St. Clair Car

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Always A Car In Sight

That, believe it or not, used to be the TTC’s slogan years ago when transit service was a far more important part of the life of Toronto than it is today.  Three love affairs have brought us to where we are now:

  • The automobile
  • The subway which moves huge numbers of people provided they’re going where one was built
  • Tax cuts and changes in public spending priorities

From time to time, people ask me both about how service has declined and about the practical limits on streetcar service.  I am not going to pretend that the answer to our problems is to build streetcar lines running in mixed traffic everywhere.  For one thing, there’s a lot more of that “mixed traffic” than there used to be.  But it’s interesting to see what streetcars were doing even well into the “modern” automotive era. Continue reading →

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Service For January 2007

January 2007 does not bring much in service changes beyond the return of streetcars to St. Clair west of the Spadina Subway.  Buses will continue to run east to Yonge Street until, it is hoped, the middle of February.

The RT will continue to operate with buses on Sundays to allow testing of the new RT signal system.  As a regular user of this line, I am looking forward to it actually working on those cold mid-winter days (which surely will be here eventually) when the old system regularly froze up.

There are several minor changes in running times and a few added trips here and there, but nothing major in improved service.  Current expectations are that we won’t see anything significant until the fall when sufficient operators, buses, and budget headroom will, in theory, be available.

Meanwhile, the list of services that should be improved or operated, but are not due to funding and other constraints, continues to grow. Continue reading →

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Howard Levine Writes About St. Clair

Howard Levine, a former member of City Council and one of the founding members of Streetcars for Toronto back in 1972, writes in today’s National Post about the St. Clair project.  Howard and I sit on opposite sides of the St. Clair fence these days — I still believe in the scheme and wish it were done better, while he sees it as irredeemably flawed.  I share his despair that what we fought for in 1972 took so long to achieve and was such a botched piece of design and community relations. Continue reading →

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St. Clair Update

Christopher Hume has a column in today’s Star about the St. Clair line (Click here) where he discusses the gap between theory and practice in major urban design/construction projects.

This morning, CBC’s Metro Morning had a discussion about the impact on businesses with the owner of the Retro Cafe (at Vaughan and St. Clair) and David Crichton, the city’s manager for design and construction.  With luck this may show up later today as a podcast on the CBC site here.  It may have been early in the day, but Crichton continued the city’s unhappy stance of saying “it’s too bad, but we have to rebuild the street” while ignoring that the design and the construction phasing have considerable impacts. Continue reading →

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How Joe Mihevc Got Conned On St. Clair [Updated]

[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 →

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What’s Up On St. Clair? (With A Glance at Spadina)

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 →

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Waterfront West and St. Clair LRT Projects

St. Clair Streetcars Return in Late November

The St. Clair line will resume streetcar operation on the last weekend of November 2006 when trackwork from Vaughan Road to St. Clair Station and elevator construction at that station will be completed.  We will have wonderful new track and maybe even working priority signalling (although I doubt we will actually see that for years, if ever), but the cars will still tiptoe over the rotten track at St. Clair West Station whose loop won’t be redone until next year.  So much for good construction planning.

There are rumblings that the section from Vaughan to Keele won’t be finished in 2007, but I have not tracked down anything definitive on that.  As for a possible extension beyond Keele, this is mired in redesign of the underpass at Dundas, Scarlett Road and St. Clair.

Isn’t it nice to know transit has such a high priority?

Waterfront West

Meanwhile, work is underway on the EA for the Roncesvalles to CNE portion of the waterfront line.  The TTC has the good sense to recognize that running this service into downtown via the Tonnerville Trolley operation on Queen’s Quay is a non-starter, and they are looking at branching off from Fleet Street via Fort York/Bremner Boulevards coming into Union Station in a tunnel along the north side of the Air Canada Centre.

No word yet on a redesign of Union Station Loop to handle the substantial additional loads that the eastern and western waterfront lines will bring.

All this will, of course, require funding for construction and for additional vehicles. 

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St. Clair Update

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 →

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Centre Poles on St. Clair (A Follow-Up)

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 →

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A Forest of Poles

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 →