Ray Kennedy sent in a link to an article in the New York Post about guerilla artists redecorating a subway car.
Steve: Did you see this? What a great idea. I especially liked the response of NYC Transit’s Paul Fleuranges, very calm and reasoned. Let’s hope they can work something out with the group.
Bob Brent left a very long comment, and I’m putting it in a post of its own. Please note that I do not intend to do this regularly, and don’t want to encourage people to try to turn this site into their own blog. However, after some of the [expletive deleted] comments I have received here about my pro-LRT orientation, it’s nice to get some fan mail.
[The bad link in the first paragraph has been corrected. Note that it goes to a Power Point file, not a PDF.]
In the ongoing discussion about whether the York U / VCC line should be built as a subway, many comments flowed back and forth here and on other blogs suggesting that I (and LRT advocates in general) are a naive bunch.
I was part way through responding to a comment from John Sutka (see below) and decided that this needed its own thread. Continue reading
For three years, we have pretended that the Spadina Subway extension was a worthwhile project. We hoped that lobbyists from York University and their pals at Queen’s Park would look kindly on poor little Toronto. Maybe they would give us more powers in a City of Toronto Act. Maybe they would actually start paying for social services that are really a provincial responsibility. Maybe they would give us better, ongoing funding for transit.
Three years of tugging our forelocks and saying “please, sir, we want some more” were a total waste of time. All of the transit spending and social services budget relief go to the 905 and Toronto gets nothing.
Toronto has new taxing powers, and it should use them. Build the city with the “revenue tools” we have and stop being so dependent on other governments.
We have been duped into an unworkable formula of 1/3 shares by the federal, provincial and municipal governments. This makes every project, every funding request, hostage to federal and provincial whims most of which avoid spending on Toronto. Yes, it’s outrageous that we get less transit funding than cities in any other major country, but we should stop holding our breath for this to change.
Now Toronto needs to make its spending priorities fit a Toronto agenda, not one for Queen’s Park.
The Spadina Subway extension exists for two reasons:
Any realistic examination of “value for money” would have killed this line, and especially the extension into Vaughan, long ago. Any proper examination of alternatives would have examined an extensive network of LRT, busways and commuter rail to serve this sector. That debate hides in back corridors because nobody in power wants to challenge the inevitability of a subway to York University and beyond, nobody wants to support a fair analysis of alternatives.
Toronto should withdraw support for the Spadina Subway immediately.
The Ontario budget, announced earlier today, contains nothing new to support transit systems around Toronto. Basically, Queen’s Park is piggy backing on the projects already underway, the same grab-bag of schemes funded by the federal announcement last week.
There is a potload of money under the general heading of “infrastructure”, but no indication of how much, if any, is available for proposals such as Transit City or ongoing funding of transit operations.
Queen’s Park listened to the call to upload some social spending, but only for the 905. Currently, the 905 municipalities pay part of the cost of social programs in the 416. This cost will be taken over by the province. However, none of the costs now borne by the City of Toronto will be assumed, and Toronto is left in just as much of a budgetary mess as they were before this budget.
Clearly, Ontario’s Liberals are going after the same block of 905 voters as the Ottawa Tories on the assumption that we Torontonians will vote Liberal/NDP even if Queen’s Park bleeds the city dry.
As regular readers here will know, I have had a running correspondence with several people about the fine details of engineering various parts of the Transit City proposal. Enough already. The issue is that this is a proposal for a network to get people talking about what transit can do on a large scale.
Yes, there are details to be worked out for various sections, but it’s not my job to run a one-man mini-EA for each route. People get paid a lot of money to do that and I’m sure Transit City will keep them in small change for years.
I have a few comments still in the hopper about alternate routes and technologies, and these will be answered in due course. However, I will henceforth delete without mercy [you have to imagine mad cackling laughter here] comments asking me about details of engineering various stations and bridges, among other things. I think that’s been done to death, other readers are probably getting bored, and I have better things to do with my time.
To all of you who have commented, many thanks even if I don’t agree with you. At least there is a conversation going on here.
Let’s not turn Transit City into an exercise in Toronto negativism where people spend their time finding all the things that might be wrong with a proposal and concentrate instead on how we can build a better transit system.
After spending the whole day at City Hall and the evening writing about Transit City and responding to many, many comments, a few personal words.
Back in 1972, the Streetcars for Toronto Committee fought to preserve Toronto’s streetcar system and with it, the basis for an expansion of low-cost rapid transit into suburbs that were still farmland. I have walked along Finch Avenue East when it was a dirt road with sheep grazing on one side and apples ripening on the trees on the other.
We almost got the start of that network with the Scarborough LRT line, but Queen’s Park had a better idea and GO Urban was born. That boondoggle led eventually to the RT and in the process convinced everyone that low-cost transit was impossible and subways were the answer.
Only one problem: we couldn’t afford them, and that’s over two decades ago. Endless wrangles on where to build one subway route wasted huge amounts of time and reinforced the idea that transit was not going to serve the suburbs. What has become the gridlocked 905 follows directly from the folly, from the abdication by planners and politicians to make a good, working transit system in the outer 416 as a model for what could grow into the 905.
Megamayor Mel’s contribution was “downtown North York”, an oxymoron if ever there was one, and the Sheppard Subway. I remember Mel saying “real cities don’t use streetcars”. This is the same person who called in the army to shovel snow, and who sold out his opposition to the Harris amalgamation plan in return for a guaranteed shot at the Mayor’s job.
I remember the long dry years when the contempt for public input and transit advocacy was palpable. No point in wasting my time on carefully researched deputations.
Today was an event I’ve been waiting for although I never really expected to see it. This is an LRT plan on a scale and with the political support we should have had 30 years ago.
And so my deep thanks to many who have supported my transit advocacy over the years, to the politicians and press who have listened to my incessant rants about LRT and transit in general, to the professional staff at the City and TTC who against the odds have kept up a belief in transit, and to the growing and lively activist community who bring new hope that people actually care about what happens to our city.
This is part of a series covering various aspects of the Transit City announcement of March 16. In previous posts I have looked at various aspects of the network both as presented and as in might evolve and improve. Now let’s look at how this stacks up against other transit proposals for funding.
The total cost of all seven lines is $6.1-billion. Assuming that this is spend over a 15-year construction period, that’s about $400-million per year. The value includes a fleet of 240 vehicles at a presumed cost of $5-million each. These would be much larger than present-day streetcars and have a capacity close to that of a subway car. Examples of cars in other systems can be seen both on the Transit City site and on many other transit activists’ and ethusiasts’ pages. I’m not going to get into cataloguing the options here.
Of these lines, by far the most ambitious is the Eglinton line which consumes over 1/3 of the total program cost. This line has the highest cost/km ($73-million) due to its tunnel section for about 10km across the central part of the city. This line can be built in stages with a good chunk of the underground part coming last.
A major purpose in getting out the Transit City proposal was to allow the City, the media, the citizenry and the politicians at many levels of government to have something concrete to talk about. We all know that cities, especially Toronto, want more money for transit. Everyone knows what a subway is, but few know about LRT. Discussions about the future of transit inevitably bog down in a hopeless circle of “I only want a subway” and “We can’t afford subways”. Being a transit advocate in that environment is challenging. Continue reading
The southern part of Transit City overlaps the existing streetcar system and some of the studies already underway. Transit City itself includes:
Other related schemes include:
The Waterfront West line has, until now, been described as ending in southeastern Etobicoke, currently planned for a new loop at Park Lawn and Lake Shore. I am pleased to see that the Transit City proposal recognizes the potential of all of southern Etobicoke and extends the LRT plan all the way to Highway 27. For years, it seemed like the Park Lawn terminus was an inevitable first step in replacing the streetcar service to Long Branch with buses and further isolation of the area from the rest of the city. Continue reading
This post continues a series of articles about the Transit City announcement on Friday, March 16. I have subdivided the discussion to keep these posts to a reasonable size and to focus discussion on each part of the network.
The North-Central section of Transit City comprises:
These are the two largest and most expensive parts of the proposed network, and they will likely take the longest time to fund and build. Both of them require some underground construction, especially on Eglinton, and this will lead to the inevitable demand to “just build a subway”. That urge can and should be resisted. Continue reading
Steve Munro 