Subways

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Crosstown LRT Interchanges with the Yonge-University-Spadina Subway

The TTC meeting agenda for November 18 includes a report on the proposed designs for the connections at Eglinton and at Eglinton West Stations between the existing subway line and the Crosstown LRT now under construction.

Eglinton is a particularly complex station because the location is constrained by nearby buildings, the platform space is already at a premium with four existing links between the subway and mezzanine levels, and this is expected to be a busy transfer location.

Eglinton West is somewhat simpler in part because the existing station is offset from Eglinton Avenue and the link between the two stations will occur at the south end of the existing structure.

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Yonge Subway Shutdown Between Eglinton and St. Clair Postponed to 2016

TTC CEO Andy Byford has issued a letter to members of the Commission and to Council advising that a planned shutdown of the subway for major reconstruction in the vicinity of Davisville Station has been put off until 2016.  In the meantime, sufficient repairs will be done to keep trains moving at a reasonable speed through this section.

The underlying problem, quite literally, is that the foundation and drainage below the track have failed causing the track to be unstable.  The condition has been addressed off-and-on for a few years with slow orders, but this does not solve the problem.

This and other areas of the subway system with wood tie/stone ballast track will be 60 years old in 2014. This is well past the normal operating life for such systems.

Detailed investigations have determined that in addition to normal wear and tear, the area below the stone ballast and the associated subgrade drainage systems have both failed, allowing enough movement of the track system to cause abnormal track movement which, in turn, can cause the signal system to fail safe. Subway service in the area is safe, but reliability on our busiest line is not where it needs to be.

The TTC will have to dig down substantially below track level, and this is the sort of maintenance that cannot be carried out overnight of on a weekend.  The number of buses and operators needed to bridge this section of the line is well into the hundreds, and the TTC does not have these resources.  Short shutdowns may be attempted and these will be co-ordinated with other work in the same section of the route.

If ever there were a need to demonstrate that subways do not last 100 years, as some short-sighted advocates claim, this is a perfect example.  The Yonge line is now 60 years old and parts of it are showing their age.  Indeed, another  section at Lawrence Station also requires major repairs even though it is barely 40 years old.

Read the full memo.

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Construction That Never Ends (Update 4)

Updated November 14, 2013 at 6:20 pm:

According to the TTC CEO’s report for November, the date for resumption of streetcar service on Queens Quay has been changed to June 21, 2014.  Brad Ross of the TTC advises that their website will be updated to reflect this new target date.

Updated October 26, 2013 at 4:32 pm:

According to the TTC CEO’s report for October (at page 20), service will not resume on Queens Quay until August 2014, not the end of June as previously reported.  I have asked the TTC to verify this date and explain why completion has slipped yet again.

The TTC memo listing service changes for the November and December schedule periods came out today, and it contains a few startling items:

  • The Yonge Subway tunnel liner program, originally expected to wrap up at the end of 2013, will now run an additional year to the end of 2014.
  • The loop at the foot of Queens Quay will not be available for service as expected in November, and service on the 510 streetcar will not resume until mid-February 2014.
  • The track on Queens Quay itself will not be available for service as expected in December/January, and service on the 509/510 streetcar will not resume until the end of June 2014.

Updated October 2, 2013 at 10:25 am:

Waterfront Toronto has posted a Construction Update for the Queens Quay project.

Updated October 1, 2013 at 6:00 pm:

Yonge Subway Tunnel Liners

I have received a note from Brad Ross at the TTC explaining the current situation.  The work has proven more extensive both in complexity and scope than originally thought.  In reply to one comment in this thread, I gave the opinion that all of the asbestos had been removed from the tunnels, but according to Ross, there is still some present and this adds to the slowness of the work.

The tunnel liner project involves the inspection of some 10,000 tunnel liners. To date, 4,000 liners have been inspected, 950 identified in need of repair, and 850 of them repaired. The process is not a speedy one as many of the liners are covered in material, including asbestos, which needs to be removed before a liner can be inspected. Add to that the time it takes for crews to get to the work location, set up, clean up, and return to the yard. As we examine liners, we’re identifying more and more that need to be repaired, mostly due to water damage. In short, the project timeline increases as the work involved increases. We are now working to determine what a reasonable completion date might look like and what the overall impact to subway service north of Eglinton will be over the next 12-18 months. Once we have that, we’ll communicate it widely.

[Email from Brad Ross, Executive Director, Corporate Communications, TTC, October 1, 2013]

Waterfront Toronto Queens Quay Project

I met with Waterfront Toronto staff to discuss the status of the project.  They have issued a construction update detailing the current situation.

Because the lanes occupied by the TTC right-of-way are essential as extra space into which construction or temporary road lanes can be shifted for utility work, the new trackbed cannot be laid down until all utility work requiring traffic diversions in an area is completed.

This work has been affected by a number of factors notably:

  • A late start by Toronto Hydro who did not receive funding approval for their Capital Program from the Ontario Energy Board in time to meet the original schedule.
  • Ground water conditions that at some locations were more challenging than expected.
  • Subsidence and resulting damage to existing utilities when areas were de-watered for construction access.  This was anticipated, but the extent of the problem is hard to gauge before the work is actually done.

The area around Spadina and Queens Quay has many utilities competing for space and for construction access.  Some planned work has been complicated by new, more stringent provincial labour safety standards for work near live hydro lines.

Most of the splicing chambers for the new track are complete, but one critical one that will feed Queens Quay Loop is inaccessible at present due to competing work in the same area.  This has slowed installation of the grounding cables for the loop which will tie back to that chamber.

The intent is to have the trackwork in the loop finished by yearend.  TTC would then install its overhead in preparation for service at the start of the February 2014 schedule period which will fall in the middle of the month.  The track installation will likely be done mainly in November, and partial shutdowns of the streets around the loop will be required.

There are three sets of special work (loop entrance from Queens Quay, loop exit to Spadina and the Spadina & Queens Quay intersection).  A preliminary plan for this might have broken the work into three stages, but Waterfront Toronto hopes to consolidate this into two.

A further complication will be the partial closing of Lake Shore Blvd. to complete the track connection south from new rails on Spadina.

Waterfront Toronto expects to publish details of the work schedule soon.

As for the tangent track on Queens Quay, the major constraint is that the space cannot be given up until utility work in a section is clear.  The intention is to build the foundation slab in pieces as various sections of the roadway become available.  Track installation would be completed in spring 2014, followed by overhead catenary, with a target date for streetcar service in late June.  (If the schedule periods for 2014 follow the same pattern as in 2013, this would be Sunday, June 22, 2014.)

Waterfront Toronto’s work plan for summer-fall 2014 will concentrate on the area south of the streetcar right-of-way which will contain the new cycling path, an expanded pedestrian area, and many trees.  Some finishing work will occur in early 2015 in advance of the Pan Am Games.

What is frustrating about all of this is that the delay in Hydro’s approval at the OEB was well known a year ago, and Waterfront Toronto has maintained rather hopeful dates for resumption of service that strained credibility as the construction wore on and on and on.

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The Big U and the little u

The Transit Investment Strategy Advisory Panel has ventured off its supposed path of looking at ways to fund transit growth in the GTHA to at least one proposal for a change to the Metrolinx Big Move plan.  This showed up at recent open houses in a handout that is not yet available online.

InvPanelOfficeEmpAndTransit

[The image above was posted on Twitter by Rishi L (@CdnEnginerd).  Click for full size version.]

The purpose of this map is to show how office employment is not sited along existing or proposed rapid transit lines.  With this as a jumping off point, the Panel suggests there is a need for a “Big U”, a much enhanced GO Transit route from Meadowvale, through Union Station and then north via the Uxbridge Subdivision (Stouffville line) to Markham.

A related factoid (one of those handy bits of information whose presence is supposed to silence critics) is that employment concentrations generate far more transit usage than residential ones.  It is certainly true that it is much easier to serve a place like downtown Toronto with a transit network that acts like a big funnel, but this does not eliminate the need to serve the residential ends of those trips.

Toronto’s Bloor-Danforth subway and GO’s commuter lines, for example, spend much of their time running through comparatively low-density neighbourhoods, collecting passengers as walk-ins, park-and-rides, and transfers from the surface transit network.  Every time a new transit route is proposed, we hear how it will only be viable if stations are surrounded by huge condo developments.  This is utter nonsense because any transit route has a catchment area.  The problem is to ensure that transit, sidewalks and bike lanes serve that area and deliver riders to a network that will take them where they want to go.

What is missing from the chart above is any indication of where the people who work in those centres actually live.  Looking at the Meadowvale end of the line, how many people come from the area that would be served by the GO corridor and a feeder network to it?  There is a lot of territory north, west and south of Meadowvale for which a rapid transit line to the east will do absolutely nothing.  Similarly, many who work in Markham live west, north and east of the employment centres.  Indeed, most of the red dots on that map are well west of the rail corridor.

Much as I sympathize with the Panel’s desire to get people talking about how parts of any network proposal might actually serve the region, I fear that we are seeing a classic example of someone who got out their crayons and drew a map.  The job will quickly change from discussing the philosophy of transit planning (and, don’t forget, funding) to defending the specifics of a proposal.

That is precisely why I have been so restrained about getting out my own crayons except in special circumstances.  The recent Don Mills Subway discussion needed a line on a map to illustrate how the “downtown” focus needed to change.  Well over half of the debate this triggered became a matter of dueling proposals between “my” line and “your” line that added little to the real issue — the need to see what such a line could connect and serve beyond simply diverting trips away from Bloor-Yonge Station.

People would even argue that there wasn’t “enough” development in some locations to justify such a route ignoring what is there today, what is in the pipeline for tomorrow and what could occur with planning and political encouragement.  Meanwhile, we build a subway to land that was recently the middle of nowhere, and propose one through miles of low density residential development as a vote-buyer claiming that only with a subway will Scarborough reap the development it “deserves”.

There is one big problem with the “Big U” — it diverts attention from the “little u” otherwise known as the “Downtown Relief Line”.  It doesn’t help one bit that the version of the “little u” shown on the map is the Pape-Queen-Roncesvalles alignment, one that is guaranteed to be very expensive and fails to recognize shifting development patterns (ironically, one of the goals of the “Big U”).  It ignores the southerly shift of population and jobs, avoids the available Weston rail corridor where we are spending a fortune to intensify transit infrastructure for a Toonerville Trolley to the airport, and it stops at the Bloor-Danforth subway missing the opportunity to reach further north to be more than a “downtown” line.

“Alternatives analysis” is a fine art in many projects, but the real art for many agencies is to ensure that what you always wanted to build is the “preferred” choice.  This is often guaranteed by setting up straw man comparisons so that the one you want shines out as the best of breed.  Such may be the situation with the DRL where, on darker days, I suspect that the whole idea is to paint as grim a picture as possible so that it will never be built.  Remember that the TTC for decades claimed we didn’t need a DRL, that they could stuff everyone into an upgraded Yonge-University line.  Expanding YUS capacity on a heroic scale was their “preferred alternative”.

With the Big and little U’s, we risk being trapped into specifics of route designs that looked good on a napkin in a bar, but which need much more thorough discussion as to purpose and specifics.  They are good as starting points for discussion, but are most definitely not the final answer in their respective fields.  Moreover, they are not alternatives to each other, a point that is often lost as the political imperative says “build in the suburbs, not downtown”.

The Big Move and the Investment Strategy that supports it have one gaping hole.  Very little attention is paid to the role of or funding for the feeder network to a regional system.  Moreover, the plethora of lines on the map hides the fact that many of them will not have the most frequent service on the planet.  Not all “rapid transit” lines are created equal.  As a recent Metrolinx report noted, the growth in “rapid transit” recently has mainly been in “BRT Light” for which the infrastructure requirements are minimal along with the service levels.  Crowing about progress in bringing transit to the millions ignores the question of how attractive that transit will be and how people will connect from the trunk routes, such as they may be, to their homes, work and other destinations.

This will be an important issue for network design on both the Big and little U’s.  One would serve rail corridors and be totally dependent on local service to deliver riders from homes and to employment locations.  The other would serve established and growing neighbourhoods and would enjoy an existing, well-developed set of local transit services as feeders.  These are not trivial differences, but they show the problems that will arise if the study does not look beyond the edges of station platforms.

This is the real debate the Transit Panel should engage — does The Big Move really serve the market it claims to address?  How useful will it be in attracting trips out of cars and onto transit?  Can developers and owners of residential and employment properties expect a real improvement in travel to and from their developments, or will their value be strangled by poor access?  Underlying all this is the basic question of whether we are spending all of those billions in the “right” place and what benefit each component of the proposed network will achieve.  That speaks directly to the concept of spending wisely, not just for the sake of generating construction jobs and photo ops for the next generation of politicians.

Returning to the “little u”, there will be a motion before Council from Councillor Josh Matlow, seconded by Cllr. John Parker (also a member of the TTC Board), to accelerate work on the EA for a “Relief Subway Line”.  Moreover, it asks that Council confirm such a route as “Toronto’s next subway expansion priority”.  It will be intriguing to see how this motion fares amid the current circus at City Hall, the recent battle over the Scarborough Subway and a faction claiming that downtown “has enough subways” already.

If this proceeds, it will be vital that it not be hamstrung with narrow terms of reference that filter out options before they are even discussed.  A major shortcoming of the new “Transit Project Assessment” protocol is that there is no consideration of alternatives because the decision that something is a “good project” is already assumed.  Debating alternatives just gums up the works in what is supposed to be an expedited process, but actually winds up as an exercise in selling an already-determined choice.  This is precisely the criticism many had of Transit City that compounded the process with less than stellar detailed planning and “sales”.  (Moreover, once a project is approved, it can be amended beyond all recognition, even though the original design was the one that “justified” the project in the first place.)

There is no point in doing a study if the underlying desire at the political and staff level is to sell a “Big U” as a replacement for the “Relief” line, whatever we call it.  The terms of reference must ensure that all options are reviewed, including cross-jurisdictional issues such as repurposing the Weston corridor’s UPX trackage for rapid transit.  We must not prejudge the outcome by requiring one continuous line to serve both legs of the U/u, especially considering that in some variants both western legs run in the same corridor.

Will Toronto Council, Metrolinx and Queen’s Park embrace the need for a full study of these routes without prejudice toward any preconceived doodlings on maps?

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A Don Mills Subway For Toronto

This is a companion article to one of the same name on the Torontoist website in which I argue that Toronto should have a subway line from Front & Spadina to Eglinton & Don Mills.  Formerly known as the “Downtown Relief Line”, this should be called the “Don Mills Subway” and there should be no pretensions about it stopping at Danforth.

Drawing subway lines on maps, especially for the DRL, has been a cottage industry among transit advocates and city watchers for several years, and everyone has their preferences.  I have stayed away from that territory most of the time because the torrent of comments (including a long thread on this side) is more than I care to moderate.

However, the Don Mills line needs advocacy and a good indication of what it might look like to counter the “downtown has enough subways” drivel dished out by Mayor Ford.

My proposed alignment is not intended to be definitive although parts of it are locked down to make specific connections and to take into account physical constraints on the route’s placement.  Other alignments are possible in places, but I don’t want to revisit that discussion in excruciating detail when the basic purpose is to show what a new line could achieve.
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Updating TTC Wayfinding

This article has been split apart from the coverage of the October TTC Board meeting to accommodate updates and to keep the comment thread separate from other issues.

The Board considered a presentation entitled New Wayfinding Standards which, among other things, proposed a change in naming for subway lines to the use of numerals.  This has provoked no end of comment, some on this blog, as an ill-advised waste of money.

More to the point, this presentation is neither a “standard” nor a comprehensive review of TTC wayfinding.  It is an overview of a few changes, and even these are not set out on a thorough basis.  What we have here is a proposed trial, but not a systemic review of wayfinding.

The goals are simple: avoid multiple styles of signs, convey information in a consistent way so that riders know the “language” of the signs across the system, make maps easier to understand, and make all forms of wayfinding more accessible.  One style, one letter font, one style of branding should identify a “TTC” message wherever it appears.

Consistency and legibility are not important just for the casual user, but for the regular passenger who  may be in an unfamiliar part of the system.  They may walk through their “home” station on auto-pilot, but off of their regular territory, they too will be “tourists”.

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Moving People Downtown: The Gardiner East Is Only The Beginning

On October 16, 2013, the second public meeting in the Gardiner East Environmental Assessment presented additional information and refinement of the options for dealing with the expressway’s segment between the Don River and Jarvis Street.

The purpose of the meeting was to report on the options that would receive further analysis in the next step of the EA and to provide comparative information about costs and benefits of the various schemes.  Broadly, there are four families of options:

  • Maintain the existing expressway with necessary repairs to make it sound for several decades’ more service.
  • Replace the expressway on a new structure either above or below ground.
  • Improve the existing expressway by selective reconstruction to open up space under the road deck.
  • Remove the expressway and create an at-grade boulevard.

Some options have been dropped from further study:

  • An underground alignment 1km long transitioning to/from existing elevated structured at the Don and at Jarvis.
  • An elevated alignment over the rail corridor.
  • A surface alignment on a berm abutting the south side of the rail corridor.

For any tunnel option, an important consideration is that most of the traffic arriving from the DVP and Lake Shore East is bound for the core area rather than as through trips to the western side of Toronto and beyond.  Therefore, access ramps are essential to any option that is not at grade so that traffic can actually get to downtown.  (By contrast, the “Big Dig” in Boston provided a link between the north and south sides of the core area on a route where 80% of the travel is through traffic and does not create demand for local ramp structures.)

The study claims that 80% of inbound trips have downtown destinations and this argues against a tunnel from which access would be difficult.  However, consider the origin-destination charts on page 15 of the presentation:

GE2P15

Of the traffic arriving from the DVP:

  • 40% leaves at Richmond Street
  • 7% exits to Lake Shore
  • 53% continues onto the Gardiner East, subdivided as
    • 10% exits at Jarvis/Sherbourne
    • 25% exits at Spadina/York/Bay
    • 18% travels beyond downtown.

If we were contemplating a tunnel across all of downtown, the argument about ramps and O-D patterns would be valid, but in this case, from the point of view of such a tunnel, most traffic is “through” traffic.  Only 10% of traffic that would enter a tunnel westbound at the Don leaves at Jarvis, and even this would be served if an off-ramp were incorporated in the transition from tunnel to elevated.  Similar arguments apply to the other O-D maps above.

The real problems with a tunnel are its cost and the barrier effect created by ramps linking the tunnel to the elevated structures at the Don and at Jarvis Street.

The schemes involving the rail corridor have both been dropped because they cannot be fitted into the space available.  In the case of an elevated, there is no room for the support structures needed (not to mention access ramps), and in the case of the berm, the area is reserved for future expansion of rail operations.

A far more important issue hinted at by the presentation but not explored in detail is the wider context of transportation into the core area.

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Once Upon a Time in Scarborough

Mike Filey passed along to me a clipping from the Toronto Star of June 29, 1977.

A high-speed streetcar line providing service between the Scarborough Town Centre and the Bloor-Danforth subway has been approved by Metro Council.

The $108.7-million line … was approved on a 23-8 vote.

Streetcars on a separate right-of-way should make the trip in about 15 minutes.

The cost of this route was to be shared 75-25 between Queen’s Park and Toronto.

It is no secret that this line was not built, nor was the planned extension to what is now Malvern Centre.  Instead, Queen’s Park, always happy to meddle in Toronto’s transit planning, strong-armed Toronto and the TTC into changing to the technology we now have on the RT at a cost, by the time the line was finished, of about $240m.  The hope for low-cost transit expansion was dashed by a technology that was almost as expensive as a subway.

The network that might have sprung from this to serve Scarborough and other suburbs never materialized.  Instead, we have endured 36 years of arguments about where we can afford to put our next subway lines, one at a time.

Premier Bill Davis may have said that the city is for people, not for cars, but he did bugger all to advance that position by making Toronto a showcase for a failed transit technology rather than a burgeoning network that grew along with and shaped its suburbs.

Scarborough LRT Study, April 1977, Excerpts

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Will Scarborough Get Its Subway? (Updated: Probably)

Updated October 9, 2013 at 1:20am:

Toronto Council, by a vote of 24-20, has approved proceeding with the Scarborough Subway project including a three-stage property tax increase totalling 1.6% to finance the City of Toronto’s share of the budget.

There is little new to add at this point on the technical issues all of which were covered on this site before.

My personal reaction is disappointment, but more strongly, disgust at the behaviour of some Councillors and a few City Officials.  The outright hatred and slander against “downtowners” and their motives in “pushing” LRT does not bode well for cordial relations on Council, not to mention sowing equivalent feelings among the electorate.  There are arguments to be made for the subway option (many of them have appeared here in the comment threads), but this should be done in a civil manner relatively free of distortion.

Instead, we got warped versions of the truth about both the subway and LRT options, and not a few outright lies.  TTC CEO Andy Byford, one who trotted out the “100 year subway” myth was forced to backtrack on two counts by questions at Council.  He admitted that the tunnels last for 100 years, but much of what is in them does not.  Meanwhile, he talked about LRT lasting 50 years, not the 30 year figure that has been bandied around of late.  The obvious issue is that a tunnel may very well last 100 years, but if you don’t have to build one in the first place, and can save the expense, what does it matter?

We will have to wait a decade to see whether the suddenly much rosier projections of demand for a rapid transit line in Scarborough come from the same well-cooked land-use and population assumptions that brought us the vastly overstated estimates for the Sheppard Subway (and for growth at Scarborough Town Centre).

In any event, the vote is taken, and barring a discovery of a major extra cost for the City appearing during detailed design, the decision is as final as we can expect to see from this Council and the provincial government.

How the rest of the LRT network will fare really depends on the 2014 municipal and provincial elections.  Mayor Ford has already declared that subways on Sheppard and Finch are goals for his next term.

The half-hearted advocacy for LRT from Metrolinx and Queen’s Park plays a big part in this situation, but I never thought their hearts were in it going right back to the early days of Metrolinx when I was persona non grata for asking their newly-minted Chair if they would consider this mode as an option in their grand plan.

How many more ridings will the Liberals feel the need to buy off with a subway promise?

The original article from October 4 follows the break.

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Scarborough Subway (via SRT) Feasibility Study (Update 7)

Updated October 2, 2013 at 12:30 pm:

Metrolinx has released a transcript of a press conference held earlier today regarding their letter to the City Manager about the Scarborough subway.

In related news, Metrolinx advises (through a separate email) that they are “approximately 3 months away from making [a] formal recommendation on Sheppard and Finch” LRT lines, and the possible acceleration of these projects.

Also, regarding Eglinton-Yonge Station, they “hope to have a final concept that Metrolinx, City and TTC agree on in the coming weeks and will present in the public session of the Metrolinx December Board meeting”.

Updated October 2, 2013 at 10:30 am:

Metrolinx has sent a letter to Toronto’s City Manager regarding the proposed Scarborough subway.  Unlike some pronouncements from Queen’s Park, this takes a more conciliatory tone for discussions between Ontario and the City of Toronto.  Notable points include:

  • Metrolinx continues to believe that LRT “would provide an effective rapid transit solution to the transportation challenges in this area” within the available funding, but bows to the desire by all three levels of government to build a subway.
  • Metrolinx is not dictating that a specific route be chosen, but wants a proper alternatives analysis as part of the Environmental Assessment.  This contradicts earlier statements by the government implying that only one route was to be funded.  It also implies that the shorter “Transit Project Assessment” process (which does not include the potentially embarrassing need to review alternatives) will not be used.
  • The Province is sticking with a figure of $1.48-billion in available funding, from which must be deducted the $85m in sunk costs for the Scarborough LRT project and unspecified costs of scaling down the LRT car order from Bombardier.
  • Although the $320m reserved for the Kennedy Station reconstruction with both the Eglinton and Scarborough LRT lines may not all be required, additional costs are expected at the Yonge-Eglinton interchange beyond the current project budget.  Savings from Kennedy may be redirected to Yonge-Eglinton.  If there is anything left of the $320m between the two projects, then it could be directed to the Scarborough subway.
  • The Scarborough subway will be entirely a City/TTC project contrary to previous schemes for the LRT that would have seen provincial ownership and a PPP arrangement similar to that proposed for the Eglinton line.  This begs a question regarding the accounting for the provincial funding contribution: if you don’t own the line, you can’t book the asset as an offset to the money spent on it.  Does this mark a shift away from the creative accounting used to justify taking Toronto’s transit projects away from the TTC in the first place?
  • Provincial funding will begin to flow in the 2018/19 fiscal year implying that no serious construction will be underway until then.  The City and/or Federal government will have to front end the project with funding for the EA and preliminary engineering.  All risk for project cost overruns will be to the City’s account.
  • Infrastructure Ontario remains available to participate in this project, but this is no longer a requirement of the Province for funding.  The decision on whether to use IO or to proceed with a conventional procurement (as on the Spadina extension) is up to the City of Toronto.

Not included in the letter, but reported through Twitter by John Michael McGrath, is a comment from Metrolinx that they are reviewing the timing of the Sheppard and Finch LRT projects.

This letter provides a more balanced response to Scarborough subway issue than some recent statements by Ontario Transportation Minister Glen Murray, and it is good to see Metrolinx acting as a reasonable broker rather than simply as a rubber stamp for ministerial musings.  The next major step will be Council’s discussion of the matter at the October 8-9 meeting.

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