.
Steve: And this is Rob Ford being comparatively quiet. The fracas involving Councillor Lindsay-Luby is not shown.
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Around the time Transit City was cancelled the first time we talked about how there would be some exodus of staff from the TTC, specifically people who had been involved in the “St. Clair disaster” and the others that had been ramped up in preparation to start building on Shepperd … I’m just wondering what the current expertise with LRT in the TTC organization is … is it going to take time to ramp up again, or are they ready to go?
Steve: The TTC continued to act as Metrolinx’ prime contractor for the design work that has been going on. Some of the staffing came from outside consulting firms, some was in house. I believe that the core of the group stayed intact.
Obviously a lot of it is Metrolinx, but the nitty gritty I assume is being done by the TTC, are we going to run into the same issues with shelters not being delivered on time, and bad sequencing of construction … also, what is the city’s plans for dealing with lawsuits etc. that come up, is there something that Metrolinx could do to prevent that from slowing the projects down?
Steve: Even before Ford’s election as Mayor, it had been decided that the mish-mash of contract management that plagued St. Clair would not be perpetuated in the new “Transit City” department. Instead of work spread among many agencies and co-ordinators, the TTC will act as prime so that all requirements, changes, etc., flow through one point.
If the election is really beginning now as Ford says, it would be useful for there to be some opposition to counter his (and other – see Conservative Party of Canada/Ontario) advertising and misinformation. Specifically their radio show is problematic, since it’s essentially a full two hours of free advertising for them (mayor and councillor Ford) … is there any move to try to get an equal opportunity for people on the other side of these issues?
Steve: Technically, since there is no formal campaign in place, any media outlets are free to give time to whoever they wish to favour. This ends the moment we are in a real campaign because the exposure would be deemed to be an illegal corporate contribution. Adam Giambrone’s “On The Rocket” show ended for just this reason.
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Hi Steve,
Thought you might be interested to know that Sydney (Australia) today went ahead and decided to tear down their monorail, which will let them focus their city-centre transit improvements on an expanded LRT network. The network is expected to include a line going down George Street, probably the city’s best-known avenue.
A happy coincidence, I would say, that both cities are ditching some out-of-date transit ideas at almost exactly the same time.
You can see this for a newspaper story about it. (In brief: expansion of the LRT was blocked by the contract with the current monorail operator — the Minister for Transport decided to buy out the P3 and remove the line at the end of its economic life, which is rather soon, so that they can start building new lines.)
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For those who were interested where Mr. Chong got his data. Based on this link (which is also being used by APTA for its statistical data) (see TS.2.1) I have compiled this table for the year 2010.
Obviously, operating expenses for the systems of the same size are pretty much close. The systems with higher ridership that use trains of higher capacity had lower operating expenses. The principal differences can be seen between systems rather then different modes of rail transit. At the end of the day, they are all rail cars – nothing more and nothing less. And it all boils down to the ridership they deal with.
Steve: Thanks for generating this table. There is a lot of basic background fact checking and information presentation that needs to be done. Sadly, we have heard so much bilge about LRT from the Ford faction that even after the Council approvals, some cleanup work remains to tear apart the bogus claims.
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Hi Steve
I feel that congratulations are in order for your efforts in helping LRT happen. Your contribution of an alternative voice and reliable information has helped people counter the flow of “information” that has been spread by the Ford camp. I also hope that Chong’s days as a transit expert are in the past.
It’s been a long road since Streetcars for Toronto, but we should start to see a proper transit system in place in Toronto.
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The city can finally begin the long overdue process of easing crowding on some of the busiest bus routes.
Does anyone know when construction will start on the Sheppard East and Finch West lines? Pro-subway advocates state that construction will begin on the former in 2016 but I find that hard to believe with all the misinformation coming from both sides of the debate.
Steve: Start dates for the various projects will depend on provincial requirements for cash flow management. In the original 5-in-10 plan, to which I understand Queen’s Park could return, the intent was to build Sheppard first in parallel with the start of construction on Eglinton. The Finch project and the SRT would follow in the latter half of the decade. Council has been somewhat conflicted about the priority of the Sheppard and Finch lines, and some fine tuning of Toronto’s priorities is needed. I suspect that the 2016 date may have applied more to a proposed Sheppard subway given the lead time needed to start construction and the cash flows involved. Much more definitive info from Metrolinx is essential, but they are silent on the matter (I have already asked and received only the Minister’s statement in reply).
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Steve wrote about the argument that LRT has higher operating costs,
That is what occurred to me when this came up. Given that LRT’s capacity range is for lower numbers than subway, it would only make sense that the per passenger operating cost could be slightly higher.
That said, if a subway is placed in a corridor where the demand can be met with LRT, even considering that subway is likely to attract a little more demand, I strongly suspect that the operating cost per passenger of that subway line would be significantly higher than the LRT line would be.
Steve: Yes, it would. Regardless of the demand, you still have a vast array of systems and infrastructure to maintain. An oft-quoted figure (I would love to see the TTC bring this up to date) is that the per passenger subsidy on the Sheppard line is $8. It has all of the bells and whistles of the Yonge and Bloor lines, but far fewer passengers.
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Steve, any idea what the most likely alignment will be for the SRT extension to Sheppard? A lot has changed since this extension was first proposed a few decades ago. Fields that where once empty on the east side of Markham Rd, for example, are now fully built-up with condos and townhouses. And I’m not sure if the (Highland?) Creek corrider south of Progress Ave could even be used today, as originally planned. So it seems to me the only plausible route may be centre ROWs along Progress and Markham Rd. What are your thoughts on that?
Steve: This has already been dealt with in the EA. After leaving the east side of McCowan Yard, the line follows the old rail/hydro corridor northeast a short distance, then follows the watercourse east and north to Markham and Progress. The line crosses the 401 on the west side of the existing Progress overpass and continues north to the point where Progress crosses the old rail corridor again. Originally the surface connection to Sheppard would have been mode via Progress, but this has been changed due to local objection (and a piss-poor job defending surface LRT by the project team at public meetings). The line will drop underground in the old rail corridor for its interchange with the Sheppard LRT line including a service track for carhouse moves between Sheppard and the “SRT”. Extension to the northeast is likely to be grade separated.
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I don’t see this as quite the victory as it doesn’t solve one nagging issue: the Sheppard Subway itself. Personally I would have loved to see the line extended, to at least Victoria Park, but from what I hear, the Sheppard line is going to be permanently frozen in its present state, which, is…. pretty pathetic. There is no commitment to converting Sheppard to LRT operation to create a seamless link on Sheppard Avenue East.
Don’t get me wrong, but I am a proponent of the Transit city plan. Stintz was on the right track when she opted for above ground LRT on Eglinton with the remainder of the money dedicated to the Sheppard subway extension. Unfortunately, Ford’s stubbornness killed any hope of a compromise that would make him look decent.
As for Ford itself, it perplexes me with his behaviour on transit. This is contrary to my previous encounters of him being open to suggestion and fostering a constructive and community minded debate. Seeing his anti-streetcar rants is almost like a Jekyll-and-Hyde moment as it makes me wonder why I supported this fellow. What bothers me is that his constant statements that “people want subways, they voted for me because they wanted subways”. Unfortunately, Ford cannot claim this statement for one very simple reason: he did not open his transit plan for debate, rather released it in a Youtube clip and evaded all discussion on it. One would think that Transit is on a low priority on his agenda given that all the other things that he constantly mentioned during the election. I suppose it was a surprise when he declared Transit City dead on his first day.
This is such a pity. Ford had the chance to be the mayor Toronto needed. And he did do quite a few good things too in his first few years. He discussed, he negotiated on everything else that was not transit, and got quite a few small victories. But his complete bungling of the transit file, by not embracing his discussion-by-open-consensus style he is so fond of, from even before he was mayor is a large stain on his reputation, one which may never come off, in my opinion.
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Has any analysis been conducted on the transfer between light rail and subway at Don Mills station? Not that I’m in favour of the subway option, but doesn’t it seem absurd that people will have to transfer from one mode to another at Don Mills merely to continue along the same route/journey? What are the transfer times going to be and how is that likely to impact ridership?
Steve: The final version of the design before Mayor Ford killed the LRT project was to have the LRT trains come in on the same level as the subway with a single continuous platform. Because the LRT vehicles are low-floor cars, the actual track heights would be different (and of course the subway is TTC gauge while the LRT will be standard gauge). Passengers will get off one line and simply walk down the platform to the other one.
An alternative scheme would have brought the LRT in at the mezzanine level, one up from the subway. This too would have meant only a short walk between platforms but would also add a single-level vertical change. I don’t know whether this will be revisited before the design is frozen for construction.
In either case, the LRT connection will be much simpler than the roundabout trek from the bus platform down to the subway.
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When will construction start on Sheppard LRT even though the Agincourt underpass is still under construction (close to completion)?
Steve: We are waiting for Metrolinx to sort out the project sequencing. Their main concern is to fit within the 10-year cash flow plans set out by Queen’s Park. This prevents every project from starting at once, and effectively means that either Sheppard or Finch, but not both, will be built in the first half of the decade.
I can presume that the Eglinton LRT will not be affected and Metrolinx is still working on the option for west of Keele such as either elevated, on surface or underground?
Steve: Yes.
And there will still be future open houses for Caledonia, Oakwood, Chaplin as well as the other updated open houses for the underground stops that had previous open houses.
Steve: The tunneled portion of the Crosstown project is not affected by recent decisions. Property expropriation for Caledonia Station was recently approved by Council.
The Finch LRT was not going to start until after the Spadina extension is running or close to completion anyway.
The York Region busways are progressing since they are not in Rob Ford’s territory.
When I asked the TTC construction workers, or one of the managers during events, they said before the 2010 election, Transit City is not going to be cancelled and many people thought so when it happened and but those people were right.
For one thing even if the completely underground LRT went on ahead, the city would have had to face the multi million dollar cancellation fee!
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Indeed a historical moment for Toronto, where yet again council has decided to do something that is going to be seen as a huge mistake in 25 years time.
I don’t care what side of the debate you were on, anyone with common sense would see how stupid it is to change from subway to LRT at Don Mills, instead of providing a one seat rapid transit ride.
Yet again Scarborough gets screwed with unneeded transfers, and we get a plan which is proven in reports to not provide “true” rapid transit, and therefore is not going to attract people to transit.
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Sal82 says: So happy to hear about service to UTSC!
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I don’t get why people are so happy about this, concerning the LRT will provide service which is no different from the current bus routes which feed into UTSC?
I don’t think people fully understand that the LRT Toronto is getting, is not LRT rapid transit, but rather a streetcar in the median of a road.
Steve: And even if it is a “streetcar in the median of a road”, that streetcar will have the capacity to absorb future growth in demand, and will not spend its time stuck in traffic like the Sheppard bus.
As for the transfers, when will those who complain about Scarborough getting screwed acknowledge the fact that the subway does not go anywhere near eastern Scarborough on Sheppard. There will be a bus to subway transfer somewhere along the way most likely at Kennedy North or at STC if the subway option were built.
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It would be a good idea for the good burghers of St. Clair to invite people of Scarborough down for a looksee. And vice versa. Although I love our neighbourhoods, we spend far too little time exploring outside of them. Which allows demagogues to play us against each other.
In keeping with that, I hope we can finally put to rest the calls for deamalgamation. Not only has that ship sailed practically, but I think the ability of such disparate councillors as Cho, Moeser, Perruza, Colle, Matlow, Stintz, KWT, Carrol, Parker and Luby to see through Ford’s antics to the crux of the matter proves that we are better working out how to work at this together rather then complaining about each other.
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Hey Steve, kind of related to this victory but not quite on topic so forgive me for posting here. But I just noticed something interesting on the TTC’s Crosstown website. At the very top of the homepage, under the headline “Toronto Transit Plan Update”, the following is written:
Good stuff, glad to read that. But scroll down a bit, past the map of the system the site promotes, and you’ll read the following:
I’m very curious about this. I could have sworn council decided NOT to build the entire Eglinton Line underground on February 21, as is stated above. It’s slightly disconcerting to me to read that. So help me out here: did they just not update the site (I’m hoping that’s the case and it will be erased soon), or did someone slip it in there perhaps looking for a fight to delay this line? Maybe I was the first to notice it, I don’t know. Anyways I’d be very interested to hear your response to this conflicting information on an official TTC project site.
Steve: This is an editing problem, one of many cases where the situation has changed so quickly that attempts to keep up have not been as thorough as they might. The map correctly shows the line as underground from Laird to Black Creek.
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@Stephen Cheung
I don’t think building LRT on Sheppard precludes building a subway extension later when demand can support it.
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I believe the people need to be educated on all things transit AND on the fact that this is DEFINITELY not the end of subway construction. (post Spadina)
At least now, revenue tools should become available soon and continuous discussion on the DRL will occur.
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