LRT Projects

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Harbourfront News (Updated)

Updated May 18:

Service to Exhibition Loop resumed today with normal operations on the Bathurst and Harbourfront cars to Exhibition Loop.

Updated May 15:

For those who were wondering why the TTC is fixing the track on Fleet Street when it is supposed to be replaced later this month, here is the answer:  our friends at Toronto Hydro can’t handle two projects at the same time, and since they’re busy on St. Clair, Fleet will have to wait.  Come back in the fall.

Streetcar service should return to Fleet Street once the patchwork on the track is completed.  The schedule for May-June still shows the cars running to Exhibition, and so the TTC should be able to restore service once there is track to run on.

More news when it’s available. 

The original post follows below. Continue reading →

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East Bayfront / West Don Lands Update

The materials presented at recent Community Liaison Committee meetings for the two EAs now in progress are available on the TWRC website.  Note that they are not thick with explanatory information as they are intended to accompany a verbal presentation, but they show where things stand with the planning now.

Several issues have been raised by the CLCs, and a revised set of proposals will come back to the next CLC meetings later in May.  The material in these documents is not definitive.

East Bayfront (roughly Bay & Queen’s Quay to Parliament)

The West Don Lands material has not yet been posted on the TWRC site.  I will add the link here when it is available.

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Connecting the Waterfront West LRT to Union Station

With the EA about to get underway for the WWLRT section from Dufferin to Sunnyside, it’s time to think again about how this line will reach Union Station.

Current plans known to those who follow the issue but not widely publicized assume that the WWLRT will get from Duffferin to Union as follows:

  • A connection along the north edge of Exhibition Place will link up with the existing streetcar loop under the Gardiner Expressway.
  • For the short term, WWLRT cars would run east via the existing 509 Harbourfront route to Union Station Loop.
  • Longer term, a new partly surface and partly underground route would run along Bremner Boulevard and connect into the Bay Street tunnel just south of the railway viaduct at the north edge of the Air Canaad Centre.  Bremner is now under construction west from Spadina to Bathurst where it will meet Fort York Boulevard just south of the Front Street bridge.
  • It is unclear whether a connection would be made via Fort York from Fleet to Bathurst to avoid operation through the Bathurst/Fleet intersection and to eliminate turns at Bathurst/Bremner.

This line suffers from piecemeal planning and it needs to be rethought in the context of changing circumstances and its larger role as part of Transit City.  Several issues remain to be addressed:

  • The planned terminus at Park Lawn is totally inappropriate now that the LRT line is intended to run all the way to Highway 27.  Park Lawn Loop is itself a replacement for the original, abandoned Legion Road scheme that was itself seen as a way of eliminating Humber Loop.  Existing and possible future development on Lake Shore make Park Lawn a nonsensical place to end service.
  • Liberty Village did not exist when the WWLRT was first proposed.  Indeed, the line was intended more to serve development of the Exhibition and included a major terminal at Ontario Place.  This was abandoned due to that agency’s desire to retain its gigantic parking lot rather than have good transit service.  The original Exhibition Loop disappeared under the National Trade Centre.  There was never any plan to serve the area north of the CNR tracks because it was all industrial and the King car was considered to be adequate.  This is no longer the  case.
  • The Front Street Extension refuses to die, and is still proposed as an off-ramp to the Gardiner.  This too is nonsensical as all that is really needed to serve Liberty Village is a local road north of the railway west to Dufferin.  Such a road could include an LRT right-of-way, and this could provide a good service through Liberty Village and other developments east to Bathurst thereby relieving the King car.
  • The Bremner approach to Union Station needs to be presented for public comment and integration in discussions about transit services in the Union Station/Waterfront precincts.  Despite the scheme for a new loop at Union, I have serious doubts that even the expanded loop will handle the combined demands of the Queen’s Quay services (east and west) and the WWLRT. 
  • If the WWLRT doesn’t use the existing Union Station Loop, is there an alternative scheme through the railway corridor?  What happens if Blue 22 is finally abandoned and we consider an LRT approach down the Weston rail corridor into Union?  Could this be shared with the WWLRT?

We are faced with a patchwork of plans from decades of incremental schemes for new transit services in the waterfront, and we risk building a half-baked WWLRT rather than something that will really provide a strong east-west link from Etobicoke through Swansea, Parkdale, and Liberty Village to downtown.

A serious, detailed review of our options is essential. 

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Ridership Growth Strategy for the Island Ferries

The April 10th meeting of Toronto’s Parks and Environment Committee will consider a proposal to give two-for-one fares for adults travelling on the ferries between 5 and 9 pm (except for special event days on holidays and weekends) from the Victoria Day to the Labour Day weekend.

Most people leave the island in the late afternoon after a hard day at the beach.  The Parks Department reckons that there is a growing population who live downtown near the ferry docks for whom the island could be a welcome evening spot.  The ferries are running with available capacity, and the cheaper fares are not expected to cost the city anything.

Fortunately, the GTTA has yet to demand that total fare integration be provided so that a rider can board a GO Train in Barrie and travel seamlessly to Hanlan’s Point.

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A Toronto PCC in San Francisco?

Christopher Dunn sent me a link to a few pages dealing with historic streetcar operations in San Francisco.  Everyone knows about the cable cars, but there is a large fleet of antique cars including many PCCs.  The PCC fleet is painted in colours of many different transit systems, one of which is Toronto.

You can read about the F-Market historic streetcar route here:  http://www.streetcar.org/mim/streetcars/index.html.

Be sure to follow all the links to different parts of this site to see the fleet and the sheer effort that has gone into making this an integral tourist attraction and part of the transit system. 

Not to be missed is the section on the “E-line”, the new line on the Embarcadero (the place where they tore down the inner city expressway).  Anyone thinking about how we might build on the waterfront and what transit can look like needs to visit this page.

Oh yes — the “Toronto” car (really ex-Minneapolis by way of Newark) is here:

http://www.streetcar.org/mim/streetcars/fleet/pcc/1074/index.html

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A Bigger Loop at Union Station?

In all the discussion of new transit lines serving the waterfront, we are also getting into the question of capacity at Union Station Loop.

Since many people will not have seen this design before, and a good quality drawing was just handed out by the TTC at a recent waterfront meeting, I’m posting it here.

UnionLoopDetail

The design shows a scheme for a new loop at Union at an interim stage in its development.  Here’s how the design works:

There is space underneath the teamways and outside of the existing tunnel structure to fit two more tracks plus platform space in the north-south direction.  In this design, you will see that the existing (now centre) tracks are disconnected at the south end and all streetcars take the outer loop past the new platform.  Inbound cars unload on the east side of the loop and outbound cars load on the west side.  There is room for four CLRVs on each platform.

Note that the existing platform space at the north end is expanded, and connects directly onto the new northbound Yonge Subway platform to be built as part of the Union Station expansion now underway.

Sometime in the future, if demand warrants it, the loop could be changed so that the east platform was reserved for cars bound to the eastern waterfront while the west platform was used for western waterfront services.  The inner tracks would be reconnected and used as bypass tracks so that the two sets of services could run through the loop somewhat independently of each other.

A further option, although tricky, would be the entry of a “Bremner LRT” (the proposed inner end of the Western Waterfront line) that would punch into the tunnel just south of the loop.  Dodging the pillars would be tricky, but apparently it is possible.

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Southern Etobicoke and The Queensway

Mark Dowling sent in the following note in response to the item on Park Lawn Loop:

Where do you stand on a Queensway ROW west of Humber Loop?  I know ridership on 80 is dismal but so is the service.  The street is wide and to my mind screams for LRVs or Citadis 302s bombing along between Roncesvalles and Sherway at 2x bus stop lengths with all the toys – next-car displays, signal priority and the like – giving a real “subway-like” service as opposed to the joke our Mayor cracked in relation to St Clair.

The residential developments at Sherway and along the Queensway would, I believe, generate a decent ridership if decent service was offered. Who knows, it might even pull in some park and ride traffic from the Gardiner?

Steve:  First off, The Queensway as far as Kipling is an “Avenue” in the Official Plan, and it is also shown as a Transit Priority corridor all the way to Brown’s Line (as is Lake Shore).  You would never know this from the sort of service offered in that part of the world or the total absence of planning for improvements as part of the TTC’s LRT studies.

Southern Etobicoke has a huge amount of redevelopable land — old industrial property, strip malls, parking lots — and there are also big possibilities up at the Six Points.  However, if we keep pumping out the message that this part of the world won’t be developed soon, if ever, from our own Planning Department, transit will continue to ignore this part of the world as well.

To answer your question, yes, an LRT service along The Queensway would be a great addition to the network, assuming redevelopment to support it.

What effect this would have on the Gardiner is another matter.  I think that the car traffic comes from further afield in the 905, and the benefit of new transit services will be to allow growth in population without overwhelming the road system.  However, we must have the will to “invest” in the future of this part of the city just as we hope to do in the eastern waterfront.

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Western Waterfront and Park Lawn Loop

This post is extremely long and most of it will be in the “more” section.  I received a copy of a letter addressed to Mike Olivier from David Nagler, the public consultation co-ordinator for the Western Waterfront LRT project.  The discussion is all about “why Park Lawn and not somewhere else” with a few other bits thrown in for spice.  My own comments are sprinkled through the post.

I have edited this slightly to eliminate duplicate information. Continue reading →

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The Myth of Fuel Cell Buses (2)

Recently, I wrote about the proposal by one neighbourhood group at the waterfront to use hydrogen fuel-cell buses in place of LRT.  Many thanks to all who contributed feedback to that piece.

This item contains a lot of technical bumpf and calculations.  If anyone finds an error in this, please let me know and I will be happy to correct it, even if that worsens my own argument.  I would like some real information to be “out there” on the issue rather than a lot of hype. Continue reading →