[Solid Snake]

Pay for the Scarborough Wye. the report recommends a 20% lower capital expenditure remember, though this does include cancelling the $7 billion DRL.

The Scarborough subway will be built. My critic of the report is that it ignores the need for stops around downtown for the DRL. A street like King must have a subway underneath it to bring service to areas like Parkdale, the edge of Liberty Village, Cityplace and Distillery District/West Don Lands and then going north east

 

[salsa]

How about the savings from cancelling both Finch and Sheppard LRT goes to elevating Eglinton East? They estimate the upgrade at 800M$.

How about sticking to the transit plans for once? It's never going to be perfect, but if we are going to continuously keep changing them then nothing will get build.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

I have two concerns about the WYE proposal:

Cost - It is my understanding that ALRT has significantly higher operational costs than LRT. If this is true then I don’t see any benefit to using ALRT over high floor light rail vehicles that utilize third rail for power collection. I'm sure that somebody more knolegable on ALRT could comment on this.


Routing - Routing the WYE along Highway 401 is less than ideal. It moves the line at least a kilometer away from potential redevelopments on Sheppard, consequently harming the walkability of the area. Instead the line should run on an elevated guideway on Sheppard Avenue East. This should cost the same as routing it along Highway 401, improves the area’s walkability and should use no more road space than would have been used by the planned ROW on Sheppard East.

 

[Solid Snake]

How about sticking to the transit plans for once? It's never going to be perfect, but if we are going to continuously keep changing them then nothing will get build.

The LRT plan is not cost effective... (a waste of limited ressources)

 

[TheTigerMaster]

How about sticking to the transit plans for once? It's never going to be perfect, but if we are going to continuously keep changing them then nothing will get build.

Depends. I absolutely don't support changing plans if it's just for the sake of playing political games. But if changing plans presents genuine benefit then I'm all in.

 

[Voltz]

Depends. I absolutely don't support changing plans if it's just for the sake of playing political games. But if changing plans presents genuine benefit then I'm all in.

But the benefit will only come if the transit that you want instead actually gets built, this report is just another nail in the coffin of transit progress, and the already high likely hood of another generation of little to no transit progress has just increased further.

 

[salsa]

Tim Hudak will probably use it as an excuse to scuttle every single transit project in Toronto. Forget about elevating or whatever, if the plans change again then nothing is going to get build, period. How many years have we been waiting just for the Transit City projects to begin construction? By time they are finished, it will have been at least 15 years in the making, and that's just for phase 1.

 

[denfromoakvillemilton]

@TheTigerMaster. The ALRT might cost more, but it can carry much more people and it gets away from the "streetcar of steroids" meme that's going around.

 

[ehlow]

Depends. I absolutely don't support changing plans if it's just for the sake of playing political games. But if changing plans presents genuine benefit then I'm all in.

Don't we want to see new transit built before we all grow too old to use it? I think the whole city wants and needs better & more transit and is frustrated by constant flip-flopping and changing things in the middle of plans, causing delays and cancellation, and the cynicism that nothing will ever get done.

You want a given change made, somebody else disagrees. Every few years the scales tip in one direction, then the other, and they have to start over each time, pushing the completion date years ahead each time. That's what I'm afraid of.

I'm hoping that they get at much tunnelling done as possible on Eglinton so that hopefully no one can cancel or indefinitely delay it.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

As someone living near Avenue and Eglinton, I'm completely on board with getting rid of Avenue road.

It would be quicker for me to take the 61A to Yonge-Eg and transfer there as opposed to transferring at Avenue road then again at Yonge and Eglinton, even assuming the bus really crawls along Eglinton.

Local demand at Avenue n Egliton hardly comes close to justifying a station.

Really, if there's any cardinal rule of transit planning in this city it's that rapid transit should never justify itself based on local demand. No amount of preexisting density or TOD will be able to justify rapid transit. Route layout should basically focus on connecting surface routes.

If the one and only purpose of the Crosstown is to connect with Y-E station and the YUS line, then the only stations we need in the underground portion are Bayview, Yonge, Bathurst, Dufferin, Keele. Everyone in between can be serviced by buses.

If that happened, I'd question why we are even building the Crosstown at all. Funding should go to expanding transit in Etobicoke and Scarborough and the DRL, instead of duplicating B-D at Y-E with little benefit to Midtown/Eglinton Corridor.

 

[Solid Snake]

But the benefit will only come if the transit that you want instead actually gets built, this report is just another nail in the coffin of transit progress, and the already high likely hood of another generation of little to no transit progress has just increased further.

This report is an opportunity to do it right

Every conclusion they have in regards to Transit City is supported by facts using Metrolinx and TTC documents. Most of you hated subway extensions because the facts weren't there to support it but now that it's the same for Transit City we should just build it anyways???

Wow, was I waiting for this one.

Mind you, I'm not saying to build subways on Finch and Sheppard. I'm saying that, due to the evidence they found by double checking Metrolinx and TTC numbers (or lack of) they arrived at the conclusion that

1-Eglinton should be 100% grade separated using automated trains to save operation costs and boost the line ridership which was grossly underestimated by the TTC . I disagree revisiting the choice of vehicles since the tunnels are already being made to accommodate the Flexity Outlook specs

2-Finch West can easily be accommodated by BRT for a fraction of the cost

3a-Their recommendation on Sheppard won't work since the Scarborough subway is pretty much a done deal. Flip flopping on that one again with Federal money involved would be beyond a catastrophe for Toronto and cripple our credibility in demanding future Federal assistance in Transit projects.

3b-They clearly demonstrate that Sheppard LRT will be overkill for the avenue in its current form and that the wrong system was chosen by the TTC (purposely?). They chose not to compare at grade LRT to ALRT (light metro) for that line which would have been the most cost effective option and would have had an impact at reducing gridlock and getting motorists to switch to transit. They called SELRT slow and unlikely to attract that much ridership in its current form. Furthermore, they heavily criticized the methodology used by the TTC to arrive to the concluusion that SELRT was the best choice for the corridor. They even found the 2007 where those who made the LRT study weren't even hiding that LRT was a tool to reshape the corridor instead of actually improveing transit. Their recommandations is to upgrade Sheppard LRT to full grade separated ALRT and eliminate a few stops to increase the speed and convert the Sheppard subway as well...which won't likely happen due to the Scarborough subway happening

3c-Due to the Scarborough subway, the SELRT ridership is expected to drop even further west of McCowan. Sinking 1 Billion dollars is pure waste and could be use to build a BRT an reallocate the balance to upgrade Eglinton by elevating the Eastern part

 

[Solid Snake]

Don't we want to see new transit built before we all grow too old to use it? I think the whole city wants and needs better & more transit and is frustrated by constant flip-flopping and changing things in the middle of plans, causing delays and cancellation, and the cynicism that nothing will ever get done.

You want a given change made, somebody else disagrees. Every few years the scales tip in one direction, then the other, and they have to start over each time, pushing the completion date years ahead each time. That's what I'm afraid of.

I'm hoping that they get at much tunnelling done as possible on Eglinton so that hopefully no one can cancel or indefinitely delay it.

You should be angrier at the fact that under Miller-Giambrone, Transit City studies were botched and were bias towards LRT on its current form for the wrong reasons. Furthermore, they criticized the fact that the studies never gave numbers on the operating and maintenance costs. So, we don't know how much it will cost to operate and maintain those line and the ridership was overestimated on some line and grossly/purposely underestimated on another...

When the Province told them they had billions to spend, they should have taken the money, ran to the bank and start the DRL on the spot. It would have been ready by the Pan am game. Today, we would have been debating what to build on Eglinton instead and how to pay for it.

They said it best

There is no point burdening Toronto for the next century with the wrong system.

Isn't that the same critic the Sheppard subway is constantly getting and yet you would happily do it again just because it's LRT? The worse as they point it out in their report is not only the ridership is overestimated, the operating and maintenance costs are unknown...

BRT can be implemented very fast on both Sheppard and Finch. I think there is time for Metrolinx to go back to the drawing board for the elevated eastern part of Eglinton while the boring machines are at Keele at the moment. How many years will it take for the machines to make it to Laird?

 

[Electrify]

What I like most about it: Converting Sheppard into an ALRT/ICTS line. Honestly, I cannot believe I did not think of this before! One of the main problems about through running Sheppard trains and converting it into an LRT is that it would require heavy retrofitting of the tunnel, or purchasing expensive dual-mode trains. If we switched to ALRT, while you could not run at grade, converting the current tunnel would be far cheaper as you would not need to renovate it to support an overhead wire power supply.

While this begs the question as to why not just run the current line elevated, the problem is the connectivity to the SRT. I would make one adjustment though, and that is to keep it along Sheppard rather than bending it south to the 401. Unless we are to get some new super fast trains, it doesn't make sense to run a metro along a highway. I would operate two branches of the SRT: One from Kennedy to Malvern, taking the route that we all know and love. The other would be to run from Kennedy to Sheppard-Yonge. It would continue along the rail corridor north of Ellesmere, then run elevated above Sheppard to Don Mills and then underground from there.

I also REALLY like how they are calling out the stop spacing on these routes. While some of their suggestions might be a little much, especially considering the low top speeds of our trains, there really is not much need to have more than one or two intermediate stops between every arterial block. If we had trains which could accelerate to 100km/h+ and come to a stop within a 2km stretch, then having arterial stop spacing would make sense.

Perhaps what I like most of all is that someone is willing to think outside the box for a change.

What I don't like Obviously killing of the DRL. GO might be a good alternative for the short term, but Toronto desperately needs some form of lower-downtown cross route. While Ideally something right through the heart along King or Queen would be best, I could see taking down the Gardiner and using the extra space provided to build such a line there. Unfortunately the GO train, even when electrified, is too infrequent and too much of a distance to provide the needed relief, except to dedicated GO fans perhaps.

While I haven't looked at the plans for Finch, but I don't think a BRT would be best, despite the valid critiques. However running in the hydro corridor would be a good alternative. It is a stone's throw away from the main avenue, and could provide a quality rapid solution for crosstown travel. Ideally, rather than building the Sheppard subway to the east, we should have built an ALRT line following the Finch hydro corridor to McCowan, and then connect down to Scaborough Centre and the SRT.

There is a lot of talk that cross Metro Toronto travel should be covered by GO and not the TTC. While there is need for GO improvements within Toronto, the reality is that GO's mandate is to connect between the GTA regions. It is the Toronto Transit Commission's job to move people within the city limits. I'm not saying people should be able to get between Oshawa and Oakville by subway, but getting from Malvern to Rexdale should be at least competitive by TTC compared to GO. As it is, the TTC isn't even competitive getting people from downtown North York to Scarborough Centre! A Finch hydro corridor through service could meet this objective. A 4 transfer disjointed service (Finch LRT/University subway/Sheppard bus/Sheppard subway/Sheppard LRT) does not.

 

[rbt]

2-Finch West can easily be accommodated by BRT for a fraction of the cost.

Kinda. Politics between the works department which handles signal priority could take a huge amount off potential BRT capacity unless it's 100% grade separated.

Their refusal to allow transit priority on routes with frequencies under 5 minutes already impacts Finch (today at 45 seconds in peak; 60 seconds with articulated buses). They have a proposal going through city hall to remove what little transit priority that exists today.

What BRT in a semi-private ROW can achieve in most cities would struggle to meet that here. One of the benefits of LRT is much much longer vehicles "allowing" the Works department to put in a proper transit priority.


Frankly, nearly every major street should have BRT on it already. Paint the pavement, install transit priority at all lights, and hire officers for lane enforcement (ticket the vehicle by their plates, not the driver) and POP fare enforcement.

The reason LRT was proposed was largely due to the works department favouring drivers. Miller certainly had no issues with BRT; he expended lots of political will to build York U's bus lanes.

 

[ehlow]

You should be angrier at the fact that under Miller-Giambrone, Transit City studies were botched and were bias towards LRT on its current form for the wrong reasons. Furthermore, they criticized the fact that the studies never gave numbers on the operating and maintenance costs. So, we don't know how much it will cost to operate and maintain those line and the ridership was overestimated on some line and grossly/purposely underestimated on another...

When the Province told them they had billions to spend, they should have taken the money, ran to the bank and start the DRL on the spot. It would have been ready by the Pan am game. Today, we would have been debating what to build on Eglinton instead and how to pay for it.

They said it best



Isn't that the same critic the Sheppard subway is constantly getting and yet you would happily do it again just because it's LRT? The worse as they point it out in their report is not only the ridership is overestimated, the operating and maintenance costs are unknown...

BRT can be implemented very fast on both Sheppard and Finch. I think there is time for Metrolinx to go back to the drawing board for the elevated eastern part of Eglinton while the boring machines are at Keele at the moment. How many years will it take for the machines to make it to Laird?

I'm not angry about that because I have no problem with the LRT. In fact I would like the Eglinton LRT to be completed. I don't have an issue with elevating the east end, I just think the time to debate that was over years ago when they did the EA originally. There will certainly be tons of people against the elevated part if that does change, causing another movement to change plans yet again.

Although I see no need to change the vehicles from LRT to ALRT. The plan was to automate LRT anyways in the fully underground version.

No plan is "the right one" or perfect. There will always be a group against whatever is planned and wanting to change it.

Look at the history: Eglinton West subway, then cancellation with 20 year wait. Then transit city. Then Ford wanted to cancel the line altogether. Then the fully underground LRT. Then back to transit city.

I just don't want to see continuous switching of plans & technology over dozens of years. I will concede that if the change in the plan is guaranteed not to cause significant delay or cancellation, or is minor, I guess I would be open to it, but I'm worried that no one can make that guarantee.