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But you couldn't believe the news the last decade. It was solely manipulated by the left to push their urban left wing biking and pedestrian agenda. How could we know prices were going to go up this much?
 
Hid what from us? The city has been warning of cost escalations for years. We’ve discussed it extensively in this thread
Certainly not exaggerated! Go back to the top of this thread. In 2006 TTC came up with the $1.2 billion 2-station (Scarborough Centre and Lawrence East) plan and then decided that was too expensive, so dropped it from consideration.

Didn't someone comment back then that it could be done for less than $1.2 billion? I'd think anyone who said that this will cost over $4-billion before it was done would have been blocked for trolling! :)

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Why do we think anything has been hidden since the 2016 or so estimate? Look at the timeframe on that - it was escalated cost and would open in 2023. If you throw in another 3-4 delay to the 2026/2027 they are now looking at, the big question to me is why hasn't it gone up even more!
Ok but Tory could have told us months ago the Scarb extension. He didnt for political reasons
 
Ok but Tory could have told us months ago the Scarb extension. He didnt for political reasons
True. But given that the escalation seems less than I'd expect for a 3-4 year delay since the 2023 opening date assumption in the previous pricing, I'm actually surprised. I assumed it was worse than this. The paranoia must be huge.

But there's other ways of dealing with it. Have to give Metrlolinx credit (on this, if nothing else). To this day, they always discuss Eglinton and Finch West costs in 2010 $. They've never done much reporting on actual cash flows.

Can you imagine the reporting that would be out there if they discussed the actual spending amounts accounting for the years of delays!
 
Because those projects are not being calculated in escalated dollars. It's actually rather unusual to use escalated dollars from my understanding. The province typically doesn't do it for it's projects, only the city is doing it for theirs (DRL, Eglinton West/East).

The Eglinton Crosstown increased because of scope creep, same way this is moving. The Mount Dennis portal got more extensive with some increased grade separation that can be blamed for most of the increased costs, from my understanding.

The $1.5 billion LRT cost in escalated dollars at planned year of expenditure would likely have been well north of $2.5 billion, for comparison. That was in 2010 dollars, which are significantly below even 2019 dollars.

None of this explains a doubling of the cost in a few years.

If we take the current $5.3 billion cost of the Eglinton LRT and assume it's in 2007 dollars, the cost in 2019 dollars is $6,468,693,285. That's a large $1.9 billion jump on the original $4.6 billion estimate (cost difference is even less if you convert that to 2019 dollars), but it's still nowhere near double the cost. And in this case we're talking about 12 years, not just 2-3.
 
None of this explains a doubling of the cost in a few years.
I don't think any first indication that the provinces claim that it has doubled is true. In the few years since the $3.5 billion or so estimate, the increase seems less than the typical 4% rule of thumb for construction inflation.

We do expect it to double in about 17-18 years though, just through inflation. So if earlier pricing was (say) $2 billion in 2007$ and current pricing is in esclated (year of spending) dollars at $4 billion with a centroid of 2024, then that would be no increase at all. You could figure out the average year of spend (centroid) by checking the weighted spending indicated in the 2018-2028 budget. It's probably close to 2024 ... I'm not looking right now, but the peak year was I think 2023 or 2024, with heavy spending through 2027, and then tapering off to about 2029.
 
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I don't think there's any first indication that the provinces claim that it has doubled is true. In the few years since the $3.5 billion or so estimate, the increase seems less than the typical 4% rule of thumb for construction inflation.

We do expect it to double in about 17-18 years though, just through inflation. So if earlier pricing was (say) $2 billion in 2007$ and current pricing is in esclated (year of spending) dollars at $4 billion with a centroid of 2024, then that would be no increase at all. You could figure out the average year of spend (centroid) by checking the weighted spending indicated in the 2018-2028 budget. It's probably close to 2024 ... I'm not looking right now, but the peak year was I think 2023 or 2024, with heavy spending through 2027, and then tapering off to about 2029.

With unlisted costs factored in, they were already at near $4 billion last year (with a $5 billion ceiling as they moved towards design completion).

Let's not forget the $4 billion cost mentioned is from a TTC staffer, not the province - according to the latter it's a lot higher.
 
Let's not forget the $4 billion cost mentioned is from a TTC staffer, not the province - according to the latter it's a lot higher.
The TTC is preparing the tenders and running the project. Any provincial information comes from TTC.

Also we know that Doug Ford lies.

It seems unlikely that it's doubled ... of course if you want to build it much longer with 3 times the stations, and delay construction into the 2030s with a PPP and built in 40-year maintenance/operating contracts ... yes it will double
 
The cost of Eglinton LRT escalated even more than the cost of SSE. Eglinton LRT was quoted at 2.2B in the original Transit City plan. Then it went up to 3.4B, then 4.3B, and at the end we are getting a shortened line (Kennedy to Mt Dennis instead of to Pearson) for 6+ Billion.

Perhaps we need a better way to express the cost of transit projects, in order to compare apples to apples. Would "actual dollars expected to be spent by the expected completion date" be a good metrics?

The situation where the very same project can be costed either at 2B or at 3.2B, dependent solely on the accounting method, doesn't make the planning of transit expansions easy.
 
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