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Are we really contemplating more LRTs?

Eglinton East and Hamilton... anything else on the drawing board? Jane?

That is to say, once this round of building is complete, will all that experience be frittered away?

All of those, plus perhaps Finch to Yonge and to the airport, , the Waterfront, KW Phase II. One wonders about Brampton or Mississauga wanting to extend or add a second line.

- Paul
 
I’m skeptical about Waterfront East or Eglinton East being funded. Both are Toronto-only projects that Doug Ford is unlikely to champion (ie give money for) and the city is cash-strapped.

Speaking of the city - it seems to be in no hurry to spend on WELRT, even though that would be incredibly useful given the Portlands. Affordable housing and SOGR seems to be eating up all available cash and the big capital ask to the feds are for new subway cars. Meanwhile, the EELRT seems to be poor value for the dollar, which makes me think that the city will continue to slow-roll it unless they get some unexpected largesse.
 
I absolutely think Finch should be extended - to the airport - and that easily makes sense. Unfortunately the Ford government has been mum on that too.

As for the ION - I’ve read good things on the forum, but the extension costs seem shockingly high, and, I’ve read lots of concerns about the routing that I’ve no real knowledge to assess the validity of.
 
I absolutely think Finch should be extended - to the airport - and that easily makes sense. Unfortunately the Ford government has been mum on that too.

As for the ION - I’ve read good things on the forum, but the extension costs seem shockingly high, and, I’ve read lots of concerns about the routing that I’ve no real knowledge to assess the validity of.
From what I understand the concerns of routing are simply over the fact that it travels through a lot of swamps and valleys that necessitates the line to spend a lot of its travel length elevated, which seems to be the main culprit for many of its cost increases. For what its worth the alignment seems to be a lot better than Phase 1 of the iON, but that's frankly not a high bar to clear. It also doesn't help that due to the slow nature of Phase 1, a lot of questions can be raised about the value of the extension. It already takes 30m to get from Fairway to Kitchener City hall on the iON, that's already roughly the travel time to do the same by Car from Downtown Cambridge from the time I'm writing this. Is it really worth spending $4B on an extension where people will still have to travel up to an hour to get to Kitchener (never mind even Waterloo)?
 
Are we really contemplating more LRTs?

Eglinton East and Hamilton... anything else on the drawing board? Jane?

That is to say, once this round of building is complete, will all that experience be frittered away?
We have plenty more LRTs that are in the planning pipeline:
  • Eglinton East LRT (Toronto)
  • Waterfront LRT (Toronto)
  • Hurontario LRT Extension (Mississauga Loop and Brampton)
  • Hamilton LRT (Hamilton)
  • iON LRT Extension (Cambridge)
  • Ottawa LRT Extension (Barrhaven and Kanata)
Local LRT construction experience is not going away anytime soon.
 
From what I understand the concerns of routing are simply over the fact that it travels through a lot of swamps and valleys that necessitates the line to spend a lot of its travel length elevated, which seems to be the main culprit for many of its cost increases. For what its worth the alignment seems to be a lot better than Phase 1 of the iON, but that's frankly not a high bar to clear. It also doesn't help that due to the slow nature of Phase 1, a lot of questions can be raised about the value of the extension. It already takes 30m to get from Fairway to Kitchener City hall on the iON, that's already roughly the travel time to do the same by Car from Downtown Cambridge from the time I'm writing this. Is it really worth spending $4B on an extension where people will still have to travel up to an hour to get to Kitchener (never mind even Waterloo)?

Yeah, getting to Cambridge from the existing terminus at Fairway requires 6 bridges which make the price astronomical. The primary issue is that all the bridges are from Fairway to Pinebush so for the business case they are considering a case where they only building the Pinebush to Galt stretch with BRT filling in the middle since hwy 8 and the 401 is competitive from a speed perspective until there is a crash.

Bridge 1: Fairway/CP track (510m)
Bridge 2: Elevated over topography caused by River Rd Extension (140m)
Bridge 3: Grand River, Hwy 8 ramp, topography (1410m)
Bridge 4: Fountain/Shantz Station, Speed River (630m)
Bridge 5: CP tracks (450m)
Bridge 6: CN tracks (100m)

In the Region's official plan they already have plans in place for another LRT corridor which is definitely more feasible then the existing Cambridge plan. It's just political suicide to do it before Cambridge.
 
I’m skeptical about Waterfront East or Eglinton East being funded. Both are Toronto-only projects that Doug Ford is unlikely to champion (ie give money for) and the city is cash-strapped.

Speaking of the city - it seems to be in no hurry to spend on WELRT, even though that would be incredibly useful given the Portlands. Affordable housing and SOGR seems to be eating up all available cash and the big capital ask to the feds are for new subway cars. Meanwhile, the EELRT seems to be poor value for the dollar, which makes me think that the city will continue to slow-roll it unless they get some unexpected largesse.

You know you're awesome, but I think you've gotten sidetracked by your goal to appear more cynical and pessimistic than @Amare .

While you're making some real progress in that regard, I'm not sure it suits you. Why not leave that to our good friend from out west, LOL
 
*Or* are they using DD-MM-YY format, and they are already 4 days behind? 🤔
I wish everyone would use the ISO-approved YYYY-MM-DD format. It leaves no room for confusion.

Also, this will be our first example of 24-hour time on the TTC. Something that should be standard. It's stupid that Mx and TTC use different formats.
 
I absolutely think Finch should be extended - to the airport - and that easily makes sense. Unfortunately the Ford government has been mum on that too.

As for the ION - I’ve read good things on the forum, but the extension costs seem shockingly high, and, I’ve read lots of concerns about the routing that I’ve no real knowledge to assess the validity of.
I assume the Finch extension is depended on the airport finalizing how they are going to incorporate Line 5/6 into Pearson and they've been silent on their plans. In the meantime, it'd be nice if Line 6 was extended to Woodbine GO station.
 
You know you're awesome, but I think you've gotten sidetracked by your goal to appear more cynical and pessimistic than @Amare .

While you're making some real progress in that regard, I'm not sure it suits you. Why not leave that to our good friend from out west, LOL

😂

Fair enough.

FWIW, I would love to see more transit projects in Toronto (regardless of whether they're LRT or not). We have so much potential.
 
I assume the Finch extension is depended on the airport finalizing how they are going to incorporate Line 5/6 into Pearson and they've been silent on their plans. In the meantime, it'd be nice if Line 6 was extended to Woodbine GO station.
I believe (from memory!) that the line was predicated on big plans Union Station West, which would have seen quite a bit of office development as well. Well - the office market fell out and airports across Canada had to take on a lot of debt to keep going through the pandemic. I'm honestly unsure if the GTAA has the appetite - or the funds! - for a transit terminus.
 
I wish everyone would use the ISO-approved YYYY-MM-DD format. It leaves no room for confusion.

While I agree, the main benefit to ISO8602 is that alphabetical sort and date sort are the exact same, which meant you could sort it in a programming language like COBOL without a lot of additional code to transform the string first. It's also a language agnostic format.

North American banking went with it pretty much everywhere because they had a lot of COBOL when picking interchange standards. Of course, some used a 2-year date to save space and hardcoded the 19 so it was actually YY-MM-DD which, as we know, caused some concerns ~25 years ago.
 
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We have plenty more LRTs that are in the planning pipeline:
  • Eglinton East LRT (Toronto)
  • Waterfront LRT (Toronto)
  • Hurontario LRT Extension (Mississauga Loop and Brampton)
  • Hamilton LRT (Hamilton)
  • iON LRT Extension (Cambridge)
  • Ottawa LRT Extension (Barrhaven and Kanata)
Local LRT construction experience is not going away anytime soon.
AFAIK, only Hurontario and Hamilton are "likely". Eglinton East and Waterfront are unfunded. Haven't heard anything about iON or Ottawa.
 

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