Subway Cars

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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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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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TTC Cattle Cars Part 3: Passengers 2, Staff 1

I’m at a loss knowing where to begin on this.  If you’ve been following this thread, you will know that TTC staff really, really want their new subway cars to use “perimeter seating”.  This means that all of the seats face inward and there are no forward or rearward facing seats, no conversation nooks.  As if that isn’t bad enough, they want to use metallic seats with no cushions.  [Let us imagine a short theatrical pause here so you can catch your breath.]

This particular scheme has been before the public twice before that I know of.  The first outing was at February’s TTC meeting where it did not win high praise.  My own posts on the subject started about that time.  More recently, TTC staff showed up at a Rocket Riders meeting to talk about their design.  On that occasion, it appeared that both the new perimeter design and the existing T-1 compartment design were both on the table.  So far, so good. Continue reading →