generalcanada
Senior Member
Didnt you write like a year ago you were quitting urbantoronto?
LOL
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- Thread starter innsertnamehere
- Start date
LOL
cplchanb
Senior Member
http://www.unbuilttoronto.ca/
We can probably add this to their next volume... what a sad sad waste of a generational opportunity to bring us to the late 20th century. All because of politics, bureaucracy and just plain incompetence. Im afraid we won't see something come up until we are retired or dead
We can probably add this to their next volume... what a sad sad waste of a generational opportunity to bring us to the late 20th century. All because of politics, bureaucracy and just plain incompetence. Im afraid we won't see something come up until we are retired or dead
Reecemartin
Active Member
I care a lot about public transit, and this is where info about what's being built gets posted.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
I agree and find it really disheartening how certain people here let the perfect come in the way of the good, by dismissing what is still one of the largest transformations any metropolitan area on this planet is seeing right now, just because the apparent over-ambition has been scaled back to something far more deliverable. Nobody in 25 years will look back and deny that it was worth it, even if we all would have preferred to have it sooner…
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Northern Light
Superstar
How about everyone stepping back from personal critiques and shots at other posters.
I get it. We all find someone's posts irksome at times. Some will even lament my penchant for writing books.
But the trading of barbs derails the thread, as does over-the-top reactions to posts, which in turn are sometimes taken personally, as disrespect, and its an infection that spreads.
Lets please stick to the subject of this thread, in this thread.
While some degree of speculation is required with an organization as opaque as Mx, let's try to keep it credible and about the foreseeable future; and if one disagrees with another poster's take, fair game.........but please don't personalize or snark it up. Just state that you disagree and provide reasons/evidence.
I get it. We all find someone's posts irksome at times. Some will even lament my penchant for writing books.
But the trading of barbs derails the thread, as does over-the-top reactions to posts, which in turn are sometimes taken personally, as disrespect, and its an infection that spreads.
Lets please stick to the subject of this thread, in this thread.
While some degree of speculation is required with an organization as opaque as Mx, let's try to keep it credible and about the foreseeable future; and if one disagrees with another poster's take, fair game.........but please don't personalize or snark it up. Just state that you disagree and provide reasons/evidence.
dowlingm
Senior Member
"I like to imagine a future Toronto where we can build infrastructure that other developed world cities in democratic countries can build instead of always giving in to overpowering cynicism" - it's not overpowering cynicism. The number of people who post on forums like these with the idea that nothing should change is vanishingly small. What's not helpful is downloading the labour of understanding how a project might be implemented to your readers.
If you have an idea for how, bearing in mind the constraints along Bay Street in respect of grade, geology, the PATH, utilities etc., a heavy rail tunnel could be added to it while still somehow being part of the GO system, be my guest and show your work.
Reecemartin
Active Member
I did not ask anyone to tell me how something was possible. Someone said "no tunnels are needed" and I gave some reasons we might build some in decades. You then suggested that don't take criticism well, and then sort of implied this wasn't possible because we currently have a dysfunctional transit building apparatus and suggested that I was either naive or baiting people.
I spend lots of time talking about our dysfunctional transit building apparatus. That apparatus is still building a new subway across the downtown core.
"Heavy rail, rapid transit, subway, mainline EMU" is all meaningless in a future GO context where we potentially use EMUs etc. (these trains would be shorter in length and height, and would have performance similar to a subway train) I mentioned in the post you quoted that this was in a far off future where we may build some infrastructure which is specific to electric trains, which can and should be just as nimble as subway rolling stock - which you can see in Munich, London, Melbourne, etc etc ad nauseum.
Building a tunnel roughly along Bay street is not easy, but it's hardly unprecedented globally, and even in Toronto we are building longer tunnels for the OL which deal with the path, utilities etc. might a tunnel be deep? Would it not literally turn north up Bay at present day Union station? Sure, but it's hardly impossible if we get our house in order. Munich is building their second S-Bahn tunnel, Berlin is doing another cross city tunnel, Melbourne has it's loop and a new tunnel, Tokyo has various tunnels. etc etc etc.
Anyways, none of that matters, because it seems you personally have a bone to pick with me and found me to be "downloading" work onto the forum. I'll shut up and not reply further as suggested by @Northern Light .
ssiguy2
Senior Member
For Toronto to truly advance and get GO electrified, Metrolinx must go along with all of it's head staff. There is absolutely, positively NO reason to think that this 2032 target will be met. ML hasn't managed to bring a single line on-time & on-budget. It's called corruption and shocking incompetence. All the funding in the world isn't going to change the fact that they simply are not a properly function organization. Not only can it not bring projects on-line but, even worse, it has no direction as to where it wants to go. You can change your ship from a rudderless canoe to a rudderless yacht but that won't change the fact that you will still be going no where fast.
afransen
Senior Member
What degree of incompetence and fecklessness would we have to see Metrolinx and their political masters to be worthy of scorn? You seem to be putting a positive spin on a massively descoped program as being more deliverable. Yes that is true. However, Metrolinx has done a very poor job of delivering even this much more modest scope for a reasonable cost and timeline. Skillful control this is not.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
Maybe (just maybe), if you had benefited from more exposure to the railroad industry and especially projects and networks in other countries, you wouldn’t be so fixated on the idea that any of the troubles and descoping we’ve seen here in the GTHA lately is unique to Ontario or unprecedented in any way. Talk to railfans elsewhere on the globe and they will also insist that the gras is greener almost everywhere else than home.
It’s surely useful to be critical, but you should always consider what was, is and will be feasible given the applicable constraints (especially the political, fiscal and economic ones) when judging the outcomes (especially the early ones). I don’t care about what promises were made in the past, I care about how plausible and realistic are the stated objectives and timelines now and how does the observable progress compare with them. And that’s where I’m still largely positive about GO Expansion and highy skeptical about ALTO…
afransen
Senior Member
I don't see how enthusiasm is warranted for GO Expansion. We are a decade on from the announcement of GO Expansion (GO RER). What little progress has been made has not been very coherent, and given the track record of Metrolinx, we should take with a grain of salt any promises of what will be delivered by 2032 and so on. They seem to be most effective at building palatial parking garages.
JSF-1
Active Member
The problem with this reasoning is that no amount of money or political will can fix the fact that Metrolinx is full of people who view RER as "a repudiation of all they have accomplished", and "that's not how things work here". All the money and political backing means nothing if you don't have the right people for the job and it should be abundantly clear Metrolinx does not have the right people for this job, or any job that has been asked of them. Metrolinx suffers from the same degenerative old railhead, old boys club culture that the TTC and the Freight operators suffer from. They are quite content with the status quo and would prefer to keep outsiders out so they don't get their ego's hurt when they are inevitably told that there is a better way. They are not going to usher us into some golden age of passenger rail service anytime soon. Metrolinx is a rotten organization that needs to be cleaned out and populated by people with an actual vision if we are to have any hope of digging ourselves out of our transit mess. This probably isn't going to happen anytime soon with the Province putting one of their own goons in charge instead of someone with the capacity to tell the old heads to pound sand.
I think somone on Reddit summed it up nicely. Metrolinx is run by "railway people", not "transit people"
** Rant Over **.(Trust me I could have kept going but I won't. My disdain for Metrolinx is boundless and they keep have yet to give me a reason to stop).
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Urban Sky
Senior Member
Again: better familiarity with other countries would greatly help you interpreting the progress already achieved and comparing it with the pace achieved elsewhere. At the recommendation of @Reecemartin, I’ve looked at the RER network which Perth has achieved, which is indeed very similar to what was and still is promised for Toronto: it took them more than 30 years to deliver (in a steady series of discrete projects and as part of an evolving vision) and they are still not finished…
Such people you describe certainly exist at ML, but they thankfully don’t run the show (same is true at VIA). It sometimes help to talk with rather than about the people who are in charge of delivering this megaproject. The visible progress in the last decade might have been painfully slow, but it includes the groundwork for anything to come. I invite you to come over to Montreal if you want a study tour of what happens if you start building a new transit network without bothering to identify (let alone: build) the necessary groundwork beforehand…
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dowlingm
Senior Member
If you wanted to delay transit expansion in Toronto further, zeroing out Metrolinx but then dealing with the ramifications of that for GO operations, stations and tracks on LSE, LSW, Barrie, Kitchener, Stouffville, Line 5/6/10/Hamilton, Ontario Line, the Richmond Hill train yard, the downtown train yard, the bus group contract orders, Presto would take years to sort out before you ever turned a new sod
crs1026
Superstar
There is a steady stream of things getting done at ML, the problem is that the actual reality of what is going on and what is promised, or said to be going on, are very different.
While there may be some change resistance, I would argue there has also been an unhealthy injection of people who believe things change overnight and by merely waving a magic wand. The “we know better” mentality is even more pronounced from those who claim to see the “vision”. Folks, nothing happens overnight, and successful change is all about managing the details.
I agree that ML has been guilty of poor work management and shifting priorities. More could be done faster. But at the same time, there are logical sequences and money flows in tranches and not all at once.
If anyone is dreaming of subway-like EMU’s, level boarding, automated train operation, and such… wonderful. I don’t disagree. But it won’t all happen at once. A lot of the frustration expressed on UT is just impatience and the pushback is not change resistance, it’s informed people explainjng how it needs to play out.
What is needed is a more adult conversation where ML lays out its plans and sequencing, and the public then holds them to account for getting it done. Plan the work, but then work the plan. Elephants are eaten only one strak at a time (insert other good cliches here)
- Paul