Vehicles

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New Streetcars Sooner, Not Later? (Updated)

[This item has been updated to correct some typos, and to add a concluding paragraph that I forgot to put in before publishing it.] 

Yesterday’s Toronto Sun reported that a proposal for 100 of the CLRVs to be refurbished by Bombardier’s Thunder Bay plant is on hold.  Some history is needed to put this in context.

For quite some time, the TTC has looked at new or refurbished streetcars.  New cars always seemed to have an astronomical price tag, but refurbishing was neither cheap nor a long-term option.

Any price quoted for a new streetcar, commonly $3- to $5-million per vehicle, provoked sticker shock.  Oddly, nobody ever mentioned the size of the vehicles in this discussion.  Given the TTC’s long anti-streetcar history (now mellowed to grudgingly accept that there is a place for LRT), the suspicious among us might think that this was a deliberate strategy to make streetcars look prohibitively expensive.

Current talk is for a $3-million car that will be larger even than an ALRV or subway car, and that’s not a bad price for a vehicle of that size (more about service impacts later).  If we can actually get new cars for that price, the comparison against a $1-million CLRV retrofit doesn’t look so bad (almost twice the car and at least double the lifespan for about three times the money). Continue reading →

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TTC Capital Budget: Where Will The Money Come From?

In between many screenings at the Film Festival, I took the opportunity to write up the TTC’s Capital Budget presentation from August 30.  The information here is a combination of the TTC staff presentation, remarks by Ted Tyndorf, Chief Planner for Toronto, and my own opinions.  This is intended mainly as a view of the most recent TTC thoughts on the subject. 

Here are the high points:

  • Expenditures on transit have been deferred over and over again, with most big-ticket attention going to a handful of subway lines.  This is not sustainable.
  • Population and ridership growth is happening faster than predicted, and significant investment in new and improved service is essential.
  • The goals of the Official Plan and Building a Transit City are not worth a penny if we are not going to invest in transit.
  • The TTC budget projections push some projects further into the future than is reasonable if we are going to lead population growth with transit, for example, the Transit First policy for the eastern waterfront. 
  • There is no provision for many new lines including the proposed LRT/BRT network in Scarborough or anything in the Don Mills corridor.

I will take up the issue of where we should go next with transit planning in a future post, likely over the weekend.  Meanwhile, the gory details. Continue reading →

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The Bombardier Subway Cars: How Much Do They Really Cost?

This isn’t news to anyone, but I wanted to give a bit of the flavour of the discussion at last week’s TTC meeting on this issue.

The TTC has a very bad habit of bringing forward Capital Budget projects that are incomplete — projects that look to be self contained when they are really only the first in a series.  A simple example is a bus purchase that begets a new garage and a requirement to hire, train and pay more staff.  In theory, we are supposed to see the full project impacts and estimated costs at the outset, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Continue reading →

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The Air Conditioned Streetcar

Car 4041 has been plying Spadina Avenue this week showing off a trial installation of air conditioning on a CLRV.  This morning when I went for a ride, the weather was moderately warm, not boiling, and it was fairly humid.  The car had a partial seated load as it was right behind its leader.

The A/C is nowhere near as aggressive as it is on some buses or on the T1 subway cars.  Moreover, depending on where you are in the car, you may not feel the effect at all because the cool air does not blow out evenly.  If the car were packed and/or if it were much hotter, I doubt that the unit would be able to keep up with the load.

This brings me to the question of having windows that open on air-conditioned vehicles.  Aside from the fact that on cooler days we could save energy by just letting air blow in from outside, if the A/C cannot keep up with the heat and humidity in the car, a sealed car would be even less comfortable than what we have now.

When I rode back north on a non-A/C car, I sat beside the open window and was actually cooler than I had been on 4041.

If this is an example of what we’ll get on new or rebuilt streetcars, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

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Cattle Car Update — New Subway Car Seating (Updated)

A correspondent sent me a link to a brochure from the Montreal transit system announcing their selection of a new car design.  You can see it here.

Big surprise!  The public prefers to have transverse seats and that’s what the STM is giving them.  Apparently the so-called standards (which turn out on close inspection not to be standards at all) cited by the TTC have not affected this design despite the fact that Bombardier is building both the Toronto and Montreal cars.  Hmmm … maybe the designers don’t talk to each other. Continue reading →

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Waterfront Revitalization Five and Ten Year Plans

A report on the Policy and Finance agenda for July 18 sets out the business plan for various waterfront projects.  Like the Spadina Subway (discussed elsewhere) this work will be funded through a trust to which various governments will contribute.  Much of this report is dry financial stuff where we take money out of one pot, put it in another, shuffle the cards around, and hope it all comes out in the end.

The interesting stuff is in Appendix A which describes the various projects.  Here we learn the current plans for construction of LRT lines to the eastern waterfront.

  • EA studies to complete by the end of 2008.
  • Construction start in the West Donlands in 2008 and the East Bayfront in 2009.
  • West Donlands LRT (the Cherry Street Car) to be completed by 2008/09 or 2010/11 depending on which page of the report you believe. 
  • East Bayfront LRT (the Queen’s Quay Car) to be completed by 2010/11 or 2014/15 depending etc.

Development of the Port Lands (east of the Don River) is not mentioned probably because it lies beyond the 10-year horizon of this plan.

I mention these schemes in the context of the TTC’s fleet planning.  We are developing a huge new part of the city, and it will need transit service.  Decisions about new streetcars cannot be delayed indefinitely if we are serious in the “transit first” commitment to new neighbourhoods.