afransen
Senior Member
Skip the tunnel in Brampton and just do a short cut and cover stretch with an underground station at Brampton GO only. Save a billion dollars or two.
afransen
Senior Member
And watching the painfully slow and difficult utility relocations and trackbed construction on Hurontario, I find it very hard to believe that a largely precast guideway installation would have been much costlier. The stations would cost more, but frankly in low density suburbs, these stations should be spaced further with bus service to fill the gaps. You only attract ridership with frequency and speed (avg speed + wait time). Adding 500 passengers a day at a midblock stop probably hurts more than it helps. I kind of expect in the not too distant future, short distances/last mile will be covered by autonomous ridehail more than buses. Huge rail investments should be focused on speed and moving many people longer distances and less trying to avoid anyone who has mobility issues having the walk more than a couple hundred meters.
Dan416
Senior Member
Yes it was closed again, but I'm not sure if it's opened back up yet because I'm stuck in NYC till Sunday due to my flight being cancelled due to high winds. Will check next time I either go to the office or go for a walk in the area. It is frustrating that they keep closing it though.
And on the topic of SkyTrain, of course I would have taken that over LRT if we can't operate LRTs properly in this province.
sixrings
Senior Member
I’d take sky train on Dundas because there’s a million lights. But all our issues with driving these lrts should be fixable
If somehow GO got rid of cooksville and erindale and made a central station at Square one would that make the loop more bearable for people whose use case is more like @drum118
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Tim MacDonald
Senior Member
Dec 21st
New NB traffic pattern under the QEW.
More to come later.
New NB traffic pattern under the QEW.
More to come later.
Bojaxs
Senior Member
Tim MacDonald
Senior Member
December 21st
Tim MacDonald
Senior Member
6ixGod
Active Member
Interesting. Setting aside all the corruption and money-laundering allegations, it does raise a more basic question: are LRTs actually as easy or as quick to build as they’re often sold to be?
We now have multiple examples where the promise hasn’t matched reality. These projects are still complex, disruptive, utility-heavy builds that run for years, blow past timelines, and create prolonged surface-level chaos. Whatever theoretical advantages LRTs are supposed to have in cost or speed clearly aren’t materialising in practice.
At some point it’s fair to ask whether the problem isn’t just execution, but the assumption itself. If LRTs are just as slow, disruptive, and politically painful to deliver…….yet end up with lower speed and capacity than fully grade-separated transit………then the rationale for choosing them over subways becomes very weak.
IMO, the entire Hurontario line should have been elevated. Mississauga is already a stroad hell, so we might as well have made proper use of all that asphalted space. An elevated alignment would have avoided years of utility relocation, traffic disruption, and business impacts, while delivering faster, more reliable service from day one. Instead, we opted for a surface compromise that maximised construction pain without maximising performance.
goodcitywhenfinished
Active Member
I am of the opinion that the Waterfront East LRT should be the last time a single dollar is put towards street running rail transit in the Greater Toronto Area. The Hamilton LRT should be descoped into a BRT.
The Eglinton East LRT is an absolutely insane idea and I would honestly donate money to a campaign for its cancellation.
I am beginning to genuinely believe that Transit City was more harmful to transit in the GTA than the premiership of Mike Harris.
Amare
Senior Member
So a clown who was in power for 7 years who absolutely destroyed transit in virtually every municipality in Ontario through: the elimination of operating subsidies, cancellation of various transit expansion plans, refused to provide capital funds for infrastructure replacement, etc. was less harmful to transit in the GTA than a plan that attempted to improve transit in Toronto?
I mean, what now?
Let's make one thing very clear; Mike Harris was the worst thing that's ever happened to Ontario in the past century. He destroyed this province in ways that we are still trying to recover from.
6ixGod
Active Member
100% agreed. In Toronto’s case, there shouldn’t even be an LRT to begin with. The city had three simple modes: subway, streetcar, bus.
In a proper plan, St. Clair, Spadina, and Lakeshore streetcars would all be upgraded to modern, higher-capacity streetcars, while Finch West could be newly built to the same standards. That would mean installing proper signals, upgrading tracks, and removing unnecessary stops…. essentially bringing all these corridors to the new higher echelons of streetcar service in Toronto.
Transit City was a disaster from day one. It was underwhelming and failed to deliver for a fast-growing region. As a millennial, I remember the media hype at the time, everyone calling it “amazing,” while people around me in high school were thinking, really? It was going to be messy: not just the construction, but the system design itself. For example, someone traveling along Sheppard would have had to change modes three times (LRT, subway, LRT).
Toronto’s midtown Line 5 clearly requires high-capacity solutions. LRT was the wrong choice, and the opening next year will prove it. I’m tired of repeating myself. I’ll just sit back and watch.
Moderate-density corridors, like Line 7 Eglinton East, can work with LRT or BRT, but only if they are properly designed, on par with the ION in Kitchener—Waterloo, with minimal street running and maximum use of dedicated ROW. ION should be a case study in how to actually build LRTs, in my opinion.
Hamilton LRT should be underground. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Busy suburban corridors like Hurontario LRT can also work. They even had a model to go by….the Mississauga Transitway, which in itself was modelled after the Ottawa Transitway. At the very least, they could just build underpasses at every intersection and place stations beneath the box. How’s that for a proper shelter? Mississauga’s roads are notoriously large…..make use of that space!
Bojaxs
Senior Member
If you're going to bury an LRT, then you may aswell do a light metro.
Cut & cover instead of tunnelling.
The Hamilton LRT is already being setup for failure. They've scrapped the LRT bridge going over the 403, and instead will have it do two hard turns on Dundurn St.
urbanclient
Active Member
I concur with @goodcitywhenfinished @6ixGod . It's not that Mike Harris wasn't awful, it's that a lot of people are not cognizant of the opportunity costs associated with building a tram instead of a metro. Especially if the corridor becomes dense enough to require a high capacity metro in the future. If you pick tram, especially the abominations on Hurontario and Eglinton, you are more or less stuck with it forever with upgrades to metro being financially unfeasible. There is precedence for this which I discussed previously:
The likelihood of Hurontario and Eglinton being upgraded to metro by 2100 is virtually 0. The likelihood of Hurontario and Eglinton needing a real metro is decidedly higher than 0.
It's the insidious harm of lowered expectations that Transit City was really guilty of. No other city that is the current size of Toronto is building trams to perform the duties of a light metro, along two critical north-south, east-west corridors. The paradigm behind Transit City was not ambitious and did not see Toronto growing to be the size it is today: a metropolitan global city that has more demographic peers in East Asia than in Western Europe or the United States.
Without Harris, a full Eglinton subway might have been completed in phases. Consequently, Miller's Transit City might've never gotten its claws on Eglinton. Without Transit City though, the 3-4 ill-conceived tram lines in the GTHA might've never been built... in favour of better suited transit modes.
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Westey
New Member
Harris gets a bad rap.
He built transit at a similar rate than most other Premiers. And he started with a terrible economy where there was not much available money. Even McGuinty/Wynne made plenty of announcement but continually delayed design to slow the flow of money.
I think he should have built the tunnel (launch shaft was started) and done the stations at a later time.
- I am not sure if this was actually feasible (e.g. was the road clear of obstacles for a 5-year mothball?
- I don't know the costs back then, but the tunnelling itself is roughly 15% (?) of the total, so for a not huge cost he could have continued the Eglinton subway at a slower pace.