[Yes, I know it’s February, but I had hoped to finish this post sooner.]

In the first part of this thread, I discussed the WWLRT plans from Dufferin Street west to Sunnyside. Now, let’s look at the route through Exhibition Place and into downtown.

The presentation materials from the Environmental Assessment are on the City’s website.

Dufferin to Strachan Through Exhibition Place

Four routes were evaluated:

1. Extend west from the existing Exhibition Loop to Dufferin Street. This option includes relocation of the GO Station to just east of Dufferin, and the construction of a new Dufferin bridge over the rail/expressway corridor.
2. Turn north at Strachan Avenue crossing the rail/expressway corridor and running west to Dufferin along the south edge of Liberty Village.
3. Turn south at Strachan Avenue, follow the north side of Lake Shore to a southerly projection of Dufferin Street, then turn north to Dufferin Loop.
4. Identical to the previous version except following the south side of Lake Shore.

The first option is preferred because it is by far the cheapest to build and has little impact on its surroundings in part, of course, because it is also the shortest.

The second option ranks highest for the Land Use criterion because it would serve Liberty Village rather than a collection of mostly empty parking lots. However, this comes at an impact on the Natural Environment that is undesirable for reasons not explained in the online material. (I was not at the public meeting and if someone knows the details, please comment here.) This begs an interesting question that, but for the environmental issues, this route would be a strong contender.

The remaining options, actually numbered 3A and 3B, are the longest and most expensive and rank lower on other criteria, although not fatally. The question remains of what to do about service to Ontario Place and to any future development of the lands on the Lake Shore side of the CNE grounds.

What is quite striking in the evaluation is the complete isolation of study for the Lake Shore routes west of Dufferin and those to the east. At no point is consideration given to an alignment that stays on Lake Shore all the way from Sunnyside to Strachan Avenue. This is a good example of how the “divide and conquer” approach to an alternative analysis can eliminate options by selectively ignoring them.

A similar issue can be seen in the evaluation of the options for connecting the WWLRT to the existing system at Sunnyside where the Colborne Lodge Road scheme is downgraded because it is “More difficult to connect streetcars to other routes and TTC transit facility at Roncesvalles.” Oddly enough, the study ignores the planned connection at Dufferin Street as one of the possible connections to Roncesvalles Carhouse.

Exhibition to Union Station

As this part of the study is only now getting underway, we’re back at the first steps where basic options are reviewed and eliminated. After a brief look at various bus options as well as streetcars in mixed traffic, the option of streetcars on dedicated lanes is the one carried forward for detailed review. This is no surprise considering the context that all other lines in the study area are similar implementations.

Next comes the choice of alignment in which two options — Front Street or Bremner Boulevard — are compared at a cursory level. The Front Street alignment is rejected because of, among other things, “Greater connectivity to Waterfront West streetcars and Union Station”.

You may recall a few paragraphs back I talked about an alignment of the WWLRT on the north side of the rail/expressway corridor. Quite obviously, if this were the chosen alignment from Dufferin to Strachan, then a similar alignment eastward from there would connect well with it. Again, this is an example of a segmented alternative analysis dismissing options because of assumptions made regarding other sections of the line.

Without question, an alignment north of the railway has its own problems, but by structuring the analysis as the TTC has, this alignment is discarded without proper study even though it would, by their own admission, provide better service to Liberty Village.

Moreover, the TTC has not considered the rather obvious possibility that a route could come east through Liberty Village and a local version of Front Street as far as Bathurst, then jog south to Bremner Boulevard. Obviously, an all-Front route right over to Union would run into problems with street space, not to mention proposed major changes in road use in the Union Station Precinct.

The next stage of the EA will look at alternatives in the chosen alignment via Fort York and Bremner and will discard any discussion of a Front Street alignment because the EA process has already filtered them out. This sort of approach gives Environmental Assessments a bad name.

Ridership Projections

Projections for the section of the line west of Dufferin are included in the EA materials. These show 2000 to 2400 peak period trips eastbound at Dufferin, and (by an ad hoc rule about the distribution of trips within the peak) means a peak hour of about 1200 rides. To this we must add the riders who will board east of Dufferin, although the route through Exhibition Place itself will add almost nothing. From Strachan to Bathurst, we will pick up demand from the new condos, but these folks will also be served by the existing Harbourfront line via Queen’s Quay and Fleet.

Once the line reaches Bremner Boulevard (by whatever route), it will serve the new condos under construction west of Spadina, and all of this riding will try to fit into Union Station Loop via a new connection to the tunnel via the basement of the Air Canada Centre at Bay and Bremner.

The operational complexity of Union Station Loop with the many waterfront services remains a concern to many people involved both in the waterfront transit studies and Union Station itself. Detailed design and operational planning for this component must proceed immediately so that we understand the implications of focussing all of these new lines on a single terminal.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The TTC needs to address the fact that there are many separate current and future demands for transit in, broadly speaking, the West Waterfront, and stop trying to design one facility that will somehow serve all of them. Here are the questions the EA must address:

• Why is the projected demand west of Sunnyside so low even though population is growing in the Queensway and Lake Shore Corridor? What are the destinations of people living in these areas, and how much is the simulated demand affected by travel time?
• What benefits could be achieved with an alignment following the north side of the rail corridor west from Bathurst to Dufferin and possibly beyond?
• How will Ontario Place, the south side of Exhibition Place and the Western Waterfront (which gave its name to this line in the first place) be served in the future, and should this be a separate route from a line serving Front Street, Liberty Village and south Parkdale?
• How will the Bremner Boulevard line interoperate at Union Station with other waterfront services?

Now that we are finally studying the entire WWLRT route, we must see how the various parts of the line can fit together to provide attractive routes into a previously ignored part of the city.

The presentation materials from last week’s public meetings on the Waterfront West LRT Environmental Assessments are now online.

Several new and interesting aspects of the proposals appear in this round including:

• Additional alternative routes between the Queensway and Dufferin Street
• Preliminary information about the Exhibition to Union Station components of the line

I will summarize each of options, but for all of the gory details, please visit the project site.

In response to issues raised at previous public meetings, several additional aligments or variations have been examined for the section of the line west from Dufferin Street to The Queensway. These are shown in maps and in textual descriptions.
Continue reading →

As the Waterfront West LRT project inches its way through various studies and construction projects, it’s worthwhile to look back at how the area around Fort York, the oldest and most historical part of the route, evolved to its present condition.

Originally, the fort stood at the lakefront, but as with so much of Toronto’s waterfront, landfill has moved the lake quite a way south leaving both the fort and the nearby lighthouse somewhat inland.

For many years, streetcar service to the fort and the nearby CNE grounds has operated via Bathurst and Fleet Streets, and reconstruction of this approach is now underway to provide a dedicated right-of-way over much of its length.  Less well known is a scheme to install part of the WWLRT on Fort York Boulevard, a new road skirting the southern edge of the fort’s grounds and connecting into Bremner Boulevard at Bathurst Street. 

Some bright spark, I am sure, knows why Fort York Boulevard wasn’t built with the streetcar right-of-way in it from day one, but such is the nature of project planning in this town.  The Friends of Fort York are, I know, concerned that widening this brand new road may encroach on the fort’s lands.

The Fife and Drum is the newsletter of the Friends of Fort York abd Garrison Common, and its October issue contains an article on the early history of streetcar service to the CNE.

If you were not able to get to the Public Information Centre meeting last week, the handout can be accessed on the Toronto Waterfront website (scroll down to the end of the list of reports). 

This package does not include drawings of proposed treatments of the underpass at the railway viaduct.  Although there have been some proposals, detailed design and evaluation is part of the study of the area south of the railway including the complex problems of connecting both parts of Cherry, Lake Shore and Queen’s Quay.

Monday afternoon, I took advantage of the balmy Thanksgiving weather to look at the state of Fleet Street, an oxymoron if ever there were one in its current state.  The construction is working its way east from Exhibition Loop, and is currently at the Strachan intersection where the coming realignment of the tracks is already visible.  From here east, the street is a mess, pedestrians are walking along the roadway because the sidewalks are torn up, and the former brewery site is now a vast and empty lot awaiting more condos.

All of this doesn’t warrant a post, but two observations do.

First, despite the fact that the 509 Shuttle only has to run back and forth from Spadina to the Princes’ Gates, there are three buses on this service, and two of them were running almost as a pair.  I was one of a handful of people on the trip east from the CNE, and I didn’t see many on the other two buses either.  Isn’t it amazing how the TTC can run such frequent, if erratic, service for construction replacement, but when it comes to basic everyday service, well, you know the rest.

Second, I saw the best example of a transit priority signal in Toronto.  Eastbound at Strachan and Fleet, there is a signal to let the streetcars out of Exhibition Loop.  Despite the physical impossibility of any streetcar actually appearing here for several months, the light dutifully cycles through its “transit” phase.  Clearly, the presence or absence of a streetcar has nothing to do with this “pro transit signal”, and it is simply one phase in a multi-phase progression.  That’s what I see elsewhere and indeed it’s the sort of thing that is actually “anti-transit” because streetcars must wait for their own phase rather than using the regular green time that had been available to them for decades.

The TTC and the Works Department need to start being honest about which signals are true “transit priority” and which are rather expensive decorations whose main effect is to keep streetcars out of the way of other traffic.  There is supposed to be a report on this subject coming to the TTC, maybe even at its October meeting.  Stay tuned. 

The Community Liaison Committee (CLC) for the West Don Lands transit Environmental Assessment wound up with its last formal meeting yesterday evening (Sept 27).  To our delight [I am a member of the CLC], we learned that the recommended scheme incorporates changes in street design that many of us had wanted to see in this small, but important link in the transit system.

A Public Information Centre will be held on Thursday, October 11 at the Enoch Turner School House (behind Little Trinity Church on King St. east of Parliament) from 4 to 8 pm.  This will be a drop in centre for people to review the design before it goes to the TTC and Council for final approval.

In the early days of this study, many of us despaired that we would see an “urban” street on Cherry which was to be 35 metres wide (almost twice the width of King Street, 20 metres) and with all of the charm of a suburban arterial.  Things have changed a lot through hard work both by the community and by the technical project staff. 

Three options made the short list for final evaluation:

• the conventional centre transit right of way as we know it from St. Clair, Spadina and Queen’s Quay West
• transit in the curb lanes with other traffic in the middle of the street
• a transit/pedestrian precinct on the east side of the street with cars and cyclists on the west side, separated by a generous median.

The last of these won out.  Detailed drawings are not yet available online, but they will eventually appear on the project’s public meeting page. Continue reading →