[I received a very long response to this item via email which contains enough information that I believe it is worth having alongside the original post here.  I have added it below.]

Back in the dark ages when we had public participation meetings on St. Clair, there was a huge amount of concern about intersection design and curb cuts.  The folks along St. Clair were deeply suspicious, and rightly so.  As I have often written, the road engineers cannot be trusted with anything and need to be wrestled to the ground for the slightest design improvements.

Then, finally, construction started.  I had talked to Councillor Mihevc several times about the need to corral the engineers, and met with him and Jim Teeple, the TTC’s project manager, in the cafe over Loblaw’s one day.  I was assured that Joe had his eyes open and was working hard to minimize the intrusions of the project.

That was when the project stopped at the east ramp into St. Clair West Station.

Then something odd happened.  In the interest of speeding up construction, the work for 2006 was extended west to Vaughan Road.  What we now see is the same ridiculous curb cuts that were in the original TTC plans, and which many had assumed we would be able to fix as part of the detailed design for the section from Bathurst west.

It didn’t happen.  The road folks got their widenings, the community got ridiculously narrow sidewalks, and Joe has turned into an apologist for this outrage.

Now we have to go into detailed design for the next section actually believing that we have a chance to get proper treatment for pedestrians and businesses along the street.

The TTC and Council must insist that roads be designed for people and neighbourhoods, not just for cars. Continue reading →

Today’s Star has an article about the ongoing woes of construction activity on St. Clair.  I will leave you to read the text yourself, but there are a few important points that deserve comment.

The intention of the right-of-way is not to save time, it is to make the service reliable.

Well, yes, but saving time wouldn’t hurt either.  Indeed, if the service is reliable, then people would not have interminable waits for a car that eventually shows up as a pack.  This will probably save more time than anything else. Continue reading →

Construction is finally underway west from Avenue Road and St. Clair to Tweedsmuir.  At this point, the work is on sidewalks and utilities, but you can see the extent of the road widening from the cuts into lawns between Avenue Road and Russell Hill.  Traffic in the construction area is now confined, more or less, to the streetcar lanes in the middle of the road. Continue reading →

After my less than kind words about the TTC and their centre pole design for St. Clair, I received a question about why the poles take up so much space (one extra metre on the right-of-way).  The short answer is that emergency vehicles, especially fire trucks, need to be able to drive down the ROW at speed without hitting anything and without falling off of the six-inch curb.  This means that the lane (measured from the curb to the pole) needs to be wide enough to give enough dynamic clearance for a large truck that is not tethered to the tracks.

Here is the longer version taken from an email I sent back to various people who asked: Continue reading →

This item is a followup to the St. Clair Streetcar item immediately below.  My friend Matt over at spacing.ca asked me about the mess of duplicate hydro and TTC poles, and the visual clutter this produces.  This is an important issue in the redesign of St. Clair, and I thought that I would post my reply to him here for everyone to see. Continue reading →

Yesterday, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Divisional Court, issued its ruling on the matter of Save Our St. Clair Inc. vs the City of Toronto and the TTC.  The Court ruled that the proposal for the St. Clair streetcar reserved right-of-way did not meet the test by which a judicial review would block the scheme, and therefore the application by Save Our St. Clair (SOS) was dismissed.

I am not going into the long and sordid history of this project, and those who know me well are aware that my feeling about both the City/TTC proposal and the position taken by its opponents was “a plague on both your houses”.  SOS made fundamental misrepresentations about the impact of the line and took positions about aspects of the plan that were diametrically opposed to each other.  Increasing pedestrian space, preserving parking and maintaining unimpeded traffic flow give one glaring example.

However, the City/TTC did an appalling job, even with much public consultation, of putting forward a reasonable plan.  There are many to blame in this and I won’t try to name names.  Here are a few of their worst gaffes: Continue reading →