A Grand Plan

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Transit City (3) The West Network

This is one of a series of articles about the Transit City plans announced on Friday, March 16.  I have subdivided the subject to keep the posts to a reasonable size and so that the discussion comments can be groups to a handful of closely related lines.

The western portion of Transit City consists of:

  • A Finch West LRT line running from Finch Station via Finch Avenue to Highway 27
  • A Jane LRT line running from Steeles West Station west to Jane and south to the Bloor Subway
  • The western portion of the Eglinton LRT from the environs of Pearson Airport eastward

Other studies underway include:

  • Extension of the St. Clair streetcar line west to Jane
  • The Blue 22 express service in the Weston corridor from downtown to the airport

All of the LRT lines would be at grade except for Eglinton east of Keele and probably the south end of the Jane line.  More about that later. Continue reading →

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Transit City (2) The East Network

Transit City is such a big announcement that boiling it down into reasonably-sized posts is a challenge.  Rather than writing one article about the routes overall, another on technical bits and pieces, and yet another on the possible future, I’m going to treat major portions of the network as one post.  My hope is to keep related discussions about individual lines in the same place.

The eastern portion of Transit City is made up of:

  • A Sheppard East LRT from Don Mills Station to Morningside.
  • A Scarborough-Malvern LRT from Kennedy Station east via Eglinton and Kingston Road, and then north on Morningside beyond Sheppard into Malvern.
  • The eastern part of the Eglinton LRT from Don Mills east to Kennedy Station.

In addition, two other studies are now underway:

  • Extension of the Scarborough RT east and north from McCowan Station to meet the Sheppard LRT.
  • Kingston Road from Victoria Park to West Hill.

All of the LRT lines would be at grade with the exception of the Sheppard line’s interchange at Don Mills Station. Continue reading →

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Transit City

Today the TTC unveiled an astounding plan for a 120km network of LRT lines for the City of Toronto.  You can read all about it on the website created for the plan at this link.

Nothing like this has ever been announced in my 35 years of transit advocacy. Even the 1990 David Peterson government’s scheme for many subway lines doesn’t come close. That plan was mostly bits and pieces patched onto an existing network and recycling a lot of old plans.  Very little was actually built and most remnants of the program were killed off by Mike Harris.

Transit City is completely new.  Many of the lines in this plan have never been part of old transit studies, or have appeared as full-blown subway lines, not as LRT.

This is the plan I have been waiting 35 years for.  Ever since the Streetcars for Toronto Committee fought to keep our streetcar system as the nucleus of a much larger suburban network, I have waited to see a real LRT network promoted by the TTC and embraced by the City.

Already, some critics are wondering how this will get approved and funded.  We seem to have no trouble proposing subway lines we don’t need at bankrupting prices, and it’s time people knew that there is an alternative.  This will mean some hard political choices about the use of road space — it’s always easier to bury the transit system than to deal with design and traffic issues on the surface.  But now, after decades, we can have this debate with a real plan as a starting point.

I will comment in detail on the plan over the weekend when I have time for a longer post, and will incorporate the many comments received on this subject.

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Light Rail Comes to Toronto

Tomorrow, March 16, will be a landmark day for LRT in Toronto.  At 10:30 am, the TTC will unveil a plan for a large network of lines covering the city.

[I have deleted the links to preliminary articles on the Star and Globe websites as they are out of date.  You can read the latest coverage by going there yourself.  Amusingly, the usually well informed sources have different lists of what’s in the network to be announced Friday morning.  We shall see who’s right.]

This plan provides Toronto with the missing pieces of both the Ridership Growth Strategy and the Official Plan. 

The purpose of RGS was to show what could be done to improve the day-to-day TTC system quickly and without huge expense.  Some fare changes have already been implemented, some service improvements, and many more are to come.  Regular readers will know that I have complained that it took so long, but at least improvements are coming soon. Continue reading →

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Some Day My Parts Will Come

Long time readers here will remember my survey of escalator status, and will also have noticed that I didn’t publish anything on the subject for quite a while.  Why?  I was keeping track, but the problem of escalators being out of service seemed to have faded to a tolerable level.

Maybe it’s a statistical blip, maybe the bad old days are back, but last week, I hit something of a “home run” for out-of-service elevating devices. Continue reading →

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Who Will Ride?

Now that shovels are poised to start digging north into York Region, we need to take a hard look at just who this line is going to serve.  The information is this post is taken from:

The TTC’s own Environmental Assessment report of the line to Steeles at this link, and

The York Region Environmental Assessment report on its plans for Highway 7 and the Vaughan North-South Link at this link.

First we have the TTC study which assumes the line will end at Steeles Avenue.  In Appendix M, starting at page 13 in the PDF (page 22 of the source document), we have the travel forecasts, and the summary appears on page 15 (25).

Assuming that the land use assumptions are met, the extension is expected to carry about 17,000 AM peak passengers  southbound into Downsview Station.  No peak hour figure is given, but typically about half of the 3-hour peak load travels in the peak hour.  This translates to about 8,500 in the peak hour.

Northbound AM peak travel to York University is estimated at 5,500.   This gives us about 2,750 northbound riders to York University in the morning peak hour. Continue reading →

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Half a Loaf

According to this morning’s Toronto Star, Ottawa is about to announce its support for the Spadina Subway extension to Vaughan along with a bunch of other goodies for the 905.  Notable by their complete absence is any transit support for the 416 other than the subway extension.

I’m not going to debate the merits of that line again as everyone reading this site knows my position, but I have a very important question for Stephen Harper, Dalton McGuinty and David Miller:

Where’s the money coming from for the projects we really need to serve the whole city?

Are we facing the same situation we had with Mike Harris when he agreed to fund the Sheppard line, gave us a pot full of money, and then said, in effect, “bugger off, that’s all you’re getting”?  Will the Harper crowd think that this announcement is all they will ever have to do for the greater Toronto area?

As my readers know, I have always warned about the Spadina line crowding every other project out of the room for the next 8 years.  Will Ottawa and Queen’s Park say “we gave you what you asked for, don’t ask for more”, or the City say “we have over-extended our ability to write new debt, so that new bus you thought was coming next year is on hold”.

To all three levels of government:  Please prove me wrong.  Soon.

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Why Scarborough Will Never Have a Rapid Transit Network

This post has been updated by correcting a bad link to the TTC’s site, and by enabling comments. 

The TTC has finally delivered up a report in reply to my deputation last August on the question of why the RT should not be converted to LRT in the context of (a) a larger Scarborough LRT network and (b) the request from the Scarborough Caucus to extend the line into Malvern.  No big surprise.  The TTC really doesn’t want to convert the line.

The report can be found at:

http://www.ttc.ca/postings/gso-comrpt/documents/report/f3085/_conv.htm

The argument in brief is that there is no customer benefit of a conversion, that it would require a prolonged closure of the line and that the Malvern extension cost would be equal no matter what technology was chosen. Continue reading →

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Spare Change for Etobicoke?

Two pieces of news caught my eye today, and somehow they seem to fit in the same post.

First up is a report in next week’s TTC agenda about the extension of the Bloor Subway.  At the January 31 meeting, there was a request that staff update information on the planned line in light of a proposed development near the East Mall.  The reply to this can be found on the TTC’s website here:

http://www.ttc.ca/postings/gso-comrpt/documents/report/f3087/_conv.htm

In this report, we learn that an Environmental Assessment was already approved for this back in 1994, although it is somewhat out of date.   Blowing the dust off of the EA would set us back about $3-million.

The intriguing information is that the estimated cost of the extension in 2007 dollars is roughly $1-billion for 3.7 km to Queensway and The West Mall, and a further $500-million for 1.5 km to get to a Dixie Station in Mississauga.  This translates to $270-million/km to get to West Mall, and a staggering $333-million/km to get to Dixie.  Underground alignments are assumed in both cases, and the report is silent on whether this cost is just for construction or also includes additional subway cars to operate the extended line.

In other news, the Canadian Mint has announced that it will produce a new 100 kilogram gold coin at a face value of $1-million, but with an actual gold content (and price to buy one) over twice that.  There is an article on the Globe & Mail’s website about it here:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070222.wrmint22/BNStory/Business/

although this may not last forever as the Globe tends to archive things fairly quickly.

For all of you who are saving up to build your very own subway line, this might be just the thing you need.  Imagine if people saw a pile of million-dollar coins.  At $270-million/km, or $270,000/metre, each coin would buy (at face value) not quite four metres of subway, or eight metres if you melted it down.

Who needs new tokens?

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TTC Capital Budget

On January 31, the TTC passed an amended version of its capital budget. There is a good PDF of the report including amendments on the city’s website as part of the Budget Committee agenda at:

http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2007/bu/bgrd/backgroundfile-1646.pdf

Some noteworthy amendments:

  • Funding for various studies and Environmental Assessments in support of the Mayor’s transit plans.  This will allow some preliminary work to be done on the proposed network of LRT/Busway schemes.
  • A North Etobicoke rapid transit assessment for which Commissioner Hall (whose ward includes the study area) has indicated a preference for LRT.
  • A Finch hydro corridor study from Yonge to Dufferin (where it would meet up with the York U busway).
  • A study of extending the Bloor-Danforth subway to the East Mall.
  • Funding for the first stage of developing improved customer information systems.

The report details the funding issues and the shortfalls between what is committed by various governments and programs and what is required.  Almost at the end is a chart showing the combined funding requirements of various programs.  Note that it still includes a future Sheppard Subway project because the TTC has not (yet) formally changed their mind on the technology to be used for this.