A Grand Plan

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Subway Art: Watercolours by Sigmund Augustus Serafin

Many years ago, the TTC was cleaning house at 1900 Yonge and a lot of old stuff was heading to the garbage can.  The combined efforts of various fans saved some material that would otherwise have been lost thanks to Ted Wickson, now retired from the TTC, who alerted people to what was happening.

I took custody of eight watercolours of proposed station designs for the University and Bloor-Danforth subway lines painted in 1957 and 1958 by Serafin.  Recently, for the Bloor subway’s 40th birthday, I brought them out of storage and was amazed at their excellent condition.

James Bow’s site at Transit Toronto has many galleries, and it seemed a more appropriate location to display the paintings than here.  If you want to see them, follow this link to Transit Toronto.

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Why Was The Bloor Subway So Successful?

Regular readers will know that my opinion of the Sheppard and York U subways is less than complimentary.  Recently, I received a note comparing the length of the Danforth subway to the Sheppard line and asking whether Sheppard, were it the same length, would be any more successful.

The reply will come in two installments.  The first one, linked below, takes us up to 1966 when the original Bloor-Danforth line opened and the Danforth leg (only to Woodbine) was roughly the same length as the Sheppard subway.  The BD line carried far more people from day one than the Sheppard line does now or the York U line is projected to carry in 2021.  Moreover, the BD line grew very substantially from its extensions to Warden and Islington a few years after the line opened.

In the first installment I also review the level of transit service that operated in the Bloor-Danforth corridor before the subway opened.  There is no surface route in Toronto today that compares with the Bloor-Danforth streetcar service of 42 2-car trains per hour.

Bloor Danforth Success Story

In the second installment, I will look at the riding growth due to the extensions as well as the original projections for the Sheppard line.  That version will come within a week.

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Build Subways! Cut Service! The Wisdom of Commissioner Li Preti

A few nights ago, Councillor Peter Li Preti, also a transit Commissioner, was on Adam Vaughan’s show on CP24 debating the merits of the York University subway with Gord Perks from the Toronto Environmental Alliance.

The line will go right through the middle of Councillor Li Preti’s ward, and he has stalwartly defended this project at the TTC.  The question came up, how do we pay for this?

Well, the TTC has a bunch of bloated, poor-performing routes, says the transit Commissioner, we’ll just have to cut service on them.  Yes, that’s right, cut service to pay for Peter’s subway.

Let’s take him at his word and see what would happen. Continue reading →

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What To Do With Spadina

Due to the volume of questions and comments about the Spadina issue along with the Toronto Star article about the extension, I am posting this to summarize what I would do if I were Transit Czar. 

Please remember that I am not perfect and that there are alternative ways of looking at this problem.  Here is mine:

  • Address the demand for service between York Region and downtown Toronto with substantially improved service on GO Rail on the Richmond Hill and Barrie lines.  This looks after the long-haul trips into downtown, makes GO Rail an attractive realistic alternative to the subway, and removes peak demand from both the Spadina and Yonge subway corridors.
  • Build a T-shaped LRT network consisting of an east-west spine (in effect, the mid-range plan for the Viva LRT) and a north-south line connecting that to Downsview Station via York University.  Build as much of it on the surface as possible. 
  • Substantially improve bus services especially those feeding York University along Finch and Steeles.

We need a detailed study of these options so that we will know comparative capital and operating costs and the scope of the affected service area.  One big point about this proposal is that it is aimed at providing a lot of good quality service to southern York Region and to York University rather than blowing every nickel we have on a subway line that won’t be open for nearly a decade.

Postscript (updated)

The original postscript has been moved into the compendium reply on matters re Spadina.

One addition:  I had originally omitted from my scheme any discussion about east-west LRT services within Toronto itself.  A Finch West line would do quite nicely, and I will delve into this in a separate post about the future of LRT in Toronto.

For greater clarity:  LRT is not that orphan technology in Scarborough but true LRT such as runs in many other cities in North America and worldwide.  Modern, low-floor streetcars on, for the most part, reserved lanes or private right-of way.

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Who Will Ride the York University Subway?

The subway juggernaut continues on its way with plans for an extension of the Spadina line northwest to York University. The Environmental Assessment completed recently, and all of the documents are available here. The discussion below is based on information contained in Appendix M regarding travel demand.

I say juggernaut, but really Toronto’s relationship to subway plans is more like a drug addict. We can’t afford them, the lines we want to built don’t do very much for the system overall, but we always want just one more, and we are willing to steal money from any other worthwhile transit project to pay for it.

For decades, planners have told us that subways need high density, concentrated development, but that’s not what we built. Now we have a city and region that need a web of transit services, not a few lines here and there. What’s the current focus? Subways.

Well, let’s have a look at the York University subway extension and see who will use it according to the TTC’s own projections. Continue reading →