Updated January 9:  The 2009 Subway Fleet Plan has been scanned and linked from this post.

Toronto’s Executive Committee voted on Monday to approve submission of the EA for the Richmond Hill extension to Queen’s Park, but added a number of riders on their support for the line.  This parallels actions taken at the last TTC meeting to strengthen the pre-requisites for City participation in this project.  The conditions include:

• Full funding for construction and operation of the extension beyond Steeles Avenue at no cost to Toronto.
• Full funding for any cost of an additional subway yard.
• Completion of the Automatic Train Control system on the YUS line, including the Vaughan extension.
• Any measures to relieve capacity problems at Bloor-Yonge would be funded as part of this project.

City and TTC staff have been requested to report directly to the January 27 Council meeting on various potential ancilliary costs including:

• Bloor-Yonge station expansion
• Fleet expansion and subway yard costs
• Second entrances to other downtown stations
• Need for an eastern Downtown Relief Line
• Need for extending the Sheppard line west to Downsview
• Sequencing of these options relative to the Richmond Hill line’s construction

Notable by its absence from this list is any reference to GO Transit’s Richmond Hill service.  This must be included because the level of GO service has a big impact on the modelled ridership for any future TTC network.

Karl Junkin, who comments here regularly, presented a deputation on this item which is supposed to be linked from the City’s site.  However, that link is currently not working.

Karl Junkin Yonge Analysis

Karl covers a lot of the ground that was in my own report on TTC fleet planning and other posts about the Richmond Hill extension.   Staff have been directed to meet with Karl and provide comments on his concerns in a report to Council.

Much of this turns on hte question of how many people will actually be riding the subway in 2017 when the Richmond Hill extension is planned to open.  TTC staff have, to their considerable discredit, played fast and loose with teh relevant data depending on the argument of the moment.

When it suits their purpose to conjure up a need for vastly more trains on the line and increased capacity at Bloor-Yonge, then the estimates can be stratospheric.  When the goal is to pretend that the Richmond Hill extension can be accommodated with no increase in service, then — Presto! Chango! — more riders but no more service.  The word “bamboozle” comes to mind here, although somewhat less Parliamentary language might be more appropriate.

Let’s review the estimates we have seen recently. Continue reading →

Posts in this thread have examined the general design proposed for the Richmond Hill subway and the many demand estimates for this line.  Now I will turn to the impact of this line on the larger network.

As many have pointed out in comments to the previous items, the Spadina/VCC extension was supposed to offload the Yonge subway.  We now know, according to the TTC’s estimates, that the effect will be a reduction of less than 10% of the existing demand southbound at the peak point, Wellesley Station.  Meanwhile, the availability of a competing subway line in the established Yonge Street corridor will attract many more riders.

The TTC manages a rabbit-in-the-hat trick by claiming that demand relative to capacity on the subway in 2017 will be the same as it is today thanks to Spadina diversion and more commodious trains.  That’s a very big, very fat rabbit, and I suspect it’s more of a canard.

Development will continue in York Region, and if anything the availability of frequent transit service, both on GO and on the TTC, will offset any effect that long-term increases in energy costs and commuting might have on travel demand and the decision to live far out of the core area.  Demand will grow on the subway both from the 905 and from within the 416. Continue reading →

In the first part of this series, I reviewed the general layout of the Richmond Hill subway extension.  Now I will turn to the question of demand on the new and existing portions of the Yonge line.

Information on current and projected demands is very hard to nail down.  Transit agencies have a bad habit of fiddling the demand models to produce the results they want depending on available funding, political imperatives and the phases of the moon.  Small changes in the assumptions in any model can produce huge swings in the outcome.

Probably the single most flagrant problem with Metrolinx is that the demand model is proprietary to a consultant, IBI, and is not available for general “what if” use.  At the very time we are making decisions about network structures and spending priorities, we are told (by Metrolinx) that budget constraints limit the number of model runs.  Detailed parameters such as the capacity and speed of modelled lines are hard to come by.

In this vacuum, any plausible scheme for transit gains political traction even though it may rest on dubious planning foundations.  I say this not to knock the Richmond Hill proposal itself, but to urge caution in looking at the numbers particularly where the interaction between several alternative lines is concerned.

Projections for riding on both the Richmond Hill extension and the rest of the rapid transit network appear in various documents.  One of them even changed between the point where it was presented at a public TTC meeting and its publication on the TTC’s website. Continue reading →

The proposed subway to Richmond Hill has an odd history as transit projects in the GTA go.  Normally, we are lucky to see anyone pay attention to any scheme for a decade or more, but this subway has gone from a gleam in local organizers’ eyes (and a website) to a top priority transit project with amazing speed.

Along the way, the whole idea of “alternatives analysis”, that pesky part of an “Environment Assessment” that is only a memory, is completely absent.  It’s a subway or nothing.  That’s unfortunate, to say the least, because the whole idea of Metrolinx was to plan on a regional basis, to see how everything fits together and where money would be best spent to improve a transportation network.

The Richmond Hill subway snuck through into the new, fast-track transit project assessment process before Metrolinx had even approved the final version of the Regional Plan.  Somebody wants a subway really, really badly.

As I have said in a comment thread elsewhere, I am not convinced that this line is a good idea especially when there are alternative ways to get people into central Toronto from the same catchment area as the subway extension.  York Region itself has (had?) plans for an LRT network as an end state for VIVA, although I have never taken them particularly seriously.  This may change once there is some real LRT running within Toronto, but as long as it’s an unknown quantity (or worse, something whose “best” example is on St. Clair West), nobody is going to take the mode seriously.

An argument can be made for an extension to Steeles as a way to relieve the bus congestion feeding into Finch Station, but there is some point where a subway has to end.  We cannot keep building a subway north on Yonge Street until we find ourselves in Lake Simcoe.  The demand simply isn’t there, and at some point the idea of a one-seat ride becomes laughable.  Indeed, even going to Richmond Hill, many travellers will depend on bus feeders or commuter parking to access the subway, and the quality of their trip will depend a lot on the amount of local transit or the scarcity of parking.  This problem is already familiar to GO Transit riders.

GO Transit, for their part, plans to upgrade service on their Richmond Hill line to 15 minutes peak, 30 minutes off peak.  This is not the same as frequent subway service, and it will only take people to Union Station, but this is an important part of the mix of services in the corridor.

All the same, any review of the proposal needs to assume that it will be built and that whatever impact this has on the network will have to be addressed.  If we are going down this path, we need to understand the consequences.

In the sections to follow, I will review the TTC report and presentation from December 17.  Parts of York Region’s original EA for this area make interesting reading, especially the ridership forecasts. Continue reading →

Update 2:  The presentation from the Commission meeting is now online.  (4MB PDF)

I will write up comments on this project on the weekend.

Update 1:  Here is the text of the motion made by the Commission including the various caveats and requests for additional information.

Original Post:

The TTC staff report on the Richmond Hill subway is available online.  (Warning 15M PDF)

Today, the Commission voted to endorse this report in principle with futher discussion and deputations to follow at the January meeting.  The Commission also reaffirmed that Transit City was its first priority for system expansion, and sought a number of additional reports to clarify the impact of the subway extension on the existing network.

I do not have time now (Wednesday evening) to write this up in full, but will do so over the next few days.  Some material was presented at the meeting which is not in the linked file.

Of particular concern to the Commission is the haste with which this project is rolling forward based on an assessment launched by York Region that had very little consideration for how the line would fit in the overall scheme of the network.  I might be forgiven for thinking, only a month ago, that we had turned away from “my line first” planning to a network view thanks to the Metrolinx Regional Transportation Plan.

An argument can be made for extending the subway, but the true cost and impact are lowballed.  Yes, the staff report raises many caveats about service and capacity impacts, but there is no real alternatives analysis, no sense that anyone has looked seriously at larger issues.  I will turn to this when I discuss the report in detail.