TTC CEO Andy Byford has issued a letter to members of the Commission and to Council advising that a planned shutdown of the subway for major reconstruction in the vicinity of Davisville Station has been put off until 2016. In the meantime, sufficient repairs will be done to keep trains moving at a reasonable speed through this section.
The underlying problem, quite literally, is that the foundation and drainage below the track have failed causing the track to be unstable. The condition has been addressed off-and-on for a few years with slow orders, but this does not solve the problem.
This and other areas of the subway system with wood tie/stone ballast track will be 60 years old in 2014. This is well past the normal operating life for such systems.
Detailed investigations have determined that in addition to normal wear and tear, the area below the stone ballast and the associated subgrade drainage systems have both failed, allowing enough movement of the track system to cause abnormal track movement which, in turn, can cause the signal system to fail safe. Subway service in the area is safe, but reliability on our busiest line is not where it needs to be.
The TTC will have to dig down substantially below track level, and this is the sort of maintenance that cannot be carried out overnight of on a weekend. The number of buses and operators needed to bridge this section of the line is well into the hundreds, and the TTC does not have these resources. Short shutdowns may be attempted and these will be co-ordinated with other work in the same section of the route.
If ever there were a need to demonstrate that subways do not last 100 years, as some short-sighted advocates claim, this is a perfect example. The Yonge line is now 60 years old and parts of it are showing their age. Indeed, another section at Lawrence Station also requires major repairs even though it is barely 40 years old.
Read the full memo.
Steve Munro 
Before buses were used as replacement services, streetcars used temporary sidetracks while the main tracks were reconstructed. Will they be using temporary sidetracks in the open sections of the subway, while they work on the main subway tracks?
Steve: No. If you think about where the track in question is, you will know that this is physically impossible in several locations.
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I am not surprised this work is postponed and honestly I am grateful it is. This needs to be planned and thought out for more than a month before implementation.
Just as an aside perhaps doing the work in warmer months would encourage people to to walk more between the stations as opposed to the colder months.
Steve: Eglinton to St. Clair is 2km. I doubt many people would want to add that to their daily commute, especially in the summer weather.
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Even if the TTC have 200 buses in surplus along with a surplus crew, it would be impossible to provide bus shuttle service. Traffic congestion and the lack of road space will scuttle such plans. It is also politically unacceptable to ban private vehicle traffic off Yonge street during the shut down.
A lot of the passengers who use the Yonge line originate from York Region and to a certain extent Peel. The TTC must coordinate with GO so that enough bilevel trains can be gathered and move the non Toronto demand to those trains.
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But Steve, this is not subway but surface construction. If it had been a true subway it would have lasted to 2054 or beyond, just like Yonge north of Eglinton.
Steve: Ah yes, including Lawrence Station where we have just learned that without repairs, there is a possibility of buses breaking through into the subway tunnel.
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Presumably there will be a need for numerous closures of this section of the Yonge line for Eglinton LRT construction at Eglinton station, so the two construction projects could be combined somehow. Building the subway interchange would be a lot faster if a subway closure were implemented between Lawrence and St. Clair for a few months.
This really illustrates the lack of redundancy in Toronto’s subway system. Many other cities implement full closures of portions of their subway system for periods of several months for construction, but they have many parallel lines. Somehow I wish we would do an accelerated environmental assessment for the downtown relief line and get it under construction ASAP.
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It will be interesting to see what they come up with! The railroads have for sometime used ballast cleaners/changers to replace ballast without removing track, using vacuum machines I believe to extract the ballast. Here I presume ballast will be replaced with concrete after drainage is installed?
Two kilometers, twenty minutes is not such an imposition in summer for most people, and could well reduce requirements for buses. I doubt that waiting/loading/travelling on a bus would be much less time than that anyway. Since it would save TTC substantially in bus costs etc, they might well be a fare reduction, and free umbrellas for those walking.
Steve: As you will know from reading the memo, the problem is not just the ballast (which the TTC tidies up from time to time) but the drainage under the ballast. Various parts of this segment seem to go back and forth from regular operating speed to slow orders depending on what part has been realigned most recently and stayed in reasonable condition.
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Even the subway tunnels are falling apart. Isn’t the tunnels at St. Lawrence Station falling apart? And how long has the TTC been working on the tunnel liners?
This is a great example to debunk the lie subways last 100 years.
Steve: St. Lawrence Station? Yes, as reported in this month’s agenda, there is a problem with the ceiling slab (which is also the bus roadway) at Lawrence. As for the tunnel liners, this process is taking forever partly because it is complex, but partly because the TTC doesn’t just bite the bullet and do weekend-long shutdowns. Why we can shut down the heart of the system downtown for signal and track work, but can’t shut the north end for accelerated tunnel repairs I do not understand.
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So Steve what is the current condition of the slab at Lawrence.. should we be expecting it to rain buses over our head any time soon?
Is this the same problem that was faced at Eglinton and VP which resulted in the closure of those busbays? If so what is the TTC planning on doing to fix it… ideas?
Steve: Read the report in the agenda. It includes photos, and does imply that the roadway slab could fail. This is a similar problem to the one at Eglinton Station and also, as mentioned elsewhere in this month’s agenda, a few now-closed bays at Islington.
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Andy Byford said:
When the Star reported this story, the reporter did not mention the 2016 date but reported most other details thus leaving the impression that the problem would hopefully be solved without an extended closure. The way Andy worded the 2016 clause seems a little ambiguous so much so that the reporter missed it.
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Do you have any insight into the problem causing the slow order northbound on the University line between Museum and St. George stations?
Steve: No.
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I don’t like this. Forget about the time lost with slow trains but think about safety. This is a huge safety issue. I don’t like safety critical maintenance being put off for years while money is wasted on fixing things that are not even broken: like dropping well descriptive line names to adopt numbers which provide ZERO information. So, Mr Andy Byford postpones critical repairs yet wastes money on useless numbering of the lines. Even if the numbering is helpful (which at least in my opinion it is not), it is not something that is as urgent as the urgency it has been shown. Forget about building more subways (whether in Scarborough or in Downtown) and forget about the numbering of the lines until you can properly maintain what we already have.
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The 2016 clause is immediately followed by another that says that the short-term improvements would be intended to last for 5 years. I wonder if the hope is to get us past the opening of the Eglinton LRT so that it can be used as a way to get riders over to the University-Spadina leg.
Although the construction zone is fairly localized, wouldn’t the existing crossover locations dictate that the closure extend from Eglinton to Bloor? That would contribute to the incredible number of shuttle buses (and operators). But if the Eglinton LRT was available, you would have a higher-capacity alternative, could reduce the number of shuttle buses needed on Yonge, and maybe use the Eglinton bus bays for shuttle service.
Steve: Five years from today only gets us to 2018-19, and the Eglinton line won’t be open by then. There is a crossover south of St. Clair Station.
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Rather than solely relying on buses to shuttle people, increased street-car service between St. Clair and St. Clair W. stations could transfer people to the University line. A turn-back loop could be formed by a West to South connector at St. Clair/Vaughan and a South to North connector at Vaughan/Bathurst. The LFLRVs that would be in the inventory in 2016 could provide a lot of capacity allowing for weekend shutdowns. Sort of related to this configuration but also for the crowding issues that a BD extension will cause, I would also propose a pocket track between Bloor and Rosedale stations that would allow for Bloor short-turns and another storage place for a gap-filler train. Too radical?
Regards
Steve: A shuttle via St. Clair won’t do much for people arriving from the north. They would be better off to head west to the Spadina line north of Eglinton (Eglinton itself will be in a mess thanks to the LRT subway construction). Those coming from the south already have this option via the subway. A shuttle via St. Clair doesn’t really achieve added capacity where it is needed.
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Steve. I had a mental block on my previous post. On just 1 cup of coffee, I was thinking the track construction was south of St. Clair. Feel free to publish anyway. I’m not shy in admitting we can all think stupidly at times. The loop and pocket track could still be assets though. But just not for this situation. I’ll step away from the computer now.
Steve: Some days, more than one coffee is required!
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Underground work is always going to be more complex. However, how do other cities with even more extensive subways deal with these issues (i.e. New York or London)?
I guess my point is this: This cannot be an issue that is unique to Toronto. Other cities have far more complex systems, some which are far older than ours. How long do their subway systems last before major work? If their systems last longer, what did we do wrong? If their systems lasted shorter, we should be happy.
And no Steve, I don’t believe in Ford’s subways everywhere mantra. However, I am saying that we can’t say look at this situation negatively unless we first look at other systems to see if the issue is with the technology (subways) or the original construction.
Steve: Some systems close entire lines or sections of lines for months at a time (Chicago just opened one line after a complete rebuild). The difference is that some other cities have is multiple lines to which at least some of the demand can flow. We have two north-south lines, but no spare capacity. Also, it is entirely possible, given how long the track near Davisville has been in less than ideal shape, that we have put off major maintenance for too long.
As Byford’s memo explains, the TTC will be looking at other systems to see how they approach this type of problem.
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Steve, do you have a list of other issues that the Subway infrastructure is facing at this time? I’ve noticed approximately eight slow orders on the BD Line and with this project being put on hold I am wondering how the outdoor section of the BD Line from Victoria Park to Warden is holding up? I assume at some point this section will need to be replaced even though the cross-overs at Warden and VP were replaced several years back. Shocking to hear about Lawrence though, I had no idea about the bus roadway above and the tunnel deterioration below.
Steve: I do not have a catalog of various places where work is in progress, but, yes, slow orders do pop up around the system with alarming regularity these days.
The problem at Lawrence is a basic design issue with bus roadways. Buses carry salt water from streets onto their loops, and this eats away at the concrete. This is the same problem faced by apartment tower garages all over the city.
Depending on what is underneath, this can be a serious matter. Roadways at various locations (most recently at Greenwood, and on a large scale at Victoria Park) have been rebuilt to deal with this. The bus loop at Lawrence lies directly above the subway tunnel unlike Islington, or the old Eglinton bays, where the bus terminal is offset from the subway structure.
Water penetration into tunnels is a widespread problem, and it is worst where there are physical joins in the structure that correspond to underground water courses. The east end of Broadview Station used to be quite wet until major work was done to seal the station. I have seen ice buildup at such locations to the point that the rails are sitting in two ruts. Aside from the obvious structural problems, this also plays havoc with the signal system by creating a short circuit from the signal rail to the ground rail making the section appear to be permanently occupied.
The Bay Street tunnel for the Harbourfront car has always been a problem because it lies below the water table. The TTC has been doing a lot of repair work there during the Queens Quay shutdown.
At least the water that seeps in underground is not as salty as the stuff buses carry into the stations.
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So, how about a multibillion dollar crash two-year program to build an extended Downtown Relief Line, incorporating the Sheppard Stubway, and then using that as the bypass during this construction? 🙂
OK, I know, that’s the sort of thing they’d do in China, not North America. Sigh….
Steve: You don’t build an entire subway line just because we need to find a way to shut down part of an existing one. This type of problem is bound to crop up on other parts of the system, and we can’t just build another subway every time. As for what they can do in China, well, if that’s the sort of government and economic policies you prefer, then I suggest you move. We also read a lot these days about quick-and-dirty projects in that part of the world where getting it done quickly is more important than getting it done well. Somewhere, there is a happy medium between the two approaches, but our biggest problem is that we build so little, so infrequently, that we don’t have a resident, ready-to-roll construction capacity for subways.
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London has *long* (multi-week, sometimes) line closures, generally with traffic being redirected onto other lines. New York uses its four-track lines to good effect, closing two tracks at a time. Philadelphia has been known to close *either* the “subway-surface” lines *or* the Market-Frankford El, but rarely both at once.
Boston also has a lack of redundancy. Boston has laid on enormous numbers of buses during closures of short sections of the Red Line or Green Line. But on the whole Boston has maintained its system better than Toronto.
Steve: None of Boston’s routes carry the loads we have on the Yonge subway. Trains on all lines are shorter and less frequent. Even then, they need a lot of buses.
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I don’t recall the Yonge line being closed when the Bloor-Danforth and Sheppard lines were being built. Why would they start doing that with Eglinton?
Steve: In the case of Sheppard, the new line sits on top of, not under, the old one and so there was no concern about undermining the existing structure. I can’t remember what was done at Bloor Station (I’m sure others here will add their comments), but one major difference is the general design of the interchanges. At Bloor, the “new” subway is only one level below the “old” one, and the links are provided in the east and west mezzanines. At both Eglinton and Eglinton West, the “new” subway is two levels down with an intermediate mezzanine. The additional depth and the extent of the excavation needed may be a factor. Also, at Eglinton, there will be physical changes to the existing station that may require the platform to be closed while some work is done.
The plans call only for weekend closures of the Yonge line, not for extended shutdowns, although the timings might be co-ordinated with the trackwork south of Eglinton.
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What is being said here is that maintaining a subway or upgrading an underground system to new codes is expensive.
One hundred years is a long time.
One hundred year is a myth since most everyone cannot forecast 5 to 10 years in advance.
In London UK they have a problem with air conditioning.
Go to NYC where some stations are 100 years old .
You think Yonge/Dundas is bad ?
I used this station last week.
What a joke.
It’s about 70 year old from when the design was finalized.
To correct the problem if correctable !
I doubt if there is a solution.
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Recently the Dufferin Bridge in the EX was condemned and it is going to take a long time to rebuild. I think that was a surprise to the City and while I don’t know specifically, the outcome suggests poor planning and poor maintenance. What if the subway suddenly needs an emergency shutdown. Is there somebody who could lend/lease us the buses (and presumably the operators) to get us through a crisis. I can’t think of anyone. Even if “cost was no object” a catastrophic failure seems like a situation with no solution.
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The 2016 date does put the closure after the Union Station revitalization work is supposed to be complete, Presto is supposed to be fully implemented, and, if we’re very lucky, the Spadina extension opens. That leaves us with a few more options for shifting around traffic flows than there is today, both in physical capacity and in fare policy.
How much of the north end/York Region subway demand do you think can be pushed on to GO through redirecting all those buses that come in to Finch, either by rerouting them or by providing a temporary busway from Finch Station to Old Cummer along the Hydro corridor?
Steve: Much depends on what GO will have done by then with infrastructure on the north-south lines and how much equipment is has to run additional/longer trains. There is also a subway station in Vaughan that might make a nice alternative destination.
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So when the inevitable shutdown between St. Clair and Eglinton occurs resulting in split service which includes a leg from Eglinton to Finch: where will the trainsets be stored overnight? how many will be required for that leg? and how will they be serviced if there is “no-track” access to the Davisville Yard from the end of the north portal?
Hmmmmm… I guess the postponement of the shutdown means the TTC hadn’t thought of these questions as well as they should have in addition to attempting to defer costs and a nuisance of a necessary shutdown.
Steve: One obvious point is that trains will simply be left in tunnels. The bigger challenge, not yet mentioned, is that turning trains at Eglinton ideally would be done using the crossover south of the station. However, this will be impossible while the track immediately south of Eglinton is under construction. The only alternative would be a very messy turnaround using the pocket track, but that track is to be removed as part of the station reconfiguration for the Crosstown LRT. In any event, the TTC has said that they may try to do this another way, but I don’t know how they can avoid the shutdown.
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Steve,
I have no idea if this is technically feasible or not, but would it be possible to keep one track open and close the other to allow reconstruction work, using the crossovers south of Eglinton and south of St Clair? Trains could be run alternately from Summerhill to Eglinton, or used solely with the flow of traffic during rush hour (depending on how much stock they have to spare and/or can fit south of the closure) to reduce shuttle bus load.
Steve: The first problem is that the running time from Eglinton to St. Clair is such that a platoon of trains each way could only get through every 10-12 minutes under the best case. Running only northbound or southbound trains in the peak direction would have limitations because one would have to store all of the trains needed for that peak wave north of Eglinton somewhere.
The second is that the track repairs will, according to the description in the TTC report, involve substantial excavation, and this would not be possible on one side of the right of way at a time.
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Actually, that is exactly what has been done in a number of systems over the last 150 years.
Steve: Examples please, with specific attention to how these parallel the situation, including locations of heavy riding demand, in Toronto.
On low-volume sections, you can substitute with buses or just tell everyone to rearrange their schedules for a week.
But on high-volume sections, where that simply won’t work … you build another rail line, a “relief line”. It’s not *just* because you need to shut down the old line, it’s because there’s no *substitute* for the old line and so you *can’t* shut it down.
Steve: The relief has to be provided in a location that diverts much of the traffic affected by the shutdown. Unlike many transit lines, the Yonge subway gets a huge demand at its outer terminal that will not be diverted by a relief line (even presuming we could build it soon enough). The relief line’s purpose is to divert trips that come onto Yonge further south to free up capacity there.
NY City built Water Tunnel #3 at absolutely ludicrous expense *solely* to create redundancy. The first two tunnels have more than enough capacity for the city, but no one of them has enough capacity, so the city can’t afford to shut down either of them. So it built a third, *entirely so that it could shut down the first one*.
Steve: Water flows differently from subway riders, and the absence of water is somewhat more catastrophic than the absence of subway trains.
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Buses could be scrounged up from around North America — other cities would be willing to lend parts of their active fleets, probably — and operators could be hired. But can the streets even carry enough buses to make up for the loss of the subway? If not…
NYC tried a bustitution after Hurricane Sandy and found it next-to-impossible. I’ve been on a bus covering a *one-bridge* gap on Boston’s Red Line and they had buses departing continuously (always at least one bus waiting) — you simply couldn’t have run any more buses per minute.
People just wouldn’t be able to get to their jobs. Nothing more nor less than that.
Steve: Well, actually, people would be able to get to their jobs through a variety of diversion routes. Moreover, if we are prepared to spend billions to build a relief subway line as a workaround, we should also be willing to spend lots on major upgrades to GO Transit so that the folks who will most need the bus bridge actually have an alternate route.
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I don’t suppose there’s any way that they could do this old-school and build temporary track down the middle of Yonge Street from just north of St. Clair to just south of Eglinton (just north of Eglinton would be better, but I can’t see how you’d easily connect in north of Eglinton without a long closure.
You’d have to close Yonge Street and perhaps all the cross-streets to cars.
Steve: The ramps would be tricky 😉
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I hope that by then the Oriole GO Station platform has been connected to Leslie Station by a covered walkway (although a direct connection would be nice).
Aside from that I’d hope to see bus lanes on Yonge and Avenue Road for the duration of the shutdown.
As for buses, Mississauga has just started putting their 2013 fleet of (10 16m and 14 12m) buses on the road, which means they will be retiring the 2001 fleet soon. With the TTC’s goal of returning to an 18 year fleet lifespan that would make them useful for another 5 to 6 years.
Cheers, Moaz
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Time for a Mount Pleasant Bus diversion scheme?
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Tricky and expensive yes … but not impossible. One could prebuild a structure that drops into the trench, and swap out between the tunnel and the ramp over a weekend.
Steve: Have you noticed that the subway south of St. Clair is not under the middle of Yonge Street? This is not just a question of building a ramp to the subway. Also, the change in elevation would be at least 10m requiring a ramp 200m long at a 4% grade, or over 300m long at a 3% grade. This would be a hugs undertaking. Don’t forget also that there are a lot of utilities in the way that would have to be shifted to make this possible.
Someone at TTC needs to think outside the box on this. A surface detour would likely not work, but they are going to have to have some brilliant idea …
Steve: Your idea is so far outside of the box as to invite nothing but wild laughter. “Not likely work” is one of the bolder understatements I have read here in years.
I wonder if there’s any way they can wait until 2020 and build detour tunnels into the Eglinton line at both Eglinton and Eglinton West, and run 50% of the Spadina trains up along a non-stop diversion from Eglinton West to Eglinton and then up Yonge … wouldn’t need any platforms. Probably cost $1-billion or so, and delay the Eglinton opening … might be cheaper to tunnel a new Yonge line I guess …
Steve: There are small matters of curves to join the lines. You have gone totally off the rails here.
I guess the question is how much is the City and TTC willing to pay to deal with this … as simply closing the line and building a temporary 250-bus garage is likely the cheapest option … unless someone can think of a way of rebuilding the track bed in-situ.
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That’s the whole point of an outside-the-box discussion. You toss out the crazy ideas you know can’t work … because it makes someone else think of something that might work … or how your crazy idea might itself work if you do X.
If there had been more brainstorming by whoever had designed the Eglinton line in the first place, they wouldnt’ have cocked up the Leslie station design so badly, which surely could have been designed several ways, to avoid any need for car lanes to have to cross the tracks between Don Mills Road and Laird.
Steve: I agree that Leslie Station’s design was badly handled, but your desire to think “outside the box” rests more on refusing to accept that the schemes you put forward are untenable. They just get wilder and wilder. “Out of the box” is one of those phrases I tend to be very suspicious of because it usually means “I am going to call your thinking stultified”. End of discussion.
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This may sound like a totally off the wall scheme but listen to all of it before you freak out.
Problem:
1. Yonge subway has to be shut down in 2016 for an extended period of time, unspecified but probably 4 to 8 weeks.
2. Up to 250 buses and 400 operators would be needed to provide, or try to provide, shuttle service between Eglinton and Davisville. The TTC does not have either of these.
3. There is no room on Yonge Street for these buses to operate.
Hopefully the TTC will investigate all possible ways to do some of the work, such as clean out sub bed, under service but there will still be a need for a complete shut down.
Now for off the wall thought. By 2016 there should be a substantial number of CLRVs surplus. Keep them, re-install the couplers and set the doors up so that they are all controlled by the lead car. Remove the curb lane of asphalt from north bound Yonge, east bound Eglinton, south bound Mt. Pleasant and west bound St. Clair.
Lay track on some thin, top to bottom, tie perhaps a metal plate on the concrete sub layer, install the track and pave with asphalt. This would probably give thunder rail a good name. It would probably be higher than the surrounding road surface but this would help to keep cars off it. Curves would probably need to swing out from the curb. A connection would be made at the track on the north side of St. Clair in front of the subway station to get cars in and out of service.
No cars would go into St. Clair Station. Service would be run with 3 or 4 car mu trains with one operator. Parking would be banned on the affected streets for the duration. Except for St. Clair which would probably need to be closed west bound it should be possible to keep 4 lanes of traffic open. Certain other provisions would need to be made.
1. Street cars would operate in their own right of way and have absolute priority at all intersections. No right turns would be allowed except with a green light.
2. Paid duty officers or preferably regular duty police should be at every intersections.
3. Street cars would stop only at Davisville Eglinton and Mt. Pleasant. Perhaps the Glencairn bus should re routed to St. Clair West Station. I know south bound stop at Davisville is on Mt. Pleasant.
4. Don’t worry about fares load them up and send them out.
5. Potential problems would be the bridges over the belt line on Mt. Pleasant and on St. Clair east of Yonge but there should be some way of temporarily re-enforcing them.
Sure there is a lot of temporary construction involved but it requires a lot fewer vehicles and operators and will not completely screw up Yonge Street. The TTC has built shoe flies for street car tracks before, though not on this scale.
In summing up the advantages are:
1. By 2016 there should be a substantial number of CLRVs surplus, if not wait until 2017. There will never be 250 surplus buses available.
2. It requires a lot fewer operators, probably between 50 and 75.
3. It will leave Yonge St Eglinton and Mt. Pleasant with virtually the same number of traffic lanes.
4. Only right hand turns are made by Street Cars and they will load at the curb.
5. It should not impact other surface operations. Think what would happen if you had to steal 250 buses and 400 operators.
6. Hopefully the cars could run out of Hillcrest for the short period needed.
So nfitz this is my example of “thinking outside of the box” with out drifting off to never never land. It is expensive and will require a lot of pre and post construction but it can be done in the time span required and will require the moving of any office buildings at either Eglinton or St. Clair. Is it practical? I honestly don’t know but it measures up well against buses or laying subway track on Yonge street. So, as Jonathon Swift would say: “A modest Proposal”.
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Robert Wightman’s comment made me think again about the “250 buses / 400 operators” assertion. What does that number of buses represent?
Let’s assume that a shuttle bus makes two round trips per hour (working out to about 8 km/h, marginally better than a brisk walking speed). That’s a frequency of 500 buses per hour. If we assume an average loading of 60 passengers per bus, voila: a conveniently familiar capacity of 30,000 passengers per hour per direction.
Is it operationally feasible (assuming that one could round up enough buses to create a temporary fleet larger than Hamilton’s or London’s… equivalent to creating an entirely new garage / division)? That frequency would lead to an average headway of 7.2 seconds per bus! Let’s say on average it takes about 60 seconds to unload (or load) a full bus, including time to pull into and out of the stop. You would need to have facilities for 8 buses to unload simultaneously, and for 8 buses to load simultaneously, at both St. Clair and at Eglinton. Or, let’s look at it another way. 250 buses parked nose to tail would take up more than 3 km, compared to only 4 km round trip distance — the shuttle route would essentially be a continuous slow-moving queue of shuttles.
I see two possibilities. The first is that someone simply asked “how many buses would you need to replace the capacity of the Yonge subway?” and someone else gave a number.
Less cynically, maybe there actually was some detailed planning that set out not just a Yonge shuttle using, say, 60 buses (two trips per hour per vehicle; 3 buses per minute), with the remainder assigned to other routes to carry riders from east of Yonge either west to the Spadina subway or south to Danforth…
An interesting if moot consideration: had Transit City been implemented as per the original plan and depending on scheduling, a short-term Yonge shutdown might have been easier to mitigate both in terms of having alternate higher-capacity routes available and in terms of having a fleet of buses recently made surplus.
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Does this mean that this section will not use ATC but everywhere else it would?
Steve: The resignalling program is separate from the track repairs. When they switch over to ATO, it should be on as much of the line as possible (with the exception, depending on work status, of the new section north from Wilson to Vaughan), without a gap at Davisville.
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