Two open houses for the conversion of the SRT to LRT and its extension to Malvern have been announced:
March 8, 2010 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Jean Vanier Catholic Secondary School, 959 Midland Avenue (north of Eglinton)
March 11, 2010 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Chinese Cultural Centre, 5183 Sheppard Avenue East (at Progress Ave)
These meetings will discuss the conversion and extension plans, as well as the Kennedy Station changes needed to accommodate all of the new LRT lines.
For some time, I have stayed away from the “Save Our Subways” dialogue over on UrbanToronto in part because Transit City and related issues are presented as being “Steve Munro’s” plan (there’s even a poll that just went up on that subject), and because there are many comments in the SOS thread that are personal insults, not fair comment, well-informed or otherwise.
Such are the joys of an unmoderated forum.
Some have proposed a public debate, possibly televised, which I flatly reject. First off, the issues are more complex than can be properly handled in that forum, and it certainly should not turn into a mayoral candidates’ debate on transit. I do not know any candidate who could debate the details of either commentary.
Second, the lynch mob mentality of some writers on UrbanToronto is utterly inappropriate to “debate”, and this poisons many of the discussions on that site.
Recently I was asked by the authors of the Move Toronto proposal to respond, and this article is an attempt to start that dialogue in a forum where civility occasionally breaks through the diatribes.
To begin with, there are areas where SOS and I agree strongly, notably on the need for the Downtown Relief Line (at least the eastern side of it). I’ve been advocating this for years at the very least as a high-end LRT line, more recently as a full subway as that technology fits its location in the network better and is well suited to the likely demand.
Where we part company is the premise that we have to give up big chunks of Transit City to pay for the DRL. This sets up a false dialogue where TC lines are portrayed as overpriced and underperforming, denigrated at least in part to justify redirecting funding to the DRL. That is an extremely short-sighted tactic and harms the cause of overall transit improvements. It takes us back to the days of debating which kilometre of subway we will build this year.
I don’t intend to repeat my three long posts about Transit City here, but anyone who has read them knows that I do not slavishly support everything in that plan. If anything, the lack of movement on some valid criticisms people have raised regarding TC sets up a confrontational dynamic. Instead, the City/TTC could have been seen as responding to concerns.
Now, with the mayoralty campaign, attacking TC has become a surrogate for attacking the Miller program and the candidacy of Adam Giambrone. These need to be disentangled if we are to have any sort of sensible debate.
My greatest concern is that whoever is the new mayor, the issues will be so clouded by electoral excess, by positions taken as debating points, as sound bites to attack an opponent, that we won’t be able to sort fact from fiction afterwards. If, for example, George Smitherman winds up as Mayor, he will need a reasoned program, likely a mixture of some old, some new, not a “throw it all out and start over” policy. People will have different ideas about what that new program might be, and that’s a valid debate.
Whether Steve Munro is an arch villain (SFX: maniacal laughter) plotting the end of civilized transportation is quite another matter. To some, I have a vast reach through the political machinery of the GTA, while to others I am irrelevant. I am not the issue. Transit is.
These comments are organized roughly in the sequence of the Move Toronto paper (6mb download). Although variations and alternatives have appeared in other locations, notably threads on the UrbanToronto website, I have not attempted to address these as they are (a) a moving target and (b) not necessarily the formal position of the Save Our Subways group.
I believe that Move Toronto contains many flaws arising from an underlying desire to justify a subway network just as critics of Transit City argue against its focus on LRT. Among my major concerns are:
That’s the introductory section. The full commentary is available as a pdf.
(Updated at 3:00 pm, February 1. I omitted a section on the proposed Sheppard subway extensions to Downsview and to Scarborough Town Centre. This has been added.)
In this, the final installment of my review of Transit City, I will look at the unfunded (or underfunded) TTC transit projects. Some of these spur passionate debates and the occasional pitched battle between advocates of various alternatives. There are two vital points to remember through all of this:
I will start with the unfunded Transit City lines, and then turn to a range of other schemes and related capital projects. Continue reading
In the first part of this article, I looked at the origins of Transit City. Here, I will turn to that plan’s various components and to other transit schemes that have some or all of their funding in place. Continue reading
Transit City and transit in general are much in the political news thanks to one mayoral candidate’s declaration that there would be a moratorium on additional routes among other changes at the TTC. Christopher Hume’s column in the Star gives an overview of the landscape.
In the midst of TTC problems from lousy customer relations to service reliability, from Enbridge cutting into the subway tunnel to a maladroit handling of the recent fare increase, everyone needs to step back a moment and divorce the TTC from the politicians.
Transit City has many good points, and they need to be reinforced, not simply tossed aside as part of the anti-Miller rhetoric brewing in some campaign offices and newspapers. Transit City isn’t perfect, but the map may as well be cut into stone tablets rather than being a living document to hear some of its supporters. Such inflexibility undermines the plan itself.
There’s an odd parallel to Metrolinx’ Big Move plan. Metrolinx claims that their plan is a work in progress, but just try to criticize it, try to suggest changes, and their professed love of public input evaporates. Transit City isn’t quite as bad, and we are at least having some public feedback through the Transit Project Assessments. However, some fundamental changes are needed.
Before I talk about the plan, it’s useful to see where it came from. Continue reading
Update: As of January 15, 2010, the signs around the closed stairway have been updated to give an opening date of “May 2010”. The signs pointing to these exits are still uncovered and lit, causing people to head for them only to discover that they are closed.
Original post from January 6: Continue reading
CBC Radio 1 will be looking at the issue of TTC customer service starting on Monday, January 11, and I will be on Metro Morning dark and early sometime before 6 am.
Updated January 11: The Metro Morning interview is now available online.
The chats with story producers got me thinking about the TTC’s eAlert system as well as other sources of information. Knowing we won’t possibly cover all the details in a short interview, and that other aspects of the discussion will certainly come from readers here, I have started this thread.
A long-standing complaint about TTC service is that nobody knows what is going on. At the best of times, one might peer into the mists on Queen Street and hope that somewhere there is a streetcar, or listen down the subway tunnels for the familiar rumble of a train. Far too often, the TTC is not at its best, and the lack of information can drive people into a fury, one that may be visited on hapless TTC staff who are no better off than the rest of us.
The TTC’s website can be hit-or-miss depending on whether it is being updated regularly. For example, the 501 Queen car’s route description was not changed back from the Shaw/Parliament split until quite recently (thanks to feedback from a reader on this site). However, the 512 St. Clair route description gives no hint of the split streetcar/bus operation.
Diversions pose a special challenge because some are implemented thanks to emergencies such as fires or major collisions, but the most annoying are those implemented locally by the route management team, and not reflected on the website or on notices at bus and car stops. The 41 Keele (local) service is diverting around construction at St. Clair southbound, but it took a few weeks for this to show up online, but only in the route description. The schedule page and map still show the route running via St. Clair, and you can look up times for a stop that in fact has no service. The info is on the “Diversions” page, but there is no alert on the route’s own page to indicate that readers should also consult the diversion information.
The subway, the main target of this article, has additional information sources for would-be riders, although all of these can be quite frustrating.
If you are at platform level, and your station has a working video screen (dead screens are becoming common), and you’re standing close enough to read it, and Transit Control considers a delay to be serious enough to put up a notice, then you have a fighting chance of discovering that something is amiss. There may even be PA announcements, but they tend to occur only for very long-running delays. (As I write this, there is no subway service east of Victoria Park, and info about this comes over the speaker systems regularly. It also appears on the “Service Advisories” on the TTC website.)
If you are anywhere else, and you have cell/internet signal, you may get information from various sources:
I get both the eAlerts and the Facebook updates, and compiled a log of information from both sources. My apologies to those who don’t like “busy” displays as there is a lot of info consolidated in one place. Continue reading
Over the years, I’ve taken a lot of flak about LRT proposals for Toronto. Some folks imply that I am personally responsible for leading one or more generations of politicians astray, and that LRT is an invention of my very own with which, like the Pied Piper, I have lured the city away from its true destiny, a network of subways and expressways.
That is an exaggeration, but there are times I wonder at the powers claimed for me, and wish I had taken up a career as a paid lobbyist.
In fact, there was a time when the TTC was considering a suburban LRT network of its own, one that bears some resemblance to plans we are still discussing today, four decades later.
To set the stage, here is an article from the Globe and Mail of September 18, 1969 about the new life Toronto’s streetcars would find in Scarborough. Included with the article was a photo of a train of PCCs on Bloor Street at High Park, and a map of the proposed network.
The TTC’s hopes for streetcars on their own right-of-way are a bit optimistic, and it’s intriguing how the ranges seen as appropriate for various modes have all drifted down over the years. All the same, it was clear that the TTC had an LRT network in mind and was looking eventually for new cars for that suburban network. It didn’t happen, of course, because Queen’s Park intervened with its ill-fated high-tech transit scheme.
A few things on the map are worth noting. North York and Scarborough Town Centres are still “proposed” as is the Zoo. There is a proposed Eglinton subway from roughly Black Creek to Don Mills, and the proposed Queen Street subway turns north to link with the Eglinton line and serve Thorncliffe Park. The network includes links to the airport from both the Eglinton and Finch routes.
I didn’t invent this plan, and Streetcars for Toronto was still three years in the future. Somehow, the TTC and Toronto lost their way, and what might have been the start of a suburban transit network, years before the development we now live with, simply never happened.
Revised December 29 at 12:15 am: The section on the Finch LRT has been moved to the end and expanded to clarify an alternate proposal for the underground connection between the Yonge subway and the LRT station.
In the two previous articles in this series on the Eglinton and other LRT lines, I mentioned that the TTC would receive an update at its December 16 meeting on the status of the projects. Seasonal festivities and other matters have diverted my attention, and I’ve been remiss in not reporting on the news, such as it is.
The discussion was intriguing as much for its political as its technical content. Two factors, related to some extent, will force decisions that, to date, have been avoided about priorities and about the mechanism of project delivery.
Under the original project schedule, the SRT would still be under reconstruction as an LRT line when the Games took place in 2015. If this is to be avoided, the start date for the project must be advanced to 2011 or delayed until after the games. The latter option is dubious considering that the SRT is, technically speaking, on its last legs and keeping it running reliably into the Games period may be challenging. TTC staff will report on these issue in January, and another round of public meetings is expected in the same timeframe.
Of course, staff will also finally have to produce a design that shows an LRT conversion, rather than an ICTS-centric scheme. They will have to modify the connection at Sheppard both as an interim terminal (the northern section to Malvern is not yet funded), and to provide a track connection to the Sheppard LRT so that Scarborough LRT trains can use Sheppard carhouse.
The Kennedy Station redesign is also affected by the LRT conversion as the SRT will no longer be a separate entity from the Eglinton LRT lines.
When the Games were announced, there was much talk of accelerating construction of the Scarborough Malvern LRT running east from Kennedy via Eglinton, then north via Kingston Road and Morningside to UofT’s Scarborough Campus (UTSC). What has not been examined in detail, probably because people still think of the “SRT” as an “ICTS” line, is the early construction of the northern 2km of the Malvern line from UTSC north to Sheppard.
I suspect that the running time from Kennedy to UTSC via Eglinton, or via a temporarily extended SRT via Sheppard could be comparable, and for a short-term operation would make much more sense. The UTSC site could be served by trains on the S(L)RT from Kennedy and by trains on the Sheppard LRT from Don Mills giving good access not just for people using the BD subway to reach Kennedy. Longer term, this option would provide service to UTSC long before the planned date for the Scarborough-Malvern line.
Metrolinx is considering this option, but the TTC and City are plumping for funding of the full Malvern LRT line.
The “alternative financing procurement” (AFP) issue arises because the contract with the private developer imposes an extra layer of complexity, preparation and management that does not for a project delivered in the “traditional” manner by the inhouse TTC project. Any private arrangement must have a defined product along with a mechanism to ensure compliance, and design must reach a detailed enough stage that a bidder can make a concrete proposal. This pushes back the start date for any project using alternative procurement by about a year.
In the case of the SRT, it would likely not be possible to make the target date for completion, according to preliminary comments at the TTC meeting, if the new line was to be up and running by the winter of 2014/15, well in advance of the Games.
In the case of the Finch West line, the delayed start triggers a political problem because there is so much focus on Scarborough. Why should Downsview and Rexdale have to wait behind reordered priorities that could complete the Scarborough LRT network all in the name of serving the Games?
For all of Transit City, the TTC will deliver the projects on Metrolinx’ behalf, but we don’t yet know how the next layer down will work for the AFP projects. However, regardless of how the new lines are built, the TTC will operate and mainten them.
Much has been made in the press recently about a certain Internet dating service that encourages people to have affairs. They managed to get lots of free publicity with a proposed total wrap of streetcars, but the TTC’s advertising review panel (a subset of the full Commission) turned them down claiming that encouraging adultery is just plain wrong.
Whether the TTC likes it or not, adultery is legal as is the provision of a “dating service” to hook up would-be partners. This would not be the first such service to advertise on the TTC. LavaLife ran ads in subway cars, and there are dating service posters in some subway stations. Somehow, I doubt that everyone using these services tells their spouse/partner what they are doing.
Subway ads are running right now for the movie “It’s Complicated” whose plot involves a love triangle between a woman, her ex, and her new boyfriend. The posters include a tasteful view of Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin in bed. I don’t know whether their characters are married at the point in the film where this scene occurs, but that’s hardly the point. If the TTC is going to start censoring ads based on behaviour that is legal, they will have to be consistent.
Many people feel that lottos and booze simply involve addictive, anti-social behaviour and encourage people to spend money they don’t have. Should these ads be banned?
On the good taste front, anyone who has visited Bloor Station recently will know that the station identity is almost completely masked in large places by a campaign for Amex. It’s an odd coincidence that the TTC will be considering a report about the proposed renaming of Dupont Station as “Casa Loma” which contains the following observation:
TTC subway stations are, first and foremost, transportation facilities, not advertising vehicles. As people travel through our system, they need to know where they are geographically, in the context of the roads and neighbourhoods within Toronto. The names of subway stations are selected to give the clearest possible information to customers as they travel on the TTC.
Someone at the TTC should tell their ad agency that disguising a subway station to the point it is unrecognizable is unacceptable. Count this post as the first of five complaints needed to launch a review of Amex’s adverising. Four more shouldn’t be hard to find, and mine might not even be the first.
Footnote: If you are going to comment, do not use the words starting with “g” that refer to games of chance. Your session will be blacklisted by the spam filter.
Steve Munro 
