From an email:

The Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario has launched its third podcast in a nine-part series. This week’s podcast is Infrastructure Ideas – Priorities for Ontario. It is part of a series called Conversations About Construction that is aimed at raising awareness about a range of issues affecting the industry and society...dialogue with transit researcher and journalist Stephen Wickens about the importance of building new projects such as the Ontario Line. Wickens authored the recent report, Station to Station: Why Subway-building Costs have Soared in the Toronto region, that was commissioned by RCCAO.

A link to the news release can be found here.
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Allandale25 said:
From an email:
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I pulled this out of the Executive Summary.

1594686955352.png


KEY RECOMMENDATIONS
  1. Expand the cost-crisis conversation beyond the usual transit experts.
  2. Minimize the use of tunnels and keep tunnels as shallow as possible
  3. Plan for and protect transit corridors.
  4. Increase the focus on openness and transparency.
  5. Rethink factors that make stations special
  6. Reuse excess soil beneficially.
  7. Proactively address the skilled-trades shortage.
  8. Increase efforts to make P3s work for transit projects.
  9. Approve long-term transit plans based on real evidence.
  10. Create designs, processes and incentives that allow stations and their catchment areas to pay dividends.
 
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urbannorth said:
I pulled this out of the Executive Summary.

View attachment 257192

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS
  1. Expand the cost-crisis conversation beyond the usual transit experts.
  2. Minimize the use of tunnels and keep tunnels as shallow as possible
  3. Plan for and protect transit corridors.
  4. Increase the focus on openness and transparency.
  5. Rethink factors that make stations special
  6. Reuse excess soil beneficially.
  7. Proactively address the skilled-trades shortage.
  8. Increase efforts to make P3s work for transit projects.
  9. Approve long-term transit plans based on real evidence.
  10. Create designs, processes and incentives that allow stations and their catchment areas to pay dividends.
Click to expand...
The Finch West LRT number isn't quiet correct. $2.5b is the total awarded cost which includes the 30 year maintenance cost which isn't included in any of the previous projects above that. The actual construction is estimated for $1.2b.

The price tag for all 4 lines are questionable. It's just hard to believe Yonge North would cost twice as much as the TYSSE which included a $400m screwed up delay cost due to bad management. Especially when they should be construction is similar ways.
 
Ummmmm 700m per km, can we not find a way to reduce the costs further? Is this a joke? I'm finding it hard to believe that we are doing all we can to reduce the costs on these lines. What's happening with the Federal Gov't infrastructure Bank? Can we not ask China (nicely this time) to help with the railway? Oh yeah, they don't like us.

There must be some sort of technology that allows us to build TTC subway elevated at reduced costs, because at this point it seems any divergence in technology is gonna end up costing us money in the long term in regards of interoperability and maintenance. These quotes are extremely troubling. We might as well just run the damn subway in the middle of Pape at grade and make the bitch a transit mall.
 
Jaye101 said:
Ummmmm 700m per km, can we not find a way to reduce the costs further? Is this a joke? I'm finding it hard to believe that we are doing all we can to reduce the costs on these lines. What's happening with the Federal Gov't infrastructure Bank? Can we not ask China (nicely this time) to help with the railway? Oh yeah, they don't like us.

There must be some sort of technology that allows us to build TTC subway elevated at reduced costs, because at this point it seems any divergence in technology is gonna end up costing us money in the long term in regards of interoperability and maintenance. These quotes are extremely troubling. We might as well just run the damn subway in the middle of Pape at grade and make the bitch a transit mall.
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All technological improvements will save about 10% of the total cost. 90% of the cost is due to labour costs, and things like accessibility requirements etc.

This is the cost of a progressive modern society unfortunately

nypost.com

Why New York City will never build another subway station

Every once in a while for fun, Phil Plotch likes to phone the MTA’s Second Avenue Subway Community Information Center — a permanent storefront on 125th Street — to ask when the next phase of the ma…
nypost.com nypost.com
 
robmausser said:
This is the cost of a progressive modern society unfortunately

nypost.com

Why New York City will never build another subway station

Every once in a while for fun, Phil Plotch likes to phone the MTA’s Second Avenue Subway Community Information Center — a permanent storefront on 125th Street — to ask when the next phase of the ma…
nypost.com nypost.com
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Not necessarily. There are plenty of "progressive modern societies" in other parts of the world, that are capable of building rapid transit at a more reasonable cost than the exceptionally bad standard of NYC.
 
Ontario's growth pressures stretch trades to the limit, which is my understanding of where most construction cost increases lately have come from. There simply aren't enough trades to go around.

Trumps tariffs and other things like a rapidly tightening regulatory environment are also driving up costs.
 
syn said:
Seems relevant to this project (and all transit projects happening under this government):

Secret letters detail Ford government efforts to control Ontario’s supposedly arm’s-length transit agency

"Months after taking office in 2018, the Ontario PC government issued a written directive to Metrolinx prohibiting the supposedly arm’s-length transit agency from communicating with the public about key issues without ministry approval."
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The first letter, written Nov. 26, 2018, by then-transportation minister Jeff Yurek, outlined, among other directives, “changes to communications protocol” that were effective immediately. The new policy required “ministry approval of all public-facing communication” by the agency, except those relating day-to-day customer service issues, and required Metrolinx officials to receive government approval for any public speaking engagements.​
​
The minister also took the unusual step of barring Metrolinx officials from meeting with members of the media. Such meetings are a common practice among officials and journalists.​
​
“Media contact is to be limited to reactive responses to media inquiries approved by the ministry. There will be no informal meetings with media ... unless approved in advance by the ministry,” the letter stated.​
 
Wouldn't it make more sense to use this infrastructure (a downtown tunnel) to optimize GO RER? If they really wanted to reduce cost using those corridors seems like the simplest solution. Paris RER should be the model to copy. A hybrid commuter/ rapid transit network integrated with the TTC legacy lines and fares would solve most transit problems in the entire region. Why isn't this never suggested? Too busy arguing over TTC gauge heavy rail vs. light rail when the answer is obviously neither.
 
W. K. Lis said:


Possible reason for underground public transit in Toronto? To be used as possible bomb shelters.
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They thought about it before but I don't think the modifications were made to the ventilation system.

www.blogto.com

That time the subway was a nuclear fallout shelter

If there was one thing that terrified practically everybody in the 1960s and 70s, it was the threat of an atomic bomb being dropped on a major city...
www.blogto.com www.blogto.com
 
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