Updated July 3, 2013 at 11:20pm:
TTC Chair Karen Stintz, as reported by the CBC’s Jamie Strashin on Twitter, claims that Minister of Transportation Glen Murray has put $1.4b of the planned $1.8b SRT conversion cost on the table as a contribution to a subway project.
Jamie Strashin @StrashinCBC
TTC Chair Karen Stintz tells me she just met with Provincial Transportation Minister Glen Murray. 1/2
2/2 Stintz: Murray indicated that if city shows clarity around subway option, province would be “open” to freeing up $1.4 slated for LRT.
There has been no confirmation from Murray whether this is true, or if Stintz/Strashin have misreported a conversation. Such a proposal would violate claims about provincial support for a subway extension that were made in the Metrolinx letter to the City of Toronto. Given Murray’s past history of freelancing on government policy, we will have to wait for clarification of what is really on the table from the provincial point of view. An informed debate at Council requires that this be stated publicly and unambiguously from the Premier’s Office.
Meanwhile, Stintz offers her own version of the situation on her blog, but with no reference to her conversation with Minister Murray. She repeats the canard that a four-year shutdown will be required to replace the SRT with LRT in the same corridor. Moreover, she adds a sweetener about using the existing SRT right-of-way to expand trackage for the GO Stouffville corridor, something which is not actually necessary.
Mayor Ford has announced that he has asked the City Manager to report to the July16 Council meeting on the Scarborough subway option. How definitive this report will be remains to be seen, especially if the TTC and Metrolinx cannot come to an agreement on cost estimates and the penalties involved in ending the LRT project.
The original article follows below.
Once more we see Metrolinx and City Council engaged in the eternal question of whether the Danforth Subway should be extended north to Sheppard, or the Scarborough RT converted to an LRT line.
I have written about this at some length before (May 2013, January 2013, October 2012, July 2012 , December 2010 among others) and will not belabour previous arguments.
After the recent Metrolinx Board meeting, during the press scrum, I asked how many responses had been received to the Request for Qualifications on the Eglinton-Crosstown project seeing that the closing date was mid-May. CEO Bruce McCuaig was elliptical in his reply offering only that the names of the respondents would be published in due course.
It didn’t take long for us to learn that the uncertainty regarding Toronto Council’s intent on its signed agreement to support an LRT for Scarborough was upsetting the bidding process. In a letter to the City Manager and others, McCuaig states:
To ensure value-for-money, we need to attract high quality bidders to our procurements, and this cannot be achieved if there is uncertainty about City Council’s support for the projects.
This implies that the process to date has not been particularly successful, and Metrolinx is placing the blame on the City’s indecision.
All of this started because of an ongoing campaign by some politicians to portray Scarborough as somehow hard done by, fobbed off with a “streetcar” when everyone else, especially those downtown elites, have subways. The fact that this “streetcar” would operate at close to subway speeds on a completely separate right-of-way is just one of the casualties of the misinformation campaign.
Part of this comes from the Ford faction and the premise that nothing but subways will do. Part comes from Scarborough Councillors, notably Glenn De Baeremaeker, who sense a threat to their political survival in supporting anything but a subway. Then there are the mayoral aspirants at least some of whom declare “My Scarborough includes a subway”.
Arguing for LRT in this context is a steep uphill battle.
What Does an LRT or Subway Give Us?
If the line is built as LRT, it will serve more potential riders directly as walk-in customers, notably the Centennial College campus, but also a future extension to Malvern Centre, than a subway would. Demand models show more people choosing to ride the subway because the models favour a faster route with fewer stops and the elimination of the transfer at Kennedy Station.
The LRT would run almost as fast as the subway, and would extend further into Scarborough, but the transfer at Kennedy cannot be avoided. However, the design for the new Kennedy Station places the LRT line on the same level as the ticketing mezzanine (the level between the bus loop and the subway trains). Riders would walk from the new LRT platform directly into the existing station and down one level to the subway. Current subway to SRT transfers involve a three-level change and a high probability that one or more escalator/elevator may be out of service. It is unclear which degree of penalty was used in the demand model.
The subway will give a direct ride for Bloor-Danforth passengers through Kennedy to stations mainly on McCowan leading up to Sheppard. An important design issue, as yet unanswered, is the connection to Scarborough Town Centre as the new station would probably be under McCowan, not within the mall as the SRT station is today. This will be good for people in walking distance of the east side of STC, but worse for everyone else. McCowan Station is not the busiest place on the TTC’s network.
The alignment of the subway is such that an extension to Malvern will never happen.
How Much Will This Cost?
Many numbers have been cited for the cost of the LRT and subway proposals. At one point, the subway was pegged at over $3-billion, but this included provision for a new yard and expansion of the subway fleet. Neither of these is needed for an extension of the Danforth subway as I discussed in a previous article. In January 2013, the subway estimate was set at $2.8b by the TTC in 2011$, but quite recently they have discovered that this value included inflation. When that is corrected, the subway is down to $2.3b.
The same January 2013 report claimed that the LRT line would cost $2.3b, and this led to the claim by subway supporters that their option would only cost half a billion more. (That was when the subway still cost $2.8b.) However, the LRT estimate included $500m for its own carhouse and yard, a leftover from the plan when Mark II Skytrain technology was on the table. Correcting for this brings the LRT line down to $1.8b. This also happens to be the Metrolinx estimate (in 2010$) for the project.
So far, we have the commonly reported half-billion dollar spread ($1.8b vs $2.3b). The fact that both estimates were off by a huge amount might give one pause in believing any of the numbers in this debate, especially considering the importance of the discussions for which the original estimates were prepared.
Metrolinx, however, has additional costs that abandoning the LRT project would bring:
- The design costs for the LRT fleet for the (now) four LRT lines has been allocated among the budgets for each line. The Scarborough line’s share is $21m and this would be transferred to the other project budgets, not be reclaimed for a subway project.
- Planning and design work on the LRT line has cost $41m to date, and a further $23m has been spent on program management.
- Bombardier would likely invoke a penalty clause for a reduction in the LRV fleet order especially considering that the TTC does not need any more subway cars for the BD line that could be used as a trade-off.
- A new subway would not likely open until at least 2021. The TTC estimates that it will cost $60m to keep the SRT running for the extra period.
- The existing structures will have to be dismantled at an unknown cost.
- The biggest single charge relates to cost sharing with the Eglinton-Crosstown project.
Metrolinx has chosen to book the entire cost of the new interchange between the Eglinton, Bloor-Danforth and Scarborough lines at Kennedy Station to the Scarborough project’s budget in the sum of $320m. Why they have done this is not clear, as with a lot of Metrolinx accounting, but this cost does not disappear if the Scarborough LRT is replaced by a subway extension. Some work at Kennedy Station will still be needed for the Eglinton LRT line. How much is a point of debate between the TTC and Metrolinx.
By Metrolinx estimates the difference between the LRT and subway proposals could be over $925m, money the city would have to find on its own hook and which would likely displace many other projects. To put this in context, the rehabilitation of the western half of the Gardiner Expressway is about $500m.
Now we come to another piece of Metrolinx accounting. When Queen’s Park took total control of the Transit City lines and funding, they did so in a way that allows them to defer the cost on their books and thereby bring the date of a “balanced budget” forward. (All governments use this sort of trickery and while it might be satisfying to blame it all on former Premier McGuinty, he is not alone in the practice.) Here is how it works.
- In a conventional transit funding scheme, a subway tunnel, say, is paid for by various governments but winds up as a municipal asset. (The Spadina extension is a good example of this.) When this happens, audit rules require that the subsidies be expensed in the year when the money changes hands because Queen’s Park (or Ottawa) receives nothing in return to balance off the payment.
- If the province holds title to the subway, then it shows up on their books and can be depreciated as a capital asset. On paper, although the same money has gone from the Treasury to the builder, the difference is that there is something on the books to show for it beyond the fleeting goodwill of municipal politicians and voters.
For the Scarborough LRT, Queen’s Park was to be the owner through Metrolinx, but this arrangement will not work for a subway extension that would be operated and maintained as an integral part of the TTC network. Trading in the Scarborough LRT money for a subway creates accounting challenges, and Metrolinx mutters darkly that the City may have to pony up some of its own money to paper over this problem.
That’s not a convincing argument because it had far more to do with Premier McGuinty’s desire to push transit expenditures into the distant future than with expanding the transit system. The same consideration is responsible for the long delays in completion of the first Transit City lines. An accounting dodge to keep the Provincial Auditor happy is no way to run a major transit project.
We have a “new” Liberal administration at Queen’s Park, and it should revisit and jettison this sort of hocus-pocus. Are we going to spend money on transit or not? Something is out of whack if we have to agonize over the bookkeeping.
How Long Will This Take?
For the subway option, a rough estimate from the TTC and Metrolinx is at least eight years from the point of project approval. There is no detailed engineering for the subway, no Environmental Assessment, none of the interminable process of haggling over where the stations will go (and you can be sure that some will be added at $150m a pop before the project is finished). Preliminary design, EA and final design leading to construction will take three years. Building the line will take another five. This means an opening date in 2021 at best, and another eight years of dealing with the declining fortunes of the SRT.
For the LRT option, the construction period is expected to be under three years according to Metrolinx, and they would like to get it down to 2.5. Meanwhile, subway advocates (including TTC Chair Karen Stintz in a Tweet a few hours before this article was completed), claim that there will be a four-year shutdown of the SRT. This longer period was based on two claims that were, generously speaking, misinterpreted:
- At one point, the SRT project was spoken of as starting in late 2015 and being completed “by 2019”. In a worst case interpretation, that’s four years.
- In the original construction plans, the time needed to build the extension was included in the shutdown, but obviously this is not required. Metrolinx plans to built the north end (McCowan to Sheppard) before shutting down the SRT and this shaves time off the shutdown period.
Without question, 2.5 years of a replacement bus service will be no picnic for Scarborough. (Although I live downtown, I worked at STC from 2000 to 2009 and know well the joys of the SRT and its frequent replacement by bus shuttles.) The question, then, is “can the shutdown be justified as a tradeoff for a less expensive replacement line that directly serves more riders and is better positioned for extension”.
The Politics
That is both a planning and a political decision, one made all the more difficult by Mayor Ford’s subway monomania and the concerted effort to sell the subway to Scarborough by convincing them that nothing else comes up to their aspirations of civic grandeur and respect.
Some members of Council, including the Mayor, are at least consistently for subways, and there is a pro-LRT faction that is even a tad more radical than I am. These I can respect for consistency, if not for the content of their positions.
Meanwhile, we have TTC Chair Stintz who has been both pro-LRT and pro-subway as it suits the season. She sold LRT with fervour when it meant wresting control of the transit agenda from the Fords, but then decided that buying votes in Scarborough was more important and flipped to the subway camp. Her position, and that of others supporting the subway option, is a bit vague thanks in part to the uncertainty of the dollar value of a subway decision.
The irony here is that the very people who ridiculed Rob Ford for paying for a subway network with “pixie dust” now have the same vague promises of how they will fund a Scarborough subway. What other projects will fall off of the table? What else in the municipal budget will be pillaged to pay for a subway extension? Will Liberal members of Council and the Queen’s Park caucus sing the government’s tune on staying the course with LRT, or will they play to their Scarborough constituents hoping that a higher power (The Premier) will rescue them from having to deliver?
Once again, transit plans may be tied in knots in Toronto thanks to the delays of Mayor Ford and Premier McGuinty. “Momentum”, the sort of thing one needs in large scale plans, is not the word of the day, and Toronto risks losing out completely depending on political winds at the municipal and provincial levels.
Postscript: What Would I Build?
If, in fact, Toronto wants subways and nothing but subways, we need to have a very serious discussion about where and when these will be built and how we will pay for them. The much touted “private sector” has lots of money, but they want to invest, not to simply hand out cash for corporate goodwill. The bloom is off PPP’s (private public partnerships) at least in part because politicians awakened to the fact that investors want to be paid back, and the overhead of managing a third-party owner-operator is not trivial.
All the talk of reducing congestion and improving transit will be meaningless if we cannot agree on and afford to build a network. Talk of “only” $2b a year in new taxes has not been received warmly “out there” by the folks who would benefit, and it must be remembered that the most expensive parts of The Big Move are the subway lines within the City of Toronto. If we really do want “subways subways subways”, then Toronto should be prepared to tax itself to pay for the extra cost of building and operating them.
I am often asked “so, Mr. Big Shot Critic, what would you do here”. My answer is quite simple, although the problem is a challenging one: build an LRT network. The fundamental problem with Toronto’s transit planning has been the premise that subways will go on forever and ever. We simply cannot afford this, and at some point there must be a transition to less expensive, lower capacity modes whose network can be more spread out.
The hardest decision is to say “this is where the subway ends”. Somebody will always be beyond the last station, and LRT (or BRT if capacity permits) must take over where the subway leaves off. That boundary should not mark the end of high-quality transit, so often the experience that makes people yearn for subways at any cost.
Steve Munro 
I can’t help but think that the residents of Scarborough will get exactly what they want with their “Subways or nothing!” attitude and the RT conversion will get killed off much to their joy. Then, at some point after 2015 if not sooner, some age related mechanical failure will occur which result in the RT being permanently shutdown and the residents of Scarborough will foolishly blame the province for not having the foresight to have a replacement for the RT in the works.
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When my mother, who lives in Gary Crawford’s ward, sent him an e-mail a couple of years ago asking him to support the Transit City plan, he sent back a boilerplate e-mail making that “Scarborough deserves a subway because everyone else has one” argument, signing off with “My Toronto includes Scarborough.”
In other words, the “but his piece of subway is bigger than mine” narrative has been sold to Scarborough residents, and very successfully … but it didn’t originate with us and we don’t all buy it, by any means.
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First off, thanks for another great article.
In latest version of the Subways vs. LRT debate, where hundreds of millions of dollars are talked about with all the care and concern one might have when discussing the price of a Tic Tac, has their been any discussion of the difference in operating costs between the two options? Actually, has there been any public discussion from either Metrolinx or the Ford/Stintz/De Baeremaeker subway Trinity on operating costs for any of these new lines?
Steve: No, there has been no discussion of operating costs. Subways are inherently more expensive because there is more infrastructure to look after and this cost builds in later years as the assets deteriorate. Much is made of the labour costs for operators on “streetcars”, but there are two counterarguments here. First, Metrolinx plans to operate the Scarborough LRT trains with one operator per train. Second, the labour force to maintain the infrastructure is substantially higher for a subway line. This might be disguised by “outsourcing” so that the cost does not show up as a headcount, but, for example, someone has to maintain escalators whether they work for Metrolinx or not.
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What are the likely operational costs of the two options? I seem to recall that the subsidy for the Sheppard subway was something like $8 a rider. And yet operational costs never seem to be mentioned (except when asking for more funding from elsewhere). Shouldn’t folks be more worried about how they are going to feed their pet?
Steve: Neither the TTC nor Metrolinx has published operational costs.
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I too was unhappy to see the Scarborough subway issue being opened up in the Globe and Mail this morning. I suppose it’s a small step forward that the possibility being raised is of a Danforth subway extension, rather than the even-more-pointless Sheppard subway extension.
I’ve said it about Waterloo and it’s true in Toronto too: the first LRT lines cannot get built quickly enough. Right now most of the boosters for LRT are LRT and transit enthusiasts like me for whom a major attraction in a city is its transit system. If we can just get one or two lines built, people will understand how nice they are and a lot of the naysaying won’t work any more.
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Steve, a great overview of a political stew that is about to boil over. Scarborough residents are being played as pawns by local pols. Better to have more of us fed sooner with chicken than to have a few of us fed sometime with imaginary filet mignon.
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Where can the prelim designs for Kennedy Station Eglington & SRT LRT changes be found? I’m really curious to see how they planned for the increased traffic at Kennedy Station at the platform levels with the increased ridership. The one unrecognized benefit of the 3 level transfer was to smooth out the people traffic exiting the subway from the lower level to the upper level RT so that an entire subway and bus transfer crowd was not reaching the RT at the same time.
Steve: See pages 16-18 of this presentation.
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Steve,
I loved this article and am happy to see that you wrote it so quickly as things are moving fast. I don’t have anything to add except my supreme disappointment in the 35 councillors (including my own) who voted to tell the province they wanted a Scarborough Subway that fateful day in May and have caused this nonsense. I really had faith in some of the TOCouncil “leadership” that was emerging due to the RoFo vaccuum of intelligence, now I’m not so sure. I am hoping that this era of TO municipal debauchery motivates young, talented activists to run for council and hopefully in the next decade we can be proud of the politics in our city… In the last decade, I’ve lived in Toronto, Manchester UK, Austin TX, & Calgary AB, and travelled all over. I LOVE Toronto, but as I spend more and more time learning/listening/providing my input to how our fair city is being run and its future, I’m just not sure anymore.
Being a technical person, I look at EVIDENCE & DATA, and it seems that in terms of bang for buck, an LRT is better. I do wonder that if we finally pander to Scarborough and cave, then a huge faction will suddenly support Metrolinx, the Big Move, and transit funding tools. Maybe there’s a fine line that can be walked?
Last week, when we spoke after the CongestedTO event, you told me that in your 4 decades of covering transit, that we seem to be a bit farther along in the discussion than ever before, which was great to hear. What was disheartening was that you’ve seen these cycles many time before and that I should be cautious with my “faith”. It is also interesting that cynicism about politics in general is at an all-time high in Canada & the US.
hmmm…
~a disenfranchised, 19-34’er, that wants the city to fulfill its potential.
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Does it have to be all one or the other? What if the Subway were extended by a station or two to a logical new terminal point which would then be a hybrid Subway/LRT station specifically designed to better facilitate transfers between the two systems? It seems to me that transfers at Kennedy have always been clunky and retrofitting this old station to better accommodate transfers to a new LRT system could be a mess… Granted this would require all new studies and EAs – but so would an all-Subway solution anyhow.
Steve: The next “logical terminal point” is STC, and if the subway is going that far, there’s precious little left to build as LRT. We would then hear all about the poor people who were “forced to transfer” to the subway from the LRT line, and the pressure would be on to take the subway even further.
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I find it fascinating in all of this discussion that no one ever raises the fact that the north end of the [Yonge] subway stopping at Finch instead of Steeles (the end of the City) has been a PIA, but people still manage to get where they want to go.. All that this endless debate is managing to achieve is no transit system all. How are we going to force SOMETHING to actually be built??
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If Metrolinx is truly unwilling to use the SRT replacement dollars for any BD extension scheme, is there a possibility that money could go to extending the other LRT lines? Maybe Eglinton to the airport, or Sheppard to UofT Scarb? Finch to Yonge? Or, heaven forbid, Queen’s Quay east? Surely they’d find somewhere to spend their cash…
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Seeing all of this makes me wonder are we ever going to build anything?
I am also concerned about the endless misinformation being spread around. It runs the gauntlet from subways only cost $50 million per kilometer to tunnel to the usual garbage about the ridership levels that will magically appear.
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I suppose that if Metrolinx wanted to try some creative accounting with the Scarborough Subway they could ‘own’ the stations (from platform to surface) while TTC ‘owned’ the tunnels and the tracks on which the train runs. Then they could develop a highly complicated usage agreement that makes GO Transit’s track time agreements with CP rail and Ottawa’s O-Train track warrants agreements with the regulator look like a walk in the park.
Or we could just stop all the madness and go back to the LRT deal and maybe try to sweeten the pot by building the Malvern extension sooner rather than later, add some GO expansion and ‘prioritize’ the Ellesmere BRT and Scarborough-Malvern LRT (even though it may not be at the top of the ‘Feeling Congested’ list).
Cheers, Moaz
Steve: The problem with any ownership/lease of the subway structure is that it would place an operating cost on the TTC it would not bear from a line completely built and maintained by Metrolinx. Queen’s Park created a real monster with the accounting sleight-of-hand on transit funding, and there’s no easy way to dig out from it unless they acknowledge that the primary job is to build new transit and we can figure out the accounting later. All of this is intended to artificially lower the provincial deficit.
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If they insist on a Scarborough Subway extension, then I insist on the following:
1) Put the Bay Street Streetcar tracks above ground between Front and Queens Quay,
2) Convert the Sheppard Subway to LRT,
3) Change the Eglinton LRT to side-of-the-road southside alignment at Leslie,
4) Regauge all TTC trackage to standard gauge,
5) Move all Spadina LRT stops to nearside,
6) Convert the Dufferin bus to streetcar for its entire length,
7) Reduce the size of city blocks in the suburbs by imposing a fine-grid like in downtown,
8) Shrink the landmass of the city to reduce sprawl and travel distances
etc.
There are times where we do have to forgo the perfectly ideal alternative if it’s not realistic to achieve, if the ideal alternative has a marginal benefit over the accepted alternative, and if the accepted proposal adequately serves our needs. I think the extension of the BD line almost falls into the same category as my other proposals above: yes, it’s ideal to have no transfer at Kennedy Station, but simply extending the BD subway brings a whole lot of other problems.
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Have councilors Stintz and De Baeremaeker given any idea of how to fund the extra $500 to $950 million cost of subway over LRT? I haven’t seen anything in the newspapers about this other that to say that Toronto does not want to pay for the Big Move if it does not include more subway for Scarborough. (And even then Toronto might not want to pay if provincial “efficiencies” can be found.)
In the cost comparison, have Metrolinx and the TTC eliminated the sunk costs (design already done, contract obligations to Bombardier, etc.) for the Scarborough LRT? These would not be recoverable if we choose a subway extension.
Steve: The sunk costs are detailed in the Metrolinx latter linked from the article. They are part of the $450m that gets the estimate cost up substantially from $500m to $950m.
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Steve, great write up. I personally would rather see the LRT since it gives Scarborough a true rapid transit system – the additional stops at Centennial College and Markham and Sheppard are very important in my opinion since it will help serve north east Scarborough (and Markham Rd, which has quite a few potential transit riders). To me, the Subway is just to serve those who do not want to get off their train to take the subway – not a worthy sacrifice.
I do want to ask for your opinion about what to do with the Ellesmere RT Station. This is currently very underused because it sits underneath a bridge with no direct way to get to it. Do you think it is possible that when station gets redesigned that it will allow for the 95 York Mills buses to go down there and drop off passengers directly?
OR how about digging underground a bit further north to Kennedy and Progress? There are a lot of apartments in that area, and this new ‘Progress’ stop can also help serve the Kennedy Commons commercial plaza?
Steve: Ellesmere Station may be abandoned or reconfigured by moving the platform further south. The problem is with the extra ramp length needed to get down to the bottom of a larger tunnel that will handle LRT cars. Why is the tunnel so small? Decades ago, the Tories at Queen’s Park were so afraid that the TTC would change back to LRT from ICTS that they forced the tunnel to be downsized so that streetcars would not fit through it. So far there has been no discussion of fitting in the York Mills bus, although this is more a question of building a service road and connections to Ellesmere rather than changes to the station per se.
Shifting the line north to Progress will add substantially to its cost and complicate the route through STC.
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My optimism has turned into disgust. I’ll be slogging through the Eglinton Disaster and the line won’t open for my benefit until I’m retired and no longer commuting.
I’m so happy I’m not a Scarberian exiled to that transit wasteland.
Debating ad nauseam is damaging the whole city and I may be dead and gone before any new transit is built when the uncertainty starts to cause delays in projects already underway.
City Council had the chance to decide on funding tools but they decided to pass the buck to Queen’s Park.
Politicians don’t have the intestinal fortitude to think beyond their terms and utilize the revenue tools that are at their disposal.
If City Council is serious about extending the Bloor Danforth Line, they better ante up with those revenue tools. Otherwise they’d better just shut up and stay the course.
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The construction of political lines in this city has got to stop. Karen Stintz’s behavior in this regard is a clear illustration of why she is unfit to be mayor. She is placing her own career dreams above the good of the city. I would even go so far as to say that perhaps the Ford brothers really do have her figured out.
As for Glenn De Baeremaeker, the word pathetic comes to mind. What good reputation he had has been pretty much dragged through the mud by his grasping to hold onto his seat.
Build the LRT NOW. If need be I would be willing to come out there today to turn the first sod.
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Hi Steve — what are the technical limitations forcing an LRT passenger interchange at Kennedy Station? I have to think there must be some way to appease Scarborough riders a bit by letting them know that they can ride through there and get closer to downtown on just one train by interlining at least some of the vehicles between Scarborough LRT and Eglinton/Crosstown.
To me, a triple change there seems somewhat absurd, especially with two lines being the same technology. I get that there’s a goal of not having westbound Eglinton vehicles already full when they reach Ionview but surely we must be able to plan for, conceive and develop a workable way for the LRT to stop at Kennedy for BD transfers yet continue onwards without an all-change all the time, no?
Later on, I could better see a “Scarborough Subway” BD extension heading further east on Eglinton rather than north. McCowan, Bellamy/GO and terminating at Markham/Eglinton… but only long after DRL, of course. I do wonder though, when you say an ideal answer is “build an LRT network”, do you forsee that as something that would use interlining to increase capacity in denser areas while not over-serving the outer lengths, maybe? If so, would there be a possibility of DRL itself being a densely run stretch of LRT network rather than full subway? In that scenario, a rider could potentially one day see themselves board a vehicle at Scarborough Town Centre, ride it through Kennedy onto Eglinton East and continue on that same vehicle as it turns south at Don Mills to take them right into the core. Ah! living the dream! 🙂
Steve: Originally the SRT and Eglinton lines were to be through-routed and early publicity for the “Eglinton-Crosstown” touted the one-seat ride eventually from Scarborough to the Airport. However, the TTC does not want it operated as one route because the demand north of Kennedy Station is considerably higher than to the west, and they would prefer two separate routes rather having different frequencies, and likely train lengths. It’s rather odd that Metrolinx, who basically took the whole project away from the TTC, gave away such an obvious integration point.
As for the DRL, much of any route south from Eglinton to the core will require a completely segregated right-of-way both for capacity and because there is no surface right-of-way available for a line with projected demands at its level (probably higher than the Scarborough LRT/subway). The whole point of the DRL is to provide unconstrained capacity to offload north-south traffic from the east into downtown, and this is most easily done, in this case, with a new subway line that would be serviced from Greenwood Yard. North of Eglinton gets us into LRT territory.
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Doesn’t it make more sense to make the eastern portion of the Eglinton line elevated, and keep the current plan for the Scarborough RT? Underground tunneling is expensive, and the cost of replacing the SRT with a subway was clearly underestimated by Karen Stintz to make the subway extension look good. On the other hand, elevated rail costs more than surface light rail but less than tunneling, so the extra cost of making the section of Eglinton between Leslie and Kennedy elevated is at most slightly more than the extra cost of replacing the SRT with a subway. Undoubtedly there will be people who complain that elevated rail is ugly, etc. but this would provide 100% grade separation, through running between Eglinton and the SRT and much higher capacity than surface light rail, and the extra cost could easily be funded from the proposed transit tax should this be passed.
Steve: This sounds like a roundabout way to justify an elevated on Eglinton rather than a cogent argument against a BD subway extension.
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It’s hard to imagine that anyone in his or her right mind, who had experience riding on a modern LRT, would prefer a subway. Whereas one is deep in the ground with nothing to see, has no natural light, is noisy and has lots of stairs; the other enjoys the sunshine, the views, the seasons, all through large windows, and is much quieter. To me it is the vehicle of choice.
What is missing in Toronto is that most people have no experience riding an LRT, and are easy converts to the pro subway misinformation, especially the notion of the greater status associated with subways.
What if Metrolinx were to install a temporary demonstration kilometer of track, say beside the RT on the Hydro right of way, running north from the North Service Road parking lot at Kennedy Go station to just short of the Tara Ave pedestrian bridge. TTR or TTC could lay the track, Metrolinx could practice installing some 25kv catenery (fed from local supplies at whatever voltage the train uses), and then get Bombardier to provide a pre-production train, or borrow someone else’s similar train (a la Vancouver). Borrow a spare condo sales pavillion from a developer for educational displays and station. It would operate mostly weekends, say 10-4, for three months, giving free rides to one and all. Maybe accommodate school bus trips on one weekday. Get there by Subway, RT, bus, and yes, by car.
Make a show of it. Advertise it. ‘Come ride our new train and bring your parents’ invitation post cards to every school kid in Toronto. Lots of prizes, a video of an LRT cab ride from say Nottingham UK (similar vehicle I think). Let’s change some attitudes, not with misinformation but the real thing.
The running might count toward necessary trials and staff familiarization. At the end of the demo dismantle it. Send the train back, reuse track materials elsewhere, and restore the grass.
We can see from Steve’s (excellent) article that $100 million is neither here nor there in the costs of various subway or LRT projects, such that a promotional project such as this would cost a pittance by comparison. The value of promotion is enormous. It would not only promote the mode, but Metrolinx too, to give them a public face. And the promotion should not be contingent on outcomes of the Scarborough debate, after all there are at least 3 more LRT lines coming.
When does this demonstration open? Canada Day 2014! Yes you can Metrolinx!
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The problem is that everyone here thinks LRT is equivalent to the Spadina / St. Clair / Queens Quay lines.
Users on these lines often experience:
* erratic wait times, while watching bunched vehicles going the other way
* vehicles so packed, they can barely fit in them
* huge lineups at the terminal stations
* travel times that are 2x longer than taking the subway an equivalent distance
If the Sheppard LRT was actually opening next year and riders could experience a true LRT trip, we wouldn’t be having these debates.
Steve: Ah yes. The original idea of Queen’s Park funding a bunch of new lines before the Investment Strategy kicked in was to show people what could be done quickly, and LRT lines were some of the early candidates, notably Sheppard. Then Dalton McGuinty got cold feet and what should have been an early showcase became yet another political football. Queen’s Park has decades of this sort of indecision and outright cock-ups to answer for.
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So Rob Ford has finally realized that people are doing something about the things he claims to want. Any bets on whether he votes against all funding options again or demands that nothing gets done until the province pays for everything?
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Unfortunately, these subway discussions are coloured by the tremendous waste of money that has occurred along Shepperd and is occurring as we build the Spadina line up to Vaughan. While we spend precious dollars building and operating vanity projects for Mel and Sorbara, people in another part of the region will want their own vanity project.
Like the rest of the city, Scarborough deserves better transit. And the city’s citizens deserve something we can afford. Until somebody starts inserting the fiscal discussion, and talking about what things cost and how things work in reality, the discussion will remain fixated on what form people would like as against where it should be – what reality we can get done.
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I refuse to believe that the repeated delays to the Sheppard LRT construction is solely due to accounting/financing issues. My take is that the (Liberal) Scarborough MPP’s didn’t want to be responsible for allowing an inferior LRT be constructed instead of a subway extension. Queens Park had the money to build the LRT, but did little to defend/promote it.
Steve: If McGuinty did not also defer the Finch line, I might agree with your hypothesis. No, the problem simply is that they didn’t want to spend most of the “committed” funding until late in this decade. It all has to do with making the provincial deficit look better.
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Frankly, I can’t even believe this debate is going on. Many commentors have registered their disgust at our illustrious leaders, particularly the unfit lot from Scarborough so I’ll leave it at that. I damn well know from submissions he made in the past Clr Thompson knows better.
I wish the media would really point out that the proposed SLRT is really, really high end LRT in terms of capacity/speed. Let’s see if I’ve grasped the argument, Scarborough wants/deserves a grade separated electric rail line … but not ‘that’ grade separated electric rail line! So really this whole thing comes down to the fact that people are enamoured with tunnels?
Of course this all distracts from the issues of actually running the third largest transit system in North America, as wonderfully pointed out by Christopher Hume. Hey Karen, can you stop “visioning” transit infrastructure and deal with reliability issues on the surface transit system? Might be a better way to spend your time. That is if you actually want to accomplish something meaningful. If not, you’re doing a great job.
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Subways have considerably higher operating costs than LRT, provided that the LRT line being compared is at street-level. The difference in operating costs that a Scarborough subway has over the Scarborough LRT isn’t as great, because the Scarborough LRT will be a grade separated line, with larger stations, elevators, and escalators.
Steve: But the LRT line will not have tunnels, and the difference in elevation that escalators and elevators must handle will also be smaller leading to lower capital and operating costs than on deep subway stations. The fire code effect on underground stations must also be remembered.
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I used the word “solely” because I believe that it was a combination of financial and political reasons that the delays happened. Yes, I agree that accounting and deficit reductions played major roles here, but I also think that these reasons provided a convenient excuse for Scarborough MPP’s who may not want to preside over suburban-streetcar-construction. Stating their opposition outright to Transit City would have painted them as Fordian anti-transit. The delay of Finch West was probably less political than that of Sheppard East.
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I would like to point out that Stintz is not the only flip flopping Councillor – I counted half of them who supported Metrolinx and the LRT last fall and then voted for the subway extension this spring. If this group could have made up their minds earlier instead of playing these political games, this last minute hold-up could have been avoided.
I have been curious for some time as to whether Metrolinx or the TTC has seriously considered the continuous ECLRT / SRT option with the Eglinton line elevated through Scarborough. It would make the transfer at Kennedy optional since riders could instead take the LRT across to Yonge (or a DRL at Don Mills). It spreads out the transfers better than having them all at Yonge/Bloor (or Pape if the DRL gets built). It follows along the currently planned route so the EA would be easier to get updated as opposed to a completely new EA needed for the subway option. It has many more stations and access to rapid transit compared to the subway option and it doesn’t eliminate transit from an existing rider, or one who was promised service. It would retain the entire line under Metrolinx’s ownership and would use the already ordered vehicles. It could be viewed as a compromise between subway and LRT so all sides would win. Using elevated cost from Vancouver, this option would have significantly less cost premium over the subway option. Also, Eglinton is mostly industrial / commercial so aesthetics is not a large concern. Every indicator suggests that this is a better option than subway, yet it has not been discussed publicly. Is it just because certain politicians had preconceived notions of how STC could be connected to the Toronto core, or is there another reason that this has not been considered.
Steve: No an elevated Eglinton has not been considered, at least not recently. Your comment about land use is only partly valid as some of the abutting lands are residential, and some of the existing industrial lands will convert to residential.
I strongly dislike the idea that we would try to build a network on the basis that “all sides would win”. If we are serious about using LRT in this town, at some point, it has to run at grade.
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This might be slightly off-topic, but who on earth decided that Karen Stintz was fit to be Mayor?!? The next election is shaping up to be a real mess.
Steve: I think the first person on that list would be named “Karen” who has flip-flopped on whether she is running as on other issues.
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Another issue is that the cost of the replacement bus service (should the SRT be shut down for reconstruction to LRT) has not been factored in. There is no estimate yet for the additional operating costs of the temporary bus service, nor is there any provision in the capital budget for the purchase of additional buses to accommodate the temporary service and any contingency plan for the storage of those buses, since the current garages are pretty much maxed out.
Steve: In the original TTC plan, the cost of the replacement service was included, although for how long we don’t know. The fleet to run the buses (for a 2012-14 shutdown) was going to come from elderly equipment that would not be replaced thanks to downsizing of the fleet with the opening of the Sheppard, Finch and Scarborough LRT lines in the first half of this decade. That plan fell apart thanks to Dalton McGuinty, and I don’t think the TTC has quite figured out how to handle the situation especially if they get into beefing up service (and fleet) just to handle growth on the overall network.
TTC fleet planning is notoriously bad and past experience with “gotchas” when the political level actually wants to improve service, but cannot, may come back to haunt us.
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I’m not as well read on these options, so please forgive what might be a or already buried and dumb question.
Has there been any consideration given to the kind of system used in San Francisco? The BART travels BOTH underground and above-ground: as a linked train from the downtown core with specific cars breaking off onto local side routes (as streetcars) once they reach their crossroad/station access points. Passengers load the trains at designated areas of the platform depending on their side routes (avoiding our current mass of passengers trying to load/unload where stairs are located at major cross points)
Is there any way to make something like that work here? They have a pretty hilly City, too.
Steve: I believe what you are describing is actually the MUNI streetcar system which occupies the upper level of the tunnels under Market Street (BART is on the lower level). The arrangement with cars from different routes coupling to run shared service through the subway is required because of the combined frequency of service with all of MUNI’s streetcar routes feeding into a common spine. This does not have an equivalent in Toronto.
In the case of the Scarborough/Eglinton line, yes, some cars could split off a “Scarborough” train to operate through service onto Eglinton, but it would be much simpler operationally to have different trains, each dedicated to a specific type of service.
In any event, the currently proposed Kennedy Station is not set up for through-running between the two lines, and yet another redesign would be required to permit this.
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I guess that one way to build a lower cost subway extension would be to only build 2 stations (at Lawrence & McCowan and “STC” at some place on McCowan north of Ellesmere and skip the station at Sheppard. This way you don’t have to tunnel under the 401. However, it is very likely that any further subway extension would cost a huge amount of money so service north of “STC” would have to be some kind of branch off of the Sheppard East line.
Of course doing this would require major changes to the plans for Kennedy, abandonment of at least 3 SRT stations (though it might be possible to see a rail line from Kennedy to Agincourt GO station at Sheppard one day), new EAs and critically, keeping the SRT alive until the extension is built.
Hence, it would be much better for everyone to stick with the original EA and build the SRT as LRT,
Now is the time to look for opportunities to seek compromise. One way might be reconsidering the decision to separate the Eglinton and Scarborough LRT lines and offer a through service in the future.
Offering the possibility of a future subway extension east on Eglinton to Markham Road (or further east) might be a reasonable compromise on the ‘Scarborough needs a subway’ demands. The added time would also help ensure redevelopment of Eglinton east is well-planned and there would be density to justify the subway extension.
It should also be made clear to all subway supporters that the costs of the proposed Bloor-Danforth extension are not reflective of the costs of a similar extension of, say, the Sheppard west line or the Yonge line to Richmond Hill … which would be much higher.
Cheers, Moaz
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“Moreover, she adds a sweetener about using the existing SRT right-of-way to expand trackage for the GO Stouffville corridor, something which is not actually necessary.”
Did you mean it’s not necessary for GO Stouffville to expand its trackage at all, or it’s not necessary to take land from the existing SRT for GO to expand its trackage?
Steve: The portion of the line between Eglinton and Ellesmere generally has enough room for a second GO track without using the SRT corridor. There are pinch points elsewhere, notably further north in Scarborough where the rail corridor runs through a residential neighbourhood. I am sure the residents will be ecstatic about both the expansion of the corridor and the operation of very frequent all-day train service through their back yards.
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Hey Jenn:
Just a small correction to your description of the Muni system. Muni no longer couples and decouple their streetcars at West Portal Station. The practice has been discontinued because the implementation of ATC in 1998 allowed better tracking and movement of the LRV’s in the tunnels.
The last time I visited San Francisco, I noticed the platforms were long enough to accommodate at least 4 vehicles, and I actually saw LRV’s with different route destinations sharing the same platform.
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Steve, an excellent article which I may (in all futility) pass along to my councillor (ward 35) who also spouts the the line that Scarborough residents are getting short-changed by not getting subways. What I find interesting and also frustrating is that this debate can be argued either way depending on which facts who choose and which you ignore. Many subway proponents argue that subways are faster that surface transit, however I can usually get from my home to my workplace faster on my bike than taking the TTC (short bus ride to Kennedy, the BD to Yonge, and YUS to Dundas). I’m close enough to Scarborough GO that is a better option than TTC (though more expensive).
I’m leaning strongly in favour of conversion to LRT for the following reasons:
1) the LRT will run within the existing ROW of the SRT to McCowan, offering similar speed to subway
2) the estimated speed and ridership for a BD extension are not much better than the LRT conversion
3) More people would be within waking distance of an LRT station
4) The LRT line is easily extendable beyond Sheppard
5) The current plan is fully funded.
5) Most importantly – the LRT would be operational within 3 years. A BD extension is only in the discussion stage, and would not be operational before 2020. I’m not optimistic the TTC can keep the SRT running much beyond the PanAm games, let alone running to 2020 or beyond.
It’s rather sad that politics have always tended to trump good transit planning. Quite frankly, if extending the BD line to Sheppard and McCowan was the better option, why was it not on the table earlier, either when Transit City was debated or when Council wrested control of the issue from the Mayor and reassert something similar to TC?
Phil
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Just send one of the new streetcars along The Queensway. That is pretty close to the LRT experience.
Steve: Provided that you get City Transportation to change the traffic lights to give the “LRT” true priority.
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As a matter of flexibility for the future, it seems to me that rebuilding Kennedy right now to prevent through-routing is short-sighted. Why not build one extra long platform like so that trains from either service will come to and stop head-on:
===(crossover)===Eglinton –> (mutual stopping point) <– SRT===(crossover)===
with crossovers at either end? Then a single platform can operate as a terminal for both services. Is this feasible? Was it ever considered?
Steve: The problem is that for the headways proposed on both lines, a single track terminal is not viable. There is also the geometric problem that there isn’t room for the SRT crossover between the end of the platform and the curve north into the existing right-of-way.
Leaving aside safety issues of a head-to-head meet, the platform would have to be long enough to handle at least 6 cars (a three car train on each line). Given the position of the curve into the station off of the Scarborough line, this would put the “Eglinton” half of the platform well west of the existing station mezzanine.
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Yes, I’m sorry. I realized after I posted that I had misidentified the service.
I’m trying to imagine the logistics; we are a “bit” bigger than SF. Outgoing seems reasonable, it is the incoming that could cause nightmares, unless they don’t join up on the way in, but just head to the turning point, where they are linked once again for the outgoing trip. There would have to be some extra cars that just run the main line for those passengers that don’t ride the local side routes.
Of course, if that is the case, they don’t really need to link up at all, just have the individual cars run their own routes but all travel the main downtown corridor … like an “express” local route line, but with regular stops.
I understand how it would be simpler operationally to run separate trains, but this would mean that passengers don’t have to change vehicles, which seems to be a choking point for objectors. It could be done for the new lines, but the “problem” of having to change from subway to LRT is not resolved with this solution. Still, it does have its romantic appeal.
Thank you for the explanation Steve. I’d just never heard any mention of it in these debates.
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I was living in the Bay Area during the construction of BART and also the during the time SF Muni put in service its new LRV. I’ve since notices the original Boeing Vertol cars have since been replaced. The Muni stations look to be of similar length to the Bart stations below, and went Muni first ran its new LRVs I would sometimes see at least three cars coupled together. It’s worth noting that Muni’s LRVs are high-floor cars as with our current fleet. For subway service Muni’s LRVs, the stairs in the centre doors would raise to be flush with the station platform but would lower for street service. Given this was there early 80’s I’m not sure low-floor technology was available. I do recall that before the new LRVs went into service Muni modified much of its overhead wire to be pan-friendly (they also have an extensive trolleybus route network, even converting some of their diesel bus routes to trolleys) . Nice to hear Muni has ATC from West Portal to the foot of Market.
As I understand it, the Eglinton Crosstown will likely be operated as two-car trainsets while the section running along the SRT route would be three-car (assuming the LRT conversion survives).
Phil
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