The City of Toronto Planning Department will hold four public meetings regarding their Regional Relief study now in progress.
The meetings will be held between 7:00 and 9:00 pm:
- Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at Calvary Church, 746 Pape Avenue (Pape Station)
- Thursday, March 5, 2015 at Riverdale Collegiate, 1094 Gerrard Street East at Jones (506 Carlton car of 83 Jones bus)
- Monday, March 9, 2015 at St. Lawrence Hall, 157 King Street East at Jarvis (504 King car)
- Thursday, March 12, 2015 at Christ Church Deer Park, 1570 Yonge Street (St. Clair Station)
The focus of the meetings will be station locations and evaluation criteria.
Steve Munro 
That would be useful if you allowed right hand turns but I believe that they are forbidden at Yonge and Dundas; besides it would be almost impossible to keep pedestrians from crossing at scramble intersections to allow for right hand turns on the green traffic phase of the cycle. If these scrambles are not going to be implemented properly, then don’t do them, especially at intersections with a short cycle time. They are slowing down the 505, not speeding it up.
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Don’t forget the time for the signals to clear and reset so another line can be selected. It may improve with the new signaling system but it is certainly not immediate with the current system. This is the reason why I think that the replacement of the ladder tracks was an expensive mistake. They are complex to operate and maintain and they can tie up the entire throat for a couple of minutes every time they are used to cross more than a couple of tracks.
The entire throat and station use should have been re-thought and optimized to eliminate these tracks to allow for faster through put of trains. On of the early electrification studies pointed out that the narrow platforms at Union would be a major bottle neck to more service as well as being a potential safety issue.
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If that’s the case, why not just abandon the concept of ST altogether and just build an north-south LRT on Kennedy or Midland?
The whole issue of mixed operations is when something goes wrong. Simple track dedication reduces the risk, but not eliminate it. Time separation works for the most part, but as Steve pointed out, what happens when there is an emergency detour by CN/CP?
I think we can summarize the issue then as saying ST is untenable even in the most cutback options. There isn’t space as Union for ST trains, there isn’t DRL capacity for ST passengers at Danforth, and there isn’t space for a GO/ST transfer station at Scarborough. That just leaves the north-south portion of the Uxbridge subdivision.
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This is something I think would extremely expensive thing to address. As I said earlier, an alternate route for CN emergency traffic would need to be found. However, I think this also adds tremendously to cost.
Steve: There is no alternate route. That’s the problem.
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I think from the perspective of relieving congestion in the way promised without destroying something else, I would agree.
Well I am not sure this is exactly the right spot — but well.
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This is why it would be so expensive!! I suspect it would require something that would be more expensive than building a subway. You would need to run a new set a tracks somewhere, and that would painful.
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Wow, it is sure frustrating that we all foresee Smart Track being a huge disappointment, but it seems likely to be built, or to delay the construction of more useful lines.
WRT to a DRL station at Wellington, how deep would it have to go to go under the Path System?
Steve: Path is not very deep. Some utilities are further down, I understand. Don’t forget that the DRL tunnel has to go under the existing subway, and so it will be a fair distance down.
Isn’t the TTC considering extending the North South platform north, so the subway and LRT platforms formed a cross, not a “T”? Would you leave the combined Wellington/King station as an inverted “T”? Or would it make be worthwhile to bump the Wellington tunnel north so it formed a cross, under King’s North-South platforms?
Steve: This comment does not make sense. A “Wellington tunnel” necessarily is under the street and cannot be shifted. Many buildings are in the way.
Maybe the tunnel would have to go a couple of stories deep to go under the buildings near King Station?
Steve: “A couple of stories” will only get you into the parking garages. There is still the foundation of buildings to deal with. If the DRL does not stay under roadways, the complexity of building it will make the project infeasible. We are not talking about going under a row of houses.
Some cities have very deep stations, Washington and Moscow have deep stations, in part, to provide fallout shelters deep enough to survive a nuclear attack. I saw a documentary on the construction of London’s Jubilee Line. IIRC it said its station were going to have to be about five or six stories deep. IIRC this was because London’s underground landscape was poorly documented, and deep tunnels were the only way to avoid running into something undocumented.
How inconvenient are really deep stations to those who run a subway system?
Steve: Very deep tunnels would involve building through bedrock, and stations would become much more expensive thanks to their depth. Long vertical connections make access between DRL and YUS stations longer, along with access times. It is odd that you want to move stations horizontally closer together, but vertically further apart, and seem to be going out of your way to make the DRL unbuildable.
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Steve, my question at this point would be, is the city doing exactly this – making the DRL unbuildable – have they done anything to secure a viable secure build path for a DRL.
Steve I would note that many subway stations elsewhere – Montreal as I recall- are built through bedrock (although there it is generally much closer to surface), and there it offers the advantage of having limited the depth of foundations built. Unfortunately in Toronto, the darned bedrock is so far down, that if you are building through it you are looking at being a depth that is like that of Montreal’s deepest stations – which as I recall is several stories below ground (and a pain in the ass) who wants to ride an escalator up 6 or 7 stories just to get to PATH.
Steve: Again you can thank the years of anti-DRL activity by the TTC. If they had really wanted this line, they would have pressed for an alignment choice and route protection years ago. Instead, they spent their time telling us we didn’t need this route. Shameful.
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While this is somewhat true in that there are many ghost tunnels and stations under London, it’s very misleading. Between the first tunnel under the River Thames and the first of the Deep Tube line was only 40 years, a small enough time that one generation of geologists/engineers could remember most major endeavours. The driving factor for the depth of the Deep Tube lines was geological. In the River Thames Valley, there is a layer of soft alluvial deposits for the first 6.5m or so, followed by a much more stable London clay layer. Combined with the height of adjacent embankments this gave a depth between 15m and 20m for the first tunnels, which then set the standard for future developments in the 20th century.
I do! While it’s 2-4 minutes to get up/down, it does make for some interesting photography and serial ads. I prefer the British ones to Washington, especially the wooden escalator under the River Tyne (26m rise). But for regular commuters, it adds a significant delay to their transit time, and I can only imagine the consequences when they are down for maintenance or repair.
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WRT Bedrock, and the Wellington tunnel — okay, I am completely convinced, thanks for your helpful answers. I wasn’t trying to suggest plans that would make the DRL unbuildable, I honestly didn’t understand the points you made in your reply, until you made them. Thanks again for those.
As to the depth of bedrock — while there may be areas in Toronto where bedrock is deep, buried under dozens of metres of glacial till, I know, for a certain fact, bedrock is shallow in other regions. I took several series of photos of the constructions of new highrises in the old downtown, within the original townsite of York, Upper Canada. The excavation for the 14 storey building on the NW corner of Parliament and King? My photos show bedrock was found about 5 or 6 metres down — the same crumbly shale one can find in other places in this part of Ontario.
The excavation on the SE corner of Sherbourne and King? Bedrock is 9-12 metres deep.
Bedrock at the Parliament site might be particularly shallow as it is near the channel of the old Taddle Creek. Anhow, if as tunnel boring machines under Wellington proceed east they pass this region of shallow bedrock, I think they will have to tunnel through this shale.
I am going to start to make a point of trying to take photos of other downtown excavations, to gauge the depth of bedrock.
I did make several stops to record the construction at 1 The Esplanada, the SE corner of Yonge and The Esplanade. I’ll dig them up and see if I can determine how deep the bedrock is at Yonge.
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As promised, here is a picture of the excavation at 1 The Esplanade, and I think it shows bedrock peeking out about 10-12 metres below grade.
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I changed my mind about the depth of bedrock at Yonge and The Explanade. The wall at the far end of this image is Yonge Street. The dark band below the concrete? I believe it is wet shale, which I estimate to be about 5-6 meters down. The 100 metre walk from The Espalanade to Wellington is at a shallow angle, so bedrock might be a depth of something like 7 or 8 metres, at Wellington. Isn’t this shallow enough that any tunnel under Wellington, that passes under the Yonge subway, will have to be tunneled through rock, not glacial till?
Don’t building piles only go down as far as solid bedrock? In that case buildings whose lowest basement stories are carved into bedrock shouldn’t require piles, should they?
I think this is shallow enough that tunnels won’t be butting into building piles, as building piles only go down as far.
Steve: I am going to leave this for the geologists reading this site to comment on.
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The Bangsar LRT station just outside the city centre of Kuala Lumpur. It uses the same trains as the Vancouver Millennium line.
The Malayan Railway (KTM) tracks are behind the fence to the left of the picture.
Cheers, Moaz
Steve: As with other examples, note the width of the street and the space occupied by the station and the vertical access elements.
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With all this talk of avoiding building piles, I take it the tunnel will not be built below the roadway. (Wellington or other) Or do these buildings extend under the road?
Steve: You have it backwards. The building piles are off-street and so the tunnel would go under the road.
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Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but Toronto is more shaped by Lake Iroquois than the Laurentide Glaciers during the last ice age. Basically, everything south of North Toronto subdivision was under water. Resultingly, we have high levels of alluvium, not glacial till. If you look at old flow patterns, you’ll get a feel for the deep rockbed areas. Furthermore, everything south of Front St. is basically fill. Specifically from bore hole data from the river rehab a few years ago, near the Don River and the center of the USRC, rockbed is 25m below grade, while 25m to the north it’s only 15m down. I’ll dig around (pardon the pun) to see what data I have further west.
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@Matthew Phillips here is a 1932 map of the surface structure of Toronto and parts of 905.
The pinkish parts were underwater during the Lake Iroquois period. Downtown is said to be “varved clay” — whatever that is. Only the bottom there is a cross section of the waterfront, from the Humber River to Highland Creek. If I am reading it correctly it shows bedrock close to the water level along the 1932 coast, or whatever cross section that line represents. Yes, Below Front is landfill. But excavations seem to indicate that the landfill isn’t far from bedrock.
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That map is so huge, 9,199 × 7,884 pixels. I need to open it in an external image editor, I can’t open it in firefox.
Steve: I was able to open it in Firefox.
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Yes, that map is consistant with what I was attempting to say. I think in summary, we can say that Toronto’s geology is highly varied and any shallow tunnels will face uncertainty or adverse conditions.
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I could not open it in Firefox until I rebooted the system. If you computer has been running to long then you may not have enough free memory to open. Reboot and it should work.
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