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Metrolinx New Speak

Roger Brook passed on to me a formal reply from the Ministry of Transportation to various questions about the Metrolinx/GO merger.  In the quoted sections below, the questions are Roger’s, the answers are from Emna Dhahak, MTO Bilingual Senior Media Liaison Officer, Media and Issues Office.

Both Minister Bradley and Premier McGuinty have dug themselves into a rather deep hole with their convoluted explanations for the changes at GO and Metrolinx.  Rather than simply saying “Metrolinx and GO were always intended to merge and be governed by a board more like GO’s with few politicians”, we get bafflegab.  Not only that, it’s cut-and-paste bafflegab with the same paragraphs repeated in the answers. Continue reading →

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Understanding Union Station

Several reader comments recently talk about various design changes that might be made for Union Station Loop and surrounding areas.  My gut feeling from many of these is that the three-dimensional layout of existing and planned structures in this area is not well understood.

To assist, to the degree I can, this post includes some drawings from the past year and a discussion of how things fit together.  Some of these drawings are partly out of date and they must be read in connection with my notes here.  The intention is to give an overview, not a definitive set of plans.  The linked images have an aspect ratio wider than the thumbnails and more is visible in the large versions.

stationxsectionc

This is a cross section through the subway station looking west with the second platform (in blue) added.  Although not obvious on this drawing, a new glass wall will be added between the south edge of the existing platform and the northbound-to-Yonge track.  The escalator and stairway access to the northbound-to-University platform will be moved to the south edge of this platform giving more space for passengers between the University track and the vertical access paths to the mezzanine.

Also visible in this drawing is a stair up to the moat level from the mezzanine level of the station.  This design predates the “dig down” plans for the GO concourse.  The new lower concourse will be on the same level as the subway mezzanine with a straight access through a lowered moat between the two areas.

Note also that there is a sewer under the moat.  This must be lowered to permit the direct access across the moat.

The mezzanine of the subway station is immediately under street level.  There is no room here to insert an east-west Front Street LRT station below grade.

Note to the TTC:  When are they going to put current information and detailed plans up on the web page which has not been updated (only reformatted) since 2006?  This in an important project, but one needs a personal archive and other sites’ data to see what is going on here.

Continue reading →

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Sheppard LRT Will Go To Don Mills Station

Today’s TTC Commission Meeting was rather short, but it included a discussion of the current state of the Sheppard LRT project.

TTC staff reported that the EA document is now being considered by the Ministry of the Environment who had sought clarification on whether the Sheppard Subway was to be extended.  Staff will formally recommend later in April that the LRT line come into Don Mills Station rather than ending at Consumers Road.

This arrangement simplifies connections with the Finch to Don Mills LRT announced earlier this week.

No details on funding for the project are available, but the TTC is continuing with design, and the City of Toronto is carrying the cost on its own books.

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Ottawa & Queen’s Park Announce GO Transit Improvements

A joint federal-provincial announcement today added a long list of GO transit improvements to the parking lot and the Hamilton Junction grade separation projects.

Among today’s improvements are:

  • Extension of GO Rail service into downtown Barrie (completion in 2011)
  • Expansion of the tunnel at Exhibition Station to provide a new north access, and additional track capacity at this station (completion in 2011)
  • Widening of the Credit River bridge on the Georgetown line to a capacity of three tracks, with two tracks initially on the new structure
  • Refurbishing existing locomotives to improve reliability
  • Adding 20 bi-level coaches to the fleet

Regular readers will know that I railed [sorry about that] against the amount of spending on parking lots announced in February.  Today’s project list is much more oriented to improvement of service and passenger facilities.  Yes, I know that to car commuters, parking is an important part of those facilities, but it’s not the only one.

From a longer range point of view, the planning issue of how parking lots and structures poison station locations remains a big problem.  The Metrolinx plan for “Mobility Hubs” doesn’t work very well without pedestrian-oriented stations and good local bus services.

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Ontario Funds Three Transit City Routes

Today, Queen’s Park announced that it would fund three of the Transit City projects — Eglinton, Finch and the Scarborough RT rehab/extension — as well as upgrading of York VIVA BRT corridors with dedicated lanes.

The announcement is fascinating in places for what it does not say, or leaves for future decisions.  Despite much of the build-it-yesterday rhetoric accompanying the GO/Metrolinx merger, the design and EA processes now under way will run their course.  Indeed, the Transit City projects have been proceeding apace thanks to funding at the municipal level to complete this work without waiting for agencies like Metrolinx to get on board.

The estimated cost for the York VIVA project is $1.4-billion with completion in stages from 2011 to 2013.  Lines that will connect with VIVA include the Spadina and Yonge subway extensions although full funding for the latter is not yet in place.

The Scarborough RT will undergo vehicle replacement, infrastructure upgrades and extension to Malvern Town Centre or to Markham Road.  This project will cost $1.4-billion “depending on the technology choice”, and construction will run from 2010 to 2015.  Connecting lines include “the proposed Sheppard East LRT”.

The Eglinton Crosstown line will run from Pearson Airport to Kennedy with a future extension to Malvern (this is the Scarborough-Malvern TC line).  The line will be tunneled between Keele and Leslie, and the total pricetag is $4.6-billion.  Constuction will run from 2010 to 2016.

The Finch LRT will run from Humber College to Don Mills, and then south to Don Mills Station where it will connect with the “proposed Sheppard Avenue East LRT”.  The project will cost $1.2-billion with construction running from 2010 to 2013.

An obvious question in response to this impressive list is “where’s Sheppard East”?  First off, as I noted above, some lines mentioned in the announcement don’t have funding yet, and the Sheppard LRT is mentioned twice.  Finch is explicitly listed as an LRT project, and the technology choice for the RT is still up in the air (no pun intended).  That choice depends on Metrolinx’ own Benefits Case Analysis (BCA) for Eglinton expected to be available, at least in private session, to the Metrolinx Board this month.  We know that the Scarborough RT BCA looked favourably on the LRT option.

There isn’t much point in building one lonely LRT line up on Finch if it wouldn’t be connecting with a larger network, and I think this suggests a larger LRT network is in our future.

Although the source of funding for Sheppard isn’t announced yet, Mayor Miller speaks of construction starting this year on Transit City.  The only place that is possible is on Sheppard.  Also coming up will be the new streetcar order for the “city” network, yet another opportunity for substantial provincial funding.  I suspect there are more rabbits waiting to pop out of one or more hats.

Finally, lest our friends to the west think I have ignored them in my haste to talk about Transit City, Queen’s Park will also fund rapid transit studies in Hamilton.  No technology is mentioned.  There is strong political support for LRT in Hamilton, but will Queen’s Park and Metrolinx let them build anything more than BRT.  A lot depends on what the studies will reveal about demand and development impacts.

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Union Loop: Trading One Bad Design For Another? (Update 1)

 

I have received a drawing of Union Station Loop that shows its end-state configuration including provision for all services.  This drawing is different from the version in the Queen’s Quay Revitalization document in (a) showing the full length of the west platform and (b) clarifying the staging of implementation for different routes.

The orange section is the first phase to expand capacity onto two platforms.  The pink section would be added to serve the Port Lands development, and the blue section for Bremner.  In its final configuration, according to the TTC:

The currently-proposed layout would ultimately have all of the service to and from the east on the platform under the east teamway allowing us to run two routes/branches from the east, one of which could be a 60m train. Service to and from the west would load under the west teamway with a Queens Quay route (509 or 510, not both) loading on the northern-most platform and the Bremner service loading on the southern-most platform. All of the platforms would operate independently from each other allowing flexibility for service management.

Original Post from March 29:

In my enthusiasm for the new Queen’s Quay designs, I neglected to look carefully at the current scheme for Union Station Loop, especially in the context of plans to build the expanded loop in stages.

Back in the days when the existing loop was designed, Philip Webb and I had a rather testy meeting with TTC Engineering about the capacity of this loop.  Outrageous claims were made for its ability to handle riders even though the TTC (a) completely missed the loss of platform space to carbody swingout and (b) assumed the full capacity of the corridor would be available for passenger flow rather than being used for stacking space as it is today.  The loop is and has been for some time grossly inadequate, and it is a monument to the TTC’s pig-headedness. Continue reading →

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Metrolinx Marries GO, Dumps Pesky Politicians

Today the Government of Ontario announced that GO Transit and Metrolinx would be merged together in one agency.  Some sort of takeover was contemplated in the original Metrolinx legislation which proposed that GO become a division of Metrolinx, but this part of the bill was never proclaimed.

Since last fall when the Regional Transportation Plan emerged, some at Metrolinx have spoken darkly, and usually privately, about how the politicians are getting in the way of accomplishing Metrolinx’ manifest destiny.  Not long ago, a report on the innocent matter of cross-border fare integration showed Metrolinx’ staff’s true colours and their hunger for power over local transit agencies.  Now Queen’s Park has stepped in.

This is hardly a shotgun marriage, but it came as a big surprise to the local politicians who make up the current Metrolinx board.  This group has been accused of being dysfunctional and obstructionist when in fact anyone who actually watches the board at work sees a truly collegial group of senior politicians who are trying to do the right thing both for their own cities and for the region as a whole.  The 416-vs-905 dynamic everyone thought might doom Metrolinx never developed.

Problems lay, however, in Metrolinx staff and its Chair, Rob MaacIsaac.  Although the agency professed to want as much public input as possible, this was stage managed to produce feel-good support for Metrolinx work, and dissent was actively discouraged.  When the Board asked for a few extra months to fine-tune the RTP, a process that anyone who saw early drafts will know made a huge improvement to the final product, they were seen as delaying progress even though the plan did come out on time.

If anything, the foot-dragging lies at Queen’s Park and in Ottawa, neither of which has shown much love for actually paying for transit projects.  Lots of promises, but no money.  Indeed, the whole concept of multi-party funding schemes is a guarantee of inaction.

What will be the effect of this merger?  In the short term, many things are unknown, but there is good reason to worry that Queen’s Park may actually have derailed the very agency that was on the verge of building a regional network. Continue reading →

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Queen’s Quay Revitalization Plan

This week, Waterfront Toronto released detailed plans (18MB download) for the redesign of Queen’s Quay between Bathurst and Parliament Streets.

Updated May 7, 2009:  The presentation has moved to a new URL, and related information can be found on the project’s web page.

This plan is the culmination of several studies, some of which seemed to go on forever, but in the end we have a design that has widespread community acceptance.  By “we”, I mean Toronto, my city, a city that too often settles for half-baked functional plans that do little to stir real pride in what we have and what will be built.

Some elements of this plan have appeared on this site before, notably the design work for the East Bayfront LRT and the long debates on a portal to the Bay Street LRT tunnel.  I will try not to duplicate those details.

This post is intended as an overview of the long presentation, a walking tour, if you will, along the waterfront-to-be.  Page numbers refer to the PDF itself regardless of any numbers that may appear on individual panels. Continue reading →

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All Over The Waterfront (Update 4)

Update 1, March 17, 5:50 pm:  More details have been added about the various alignment options for the Waterfront West line through Parkdale.

Update 2, March 24, 7:55 pm:  Feedback from the TTC about Parkdale alignment details.  Details of Queen’s Quay public meetings added.

Update 3, March 25, 6:00 am:  The preferred option for the Kingston Road line is BRT.

Update 4, March 28, 11:10 pm:  The presentation from the March 25 public meeting on the Queen’s Quay redesign is now available online.  Note that this file is almost 18MB for those of you with slow network links.  The document is quite extensive, and I will review it in a separate post.

Transit planning on Toronto’s waterfront leaves much to be desired thanks to the patchwork of overlapping studies and projects for two decades.  Options for the portion between Parkdale and Bathurst Street have changed with the recent cancellation of the Front Street Extension, but no planning based on ths possibility has ever been conducted.

Throughout its history, planning for the waterfront has been fragmented and compromised to fit around whatever other projects had real political clout.  To help focus discussion of the waterfront as a whole, this post gives an overview of all of the projects and schemes from Long Branch to West Hill. Continue reading →

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Roncesvalles Redesign Public Meeting (Update 2)

Updated March 28: 

I have received reports from various sources that the recent public meetings on this project were a bit of a mess because the project’s representatives could not explain how their preferred option would work, and even supporters were left scratching their heads.  This option is explained, although not illustrated, by a post on the Roncesvalles Village BIA’s website.

The big problem is that the “new” scheme was so recently added to the mix that the project doesn’t have proper illustrations for it, only engineering plan views (looking straight down, in two dimensions, with no sense of how the street would actually work or look for people on it).  There is a somewhat clearer illustration on Bike Toronto’s site, although their drawing does not show clearly how the bike lane would ramp up to sidewalk level at transit stops.

Another surprise, lost in the shuffle, is that almost no parking will be eliminated by this plan.  Roncesvalles, unlike major streets such as St. Clair, has comparatively little traffic, and converting curb lane space to permanent parking and loading zones bounded by sidewalk “bump outs” won’t seriously affect traffic flow.

John Bowker of the BIA writes:

Torontoist is reporting broad opposition at the meeting to the City/TTC proposals. The truth is that the presentation was regrettably weak and unclear. The City and TTC even managed to confuse their own supporters. Many members of the supposedly angry crowd asking about the proposals were actually Roncesvalles Renewed members, all of whom support the pro-transit values underlying the concept proposals. Torontoist also falsely claims the sidewalk plan would eliminate right turn lanes, but anyway …

Lisa Rainford from the Bloor West Villager describes the meeting more accurately, emphasizing confusion over hostility.

The City/TTC presented a plan that reduces parking losses from 26% to eight percent – just 19 spots. And that’s during the day. During the evenings and on weekends, when loading zones are not in use, the plan reduces parking by less than five percent – a mere 11 spots. And the City and TTC were able to do this without affecting traffic flow or greatly altering the original vision of new and enhanced public spaces. This is incredibly good news (at least for businesses), and no one at the meeting even knew. This plan comes as close to having your cake and eating it too as anyone could have hoped.

Update 1, March 26:  The presentation boards and slides are now available on the project’s website.

The City of Toronto will hold a public meeting tonight to present the recommended design for the revitalization of Roncesvalles Avenue.

The meeting will be held

Monday March 23, 2009
6:00pm – 9:00pm (presentation at 7:00 pm)
Howard Jr Public School, 30 Marmaduke St.

Further information is available on the City’s project website and on the Roncesvalles Village website.