[gweed123]

Many popular DRL plans go west of Garrison Creek.

I know, I'm just saying that if Phase 1 starts at Wellington and Spadina and goes east, that Garrison Creek won't be an issue. For a westward extension, it probably will.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Maybe thats true... But I see daily more and more stores on Eglinton closing because of the LRT construction and it is NOT cut and cover... No business is going to want to be around during construction and its a coin flip what comes after construction is done.

There needs to be a TVM to use instead that can vaporize and cut through rock and soil like a hot knife through butter. You could get all the tunneling done for the whole line in just a day or two.

I saw that on a Disney short once. One of the the ones they did back in the Cold War era when futurism was in.

It was something about nuclear powered TBMs being able to cut through whole mountains in mere days. I wish....

And of course some hovering cars would be using those tunnels. Apparanly nobody back in the 60s had the foresight to see that millions of cars on the road, each requiring 40 meters (at least) of space on the road was probably the lest efficient and least sustainable transit model out brains could come up with.

For the record, I love my car. Just hate everybody else's

 

[jamincan]

I wonder how much more costly it is to excavate stations from below instead of digging down. This seems to be the approach that they are taking with the Confederation Line in Ottawa, and it seems that disruptions to the surface street network will be very minimal. The cost for the line don't seem to drastic, so it can't be that unreasonable.

 

[Bamako]

Alright time for some theorycrafting.

A "full" DRL that does everything everybody wants it to would be approximately 27km long and have at least 19 stations. If the TTC is smart they'll build it with 200m platforms in mind. This is enough for 8 or 9 cars, which provides a lot of extra breathing room because this line is going to be packed on day one. An Adelaide route through the core avoids screwing King or Queen but is still close enough to both. With the long platforms you can cheat and make a single station serve both Bay and Yonge and another station both serve Shaw and connect to GO. You could also position Queen station to make Dundas at the north end not a huge hoof. Roncesvalles Village could be an infill station but the line already has spacing wider than the BD.

Wherever Metrolinx is getting $7B from, it's grossly too small. There's no way this could be done for under $15B or even $20B. $7B buys you east of Yonge maybe up to Eglinton or Sheppard. Crossing the Don is going to be very pricey.

 

[M II A II R II K]

Some kind of top down construction perhaps. A relatively new concept when it comes to building skyscrapers like the Shanghai Tower, where it was officially under constructing by just piling into the ground without even digging a hole at first.

 

[drum118]

Alright time for some theorycrafting.



A "full" DRL that does everything everybody wants it to would be approximately 27km long and have at least 19 stations. If the TTC is smart they'll build it with 200m platforms in mind. This is enough for 8 or 9 cars, which provides a lot of extra breathing room because this line is going to be packed on day one. An Adelaide route through the core avoids screwing King or Queen but is still close enough to both. With the long platforms you can cheat and make a single station serve both Bay and Yonge and another station both serve Shaw and connect to GO. You could also position Queen station to make Dundas at the north end not a huge hoof. Roncesvalles Village could be an infill station but the line already has spacing wider than the BD.

Wherever Metrolinx is getting $7B from, it's grossly too small. There's no way this could be done for under $15B or even $20B. $7B buys you east of Yonge maybe up to Eglinton or Sheppard. Crossing the Don is going to be very pricey.

Take that line to Steeles with a future extension to Hwy 7 for the east.

Instead of going to Dundas West, take it over to the DB Jane station and then north to Finch since you will never get a surface LRT on Jane south of Eglinton. At $450/km will be more than than plan for and that including longer platforms.

You need 2 yards and where are they going??

 

[Bamako]

Take that line to Steeles with a future extension to Hwy 7 for the east.

Instead of going to Dundas West, take it over to the DB Jane station and then north to Finch since you will never get a surface LRT on Jane south of Eglinton. At $450/km will be more than than plan for and that including longer platforms.

You need 2 yards and where are they going??

You could always just extend it north on Dundas and then turn on Jane, so that the Junction gets subway.

 

[ssiguy2]

Because it didn't come in at $1.4bil, not even close. The total cost of the line was almost $2.1bil in 2009 dollars.

Hmm, all of a sudden those costs here don't seem so far out of line, do they?

Dan
Toronto, Ont.

I was referring to the new Evergreen Line.
Hmmm...........I guess Toronto costs really are out of line.

BTW, the cost includes all the new trains which will be the MK111 Innovia ART trains. I understand that Bombardier is going to be phasing out the MK11 cars which in Toronto must be unbelievable seeing they still use the MK1s as proof the system doesn't work. The new trains are based on the Bombardier Innovia MK111 Monorail trains which will be employed in Sao Paulo which will have capacity of 49,000 pphpd with headway every 75 seconds.

Looks like Bombardier will also be bidding on some new contracts going out for monorail in Bangkok and Rio. 3 new lines in Bangkok will now be monorail and one new line in Rio equaling a total of 100 km. Very interesting to note that all 4 of those lines in Bangkok and Rio were ready to go ahead as standard Metro but have since switched to equal capacity Monorail due to it's lower construction costs, faster construction, better curve and incline abilities, and the fact that they are more urban friendly due to having far smaller footprints and shadows than any other elevated system and are the quietest due to rubber tires.

 

[nfitz]

I wonder how much more costly it is to excavate stations from below instead of digging down. This seems to be the approach that they are taking with the Confederation Line in Ottawa, and it seems that disruptions to the surface street network will be very minimal. The cost for the line don't seem to drastic, so it can't be that unreasonable.

Aren't the Ottawa stations in bedrock? Completely creating caverns in bedrock, than in flowing sands.

 

[gweed123]

Aren't the Ottawa stations in bedrock? Completely creating caverns in bedrock, than in flowing sands.

Yes. Most of downtown Ottawa is very favourable geology for tunnelling. It's allowing them to build the tunnel and stations with only minimal surface disruptions. They did however have to shorten the length of the tunnel and move one station (uOttawa Station) above ground because of unfavourable geological conditions. Who would have ever thought that the Sandy Hill neighbourhood would be... sandy .

 

[pman]

Alright time for some theorycrafting.

A "full" DRL that does everything everybody wants it to would be approximately 27km long and have at least 19 stations. If the TTC is smart they'll build it with 200m platforms in mind. This is enough for 8 or 9 cars, which provides a lot of extra breathing room because this line is going to be packed on day one. An Adelaide route through the core avoids screwing King or Queen but is still close enough to both. With the long platforms you can cheat and make a single station serve both Bay and Yonge and another station both serve Shaw and connect to GO. You could also position Queen station to make Dundas at the north end not a huge hoof. Roncesvalles Village could be an infill station but the line already has spacing wider than the BD.

Wherever Metrolinx is getting $7B from, it's grossly too small. There's no way this could be done for under $15B or even $20B. $7B buys you east of Yonge maybe up to Eglinton or Sheppard. Crossing the Don is going to be very pricey.

I'd make you the czar of Toronto transit planning, but I do have one question about your alignment. It seems that pretty much every subway fantasy map (cause in Toronto they're all fantasy maps) proposes an alignment that follows our grid street pattern. So this proposal has right-angle turns in the east and west sections. Other cities seem less bound to follow their streets, and many seem to adopt a more radial approach. I understand that given the depth to which buildings go in the downtown core an alignment under a street may be necessary. But outside of the core wouldn't it be possible and perhaps more efficient to base transit somewhat less on following surface streets? Given the depths to which some other cities build transit - London's Piccadilly and Central Lines come to mind - it would appear to be technically feasible.

 

[jje1000]

I'd make you the czar of Toronto transit planning, but I do have one question about your alignment. It seems that pretty much every subway fantasy map (cause in Toronto they're all fantasy maps) proposes an alignment that follows our grid street pattern. So this proposal has right-angle turns in the east and west sections. Other cities seem less bound to follow their streets, and many seem to adopt a more radial approach. I understand that given the depth to which buildings go in the downtown core an alignment under a street may be necessary. But outside of the core wouldn't it be possible and perhaps more efficient to base transit somewhat less on following surface streets? Given the depths to which some other cities build transit - London's Piccadilly and Central Lines come to mind - it would appear to be technically feasible.

I presume it's more about modern-day property rights- it's probably much harder to convince people to allow a tunnel to be drilled under their houses.

 

[Bamako]

I'd make you the czar of Toronto transit planning, but I do have one question about your alignment. It seems that pretty much every subway fantasy map (cause in Toronto they're all fantasy maps) proposes an alignment that follows our grid street pattern. So this proposal has right-angle turns in the east and west sections. Other cities seem less bound to follow their streets, and many seem to adopt a more radial approach. I understand that given the depth to which buildings go in the downtown core an alignment under a street may be necessary. But outside of the core wouldn't it be possible and perhaps more efficient to base transit somewhat less on following surface streets? Given the depths to which some other cities build transit - London's Piccadilly and Central Lines come to mind - it would appear to be technically feasible.

The curve at Sunnyside is actually very gentle, and the curve at Carlaw can be as round as you wanna make it since it all goes under lowrise industrial anyways. Gerrard is easily doable but the mall will have to be bought out and demolished. Getting from Adelaide to Front is going to be challenging since there's no street connecting the two at a gentle enough angle.

edit: Ideally I would have it under Adelaide until around the Georgetown line but there's a really old pesky church in the way that I'm sure people will scream about if a subway goes right under it. This then makes it very challenging to get under Adelaide but it looks like between Bathurst and Spadina is the least horrible place to do it then.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

I don't quite understand why Metrolinx wants to build DRL south rather than the Don Mills to Downtown route. The latter is obviously much urgently needed. If not then Eglinton-Yonge Station will become as bad as Bloor-Yonge today, nobody south of Lawrence will be able to get catch a train easily and Bloor-Yonge will probably be even worse than it is today. Seems to me that their main concern is hooking it up to the Georgetown rail corridor.

Of course all of the official planned routes for the line is totally inadequate. Planning needed to start on at least the entire Finch to Dundas West route two years ago if we want any hope of having a somewhat usable subway when Yonge North, Sheppard and Eglinton open in 2030.

 

[diminutive]

There is a very good reason why at least some portion of the DRL (i.e. the part closest to the core) will have to be deep(er) - the YUS line is so close to the ground in downtown that you can't possibly have it run above it. And even if you can run the tracks above it, you'd have no room for a bi-level stations with mezzanine needed for most island platform arrangements.

AoD

I'd have imagined the entire segment through the core would have to be quite deeply bored to get around the YUS, PATH and various utilities.

Then again, with the ECLRT, aren't they cut-covering any portion which passes under the YUS subway to avoid risking any damage to the existing tunnels? If they similarly had to cut-cover under the YUS in the core, it may also be easier to simply cut-cover between University and Yonge. Surely it's not practical to set up, launch, bore and extract for a 500m stretch.

Anyways, even if the core DRL section isn't appropriate for cut-covering, other sections surely could be. Pape between the Don Valley and Danforth as well as further south along Carlaw to wherever the DRL swings back west, for instance. Those roads aren't especially important to overall traffic flow, so congestion impacts would be minimal. And if you stacked the tunnels, you could probably keep 1-2 lanes open.