Updated June 27 at 5:20pm: I have written a political analysis of today’s announcement for the Torontoist website that will probably go live tomorrow morning. A line-by-line review of the plan will go up here later the same day.
TTC Chair Karen Stintz and Vice-Chair Glen De Baeremaeker will formally announce a new plan called “One City” on June 27 at 10:30.
The plan already has coverage on the Star and Globe websites. Maps: Globe Star
I will comment in more detail after their press conference, but two points leap off the page at me:
- The proposed funding scheme for the $30-billion plan presumes 1/3 shares from each of the Provincial and Federal governments. This money is extremely unlikely to show up, especially Ottawa’s share. From Queen’s Park, some of the funding is from presumed “commitments” to current projects such as the Scarborough RT/LRT conversion which would be replaced by a subway extension. The rest is uncertain.
- The “plan” is little more than a compendium of every scheme for transit within the 416 that has been floated recently in various quarters (including this blog). What is notable is the fact that glitches in some of the existing ideas (notably the fact that the Waterfront East line ends at Parliament) are not addressed. The whole package definitely needs some fine tuning lest it fall victim to the dreaded problem of all maps — once you draw them, it’s almost impossible to change them.
For those who keep an eye on political evolution, the brand “One City” surfaced in April 2012 in a speech made by Karen Stintz at the Economic Club of Canada. This idea of a new, unifying transit brand appears to have been cooking for some time.
Steve Munro 
I am wondering with all the lines in Scarborough wouldn’t everyone of those lines be horribly underused? I can maybe see the support for one LRT Line but to LRT lines, whatever is InRail and Subway service. I just see lots of empty trains running around.
Steve: With a chicken in every pot, some of those pots are rather crowded, but every one of those chickens has a politician’s name on it.
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I applaud the effort to make Toronto’s transit decision less dependent on other levels of government. The question becomes is property tax the right way to generate this new revenue. If the TTC is truly the better way, why can’t it command a premium? Will $200 metropasses and $5.50 cash fare on the TTC that hard to swallow? One must remember that a TTC that does not ask money from the city will make it independent from the day to day politics at city hall. This is the quickest way to build a network that is not marred by political re-election considerations.
The plan to turn the ARL into a local service is not smart. The ARL has the potential to increase the market share of the Star Alliance significantly when built. Perhaps in another post, it is clear that an express only ARL will matter in the fight for market share against One World and Sky Team.
This One City plan also lacks a vision to intensified certain areas. Mobility Hubs are useless if it is only used as a transfer. There is so much retail possiblity at these Mobility Hubs. One can see the possiblities by looking at the newly renovated Osaka Station. To make the One City plan less onerous to taxpayers, the TTC should become involve with real estate.
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“One City” To Serve Them All” … maybe what we really need is some brave little Hobbits!
Steve: I wondered how long it would take for someone to notice that.
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re: Wilson BRT:
From the Transit City Bus Plan:
Steve: Thanks for digging this out. It is an odd rationale for the Wilson lane, especially considering that the service quality inbound will be strongly affected by whatever happens further west on the line. Oddly enough the Ellesmere BRT is included in OneCity, but not the Dundas BRT.
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It seems to me that the OneCity subway option through STC and up to Sheppard is at least one thousand times better than what is currently on offer. Someone with power and influence should make this happen, new funding strategy or not.
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I for one think Steve would make an excellent Gandalf the grey to guide the little hobbits;)
Steve: But will I be allowed to take my staff into Council meetings?
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It’s appalling that people are taking this plan seriously. $30 billion spent and still no Bloor Danforth subway west of Kipling (Sherway Gardens, hello?), or east of Kennedy (assuredly extending that line or the Eglinton Crosstown underground to UTSC is a better use of funds than several meandering lines through low density sprawl – Ellesmere BRT, seriously? At at least a terminus near UTSC could have bus routes branch all over eastern Scarborough for far less complexity than a Malvern AND a Zoo LRT spur).
Still no attempt to rectify the unnecessary transfer points at Don Mills and Kennedy Stns, when extending the Sheppard Line at least to Agincourt GO and letting the LRT take over from there eastwards would actually interconnect major nodes without transferring (York U > North York Centre > Scarborough Centre). And what is the point of Finch LRT west of Hwy 27 and east of Keele if the Sheppard Line’s extended to Downsview and the 192 Rocket could easily be extended to the Humber College terminus via Hwys 409 and 27? As someone said earlier Jane LRT is technically impossible at-grade south of Wilson and most of the heavy volume traffic along 25 Don Mills is south of Eglinton as at most BRT north of Eglinton woud suffice.
But the most egregious mistake of all OneCity makes is the seeming operation of DRL East and DRL West as two separate lines enforcing two transfers (one at King, one at Union) to continue in one’s direction of travel. And the fact that the “Etobicoke Express” branch of the DRL bypasses the inner-city altogether is a missed opportunity to have the DRL serve local neighbourhoods en route sufficiently, most notably West Queen West and Parkdale.
I can get how desperate some people are to see something, anything built just to claim that a solution has been made, but let’s not get carried away here. I’d rather see the $30 billion be spent on bringing the subway network to at least to the city limits and building a proper DRL from Mount Dennis via downtown to the Science Centre preferably running underneath Queen with some permutation down to the Financial District in the mid-section. Anything leftover could go towards BRT lanes.
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So Rob Ford has come out against the plan (gasp!).
I too feel that caution needs to be used in getting bogged down in the specifics of this plan – OneCity seems to me to really be a banner under which to create sustained, ongoing funding, & providing an interm plan to tangibly communicate to the public what $30 billion could actually produce with the money. Exactly how the money gets spent (one example: what mode of transport to use on Jane) is another matter altogether in many respects.
And yes – a Scarborough Subway of some kind is defiantly a political necessity to get that chunk of the city to buy in.
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I’ll never understand the obsession with scrapping the SRT. I realise it’s utterly maligned (to a painfully exaggerated degree) but it’s infrastructure that exists and there is a plan in place to improve it (ironically, to an upgraded version of the original technology in mind for it IIRC).
We need to improve and expand the infrastructure we have rather than pay heed to someone’s hate on. You’d think the 20th century obsession with ripping out streetcar tracks across North America which brought us here in many ways would be a cautionary tale by now. But I guess moderation has no place in a simplistic, short sighted and divisive one oversize fits all paradigm.
Steve: Thanks to the SRT’s shortcomings as an unreliable orphan technology complete with an inhospitable transfer at Kennedy, the line has always felt very “second class”. Oddly enough, it was originally touted as new, modern technology putting Scarborough on the map, but that status didn’t last for long. Add to this Mel Lastman’s blustery promotion of North York as the centre of the known universe where “real cities don’t use streetcars” and a penchant for subway lines, and it’s no wonder Scarborough felt it was getting short-changed. This feeling predates Rob Ford, although he exploited it with his subway vision, flawed though it might have been.
There is an argument to be made for the BD extension, but especially in a form where it does not end at Scarborough Town Centre, and where it does not pre-empt building a network of other services, notably the Sheppard and Scarborough-Malvern LRT lines.
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The other Mikey makes my eyes roll:
Right. An expensive deep-tunneled extension to an area of huge parking lots and poor access to connecting transit routes. I guess fans of an extension to Sherway love drawing lines on a map. I’m pretty sure they’ve never visited the area.
Well, there’s already the 191 to Humber College. But maybe Humber students would appreciate a nice tour of the airport on their way to and from classes. Anyone boarding at the airport with luggage is sure to be thrilled to be squeezing on a bus packed with Humber students. Sounds like a win-win.
Of course, there is absolutely no connection between 409 and 27, and the layout of the area would make it prohibitively expensive to construct one. However, reality is no barrier to drawing lines on a map.
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All these lines to be built in 30 years and I bet there still won’t be an elevator at Coxwell by then.
It’s tempting to delve into the minutiae of this plan to critique (such as: how long will a switch to subway extend the timeframe to replace SRT) but the biggest showstopper is money.
If the Federal Government won’t pony up 1/3 of TC/5-in-1 what is there to interest them about a far larger scheme? If we’re game to pay taxes for OneCity why not start now and commit to paying 1/3 of the 5-in-1 in order to accelerate *those* schemes, given the obvious footdragging of the Province, and to test the Fed’s willingness to come to the table with 1/3?
Steve: Given Queen’s Park’s love for the boondoggle of Infrastructure Ontario and AFP, complete with a year or two delay just to put together the contracts, I’m not sure throwing more money at the existing plans would make much difference. Toronto needs to think about funding some of the smaller projects on its own. “Smaller” may be several hundred million (e.g. Waterfront East, busways).
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But will I be allowed to take my staff into Council meetings?
You would not part an old man from his walking stick? 😛
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What I find most interesting about the “one city” plan is the timing of the release. It is just a few days before the province is in a legal position to raise the HST (July 1, 2012).
Raising the HST to where it used to be at 15% would easily give the province the necessary funding power to upgrade much of the transit system. The trick will be to pick out those projects that give the biggest bang for our buck. My suggestion would be to upgrade GO services to all day two way service, and upgrade Union Station and the surrounding tracks so that they can handle about 90 GO trains an hour.
The most important issue here would be shifting the way we view transit from that of consumption to that of investment. When we consider some of these projects from an investment perspective even though the price tag for the project is high in absolute terms, the aggregate benefit to society is even greater making the project in fact very cheap.
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I’d agree that a Sherway extension is ridiculous, but I am a little surprised that an extension of the Mississauga busway down the 427 isn’t being talked about.
Steve: I suspect that is viewed as a “regional” and therefore Metrolinx project.
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I can’t be sure if you [Benny Cheung] are writing the biggest tongue in cheek satire or if you mean this, but then I re checked your previous postings.
Benny Cheung says:
June 27, 2012 at 9:39 pm
The TTC already has among the highest pass costs in North America and the highest coverage of operating costs except for GO, which by the way serves Toronto also. If you want to take a libertarian view then let’s charge everyone for every metre they travel on the road system and for every kg of garbage they put out. Make everything user pay for 100% of the cost.
If Star Alliance wants to increase market share by using the ARL then let them pay for it. By the way are One World and Sky Team passengers banned from using the ARL?
While downtown Toronto is becoming an area of higher residential density, I don’t think it is approaching levels anywhere near those in Japan. I am not sure if the city is allowed to get into real estate deals to the level required. There was an article in today’s Star about a supposedly Transit Oriented condo development going up at Sheppard and Don Mills. You will be able to get from your condo to the subway station without going out side. The fact the 404, 401 and Don Valley parkway are there will not factor into the new residents’ choice as much as the subway, right!
Steve: There is already a city agency involved in real estate development, but Toronto is not allowed to just go out and start buying property on spec. The private sector might get a bit upset about competition from an agency that had a right of eminent domain (expropriation). Provincial legislation would be required, and that’s not going to happen with the tight connections between the ruling parties and the developers. I doubt even the NDP would go down that path.
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One must wonder if the 1/3 expected of the fed’s (which will never happen) is merely a ploy, which will later be “mused” about to be funded by road tolls & other fees once the hype builds on this plan…
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Steve, if you could please provide an educated guess for the following two scenarios.
1) A commute starting from Neilson Rd and Sheppard Ave to Union Station – all existing TTC (Google says about 1 hour and 15 minutes )
2) The same commute as above but with the Sheppard LRT and a fare integrated all day two way GO service, with Union station handling about 80-90 GO trains an hour (same time of day as above say morning commute)
I am trying to get a feel for any tangible benefits coming from having enhanced GO services coupled with the existing LRT construction projects.
Steve: This is one of those “it depends” situations, and much has to do with what is actually built and how good the service might be.
Option 1: It’s about 6km from Neilson to Agincourt Station. Assuming the LRT makes about 20km/h, that’s a bit under 20 minutes, but we have to allow for waiting time, so say 20. If there is frequent service running on the Stouffville GO line (say every 12 minutes), the average wait would be 6 minutes, and the run in to Union would be around 30 minutes (the times on the current schedule vary). So we have 20+6+30 which is as close to an hour that we might as well take that value.
Option 2: New GO service on the CPR through Agincourt and Malvern to Union via the Don Branch. My guess is that if there were a station in the vicinity of your starting point, it would be where the CPR crosses Markham Road. The line crosses Sheppard between Brimley and Midland, and that’s very close to Agincourt Station. My gut feeling is that the running time to Union would not be substantially different, and the biggest sources of delay would be (a) getting to a station on the CPR if it were not on Sheppard itself and (b) waiting for the train on what would likely be a less-frequent service to show up.
Option 3: LRT/subway via Sheppard/Yonge. The distance is almost 12km, and so that’s about 40 mins on the LRT at 20km/h. Transfer to the subway and ride to Yonge is about 12 minutes (I am assuming a direct along-the-platform transfer at Don Mills Station), then to the Yonge line and down to Union 26-30 minutes depending on conditions. So that gets us up to about 82 minutes.
Option 4: LRT to SLRT to BD subway to YUS subway. Neilson to Progress is 1.4km, a bit shorter to the proposed interchange with the SLRT. Say about 6 minutes’ running time including the initial wait. The SLRT from Sheppard to Kennedy would be say 25 minutes, with an improved transfer connection to the subway. BD subway over to Yonge 25 minutes plus transfer time, say 30, then another 10 down to Union. Total 70-75 minutes. This is probably a best case scenario as it assumes no foul-ups on any of the transfer connections, and a smoothly flowing service (and ease of boarding) on all routes.
So of these, LRT+GO wins out at about an hour. LRT/SLRT/Subway comes second at say 75, with LRT/Subway third at over 80. There’s enough give in any of these numbers, especially the presumed speed of the Sheppard LRT which makes trips taking it a considerable distance longer.
I suppose that the bottom line is that no matter how you calculate it, it’s going to take an hour or more to get from Malvern to Union. The best case alternative would be for GO to have a station on the CPR line in the middle of Malvern, for you to live next door to it, and for service to be frequent enough that the wait time was not an issue. All of these are unlikely.
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