Cllr. Colle today suggested that the Relief Line will cost $20 billion in city council.

Also commented that he questioned [people] about using LRT north of Bloor and was met with a huge opposition from people saying there shouldn't be a forced transfer. (and paralled that to Scarborough debate)

I don't think the forced transfer is even the issue tbh, so much as ridership exceeding LRT technology for the DRL.
 
Cllr. Colle today suggested that the Relief Line will cost $20 billion in city council.

Also commented that he questioned [people] about using LRT north of Bloor and was met with a huge opposition from people saying there shouldn't be a forced transfer. (and paralled that to Scarborough debate)

I don't think the forced transfer is even the issue tbh, so much as ridership exceeding LRT technology for the DRL.

That, plus the fact that there is no corridor between Danforth and Eglinton for a cheap LRT. Up to Eglinton, a subway Relief line is most cost-efficient, even though it will cost a fortune.

North of Eglinton, a variety of options is available. Underground subway, elevated subway, a subway in the DVP / 404 corridor, or LRT up Don Mills.
 
It would be a wacky set of priorities in this city if we supported the SSE while pushing for LRT north of Eglinton, that's for sure.

I am in favour of using the RH-GO corridor north of Lawrence, because that would be the smart thing to do to save on costs. But that is different from changing technology to LRT.

I'd only support LRT north of Eglinton if it was interlined with the Sheppard East LRT.
 
It would be a wacky set of priorities in this city if we supported the SSE while pushing for LRT north of Eglinton, that's for sure.

I am in favour of using the RH-GO corridor north of Lawrence, because that would be the smart thing to do to save on costs. But that is different from changing technology to LRT.

I'd only support LRT north of Eglinton if it was interlined with the Sheppard East LRT.
Maybe north of Millwood Bridge,
one LRT branch goes Thorncliffe, Science Centre, up Don Mills, and
another LRT branch runs up Taylor Creek to O'Conner up Vic Park

And yes, it is all about the transfer. I will defend this just like Scarborough. Both LRT branches come together and head downtown following the Pape-Eastern-Queen alignment.
 
There is one problem.

American (and might as well include Canadian) infrastructure projects often cost five to six times what they cost in other developed countries.

From link.

Where the Second Avenue Subway Went Wrong
American infrastructure projects often cost five to six times what they cost in other developed countries. Can we learn to be thriftier?

On New Year’s Eve, at a party to celebrate the opening of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the project showed that government “can still do big things and great things.” What he didn’t say is that the project also shows that government can do really expensive things. The line, which so far consists of just three stations and two miles of track, is, at a cost of roughly $1.7 billion per kilometre of track, the most expensive ever built. And it will keep that record as Phase 2 begins, at a projected cost of $2.2 billion a kilometre.

Construction projects everywhere are subject to delays and cost overruns. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish economic geographer, has found that nine out of ten infrastructure mega-projects worldwide ran over budget and the same number finished behind schedule. But the U.S. is the world’s spendthrift. A 2015 study by David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, and Tracy Gordon, a fellow at the Urban Institute, looked at a hundred and forty-four rail projects in forty-four countries. The four most expensive, and six of the top twelve, were American, the Second Avenue subway among them. In a study of transit construction costs worldwide, Alon Levy, a transit blogger, has found that they are often five to six times higher here than in other developed countries.

We used to do better. Hoover Dam was completed under budget, and two years ahead of schedule, and the Golden Gate Bridge, too, was finished early and cost $1.3 million less than expected. So what’s going wrong? It’s complicated: one analysis of the problem cited thirty-nine possible causes. And factors that immediately come to mind, like higher land costs or labor costs, don’t explain the difference between the U.S. and places like Japan or France. But some problems are clear. A plethora of regulatory hurdles and other veto points drag things out and increase costs. When New Jersey wanted to raise the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge, it took five years, and twenty thousand pages of paperwork, for the project to get under way. Obviously, environmental and workplace standards are important, but a recent paper by Philip Howard, the chairman of Common Good, suggests that a more streamlined regulatory process, like those found in many developed countries, could save hundreds of billions of dollars.

Then, too, because most infrastructure decisions in the U.S. are made at the state or local level, involving multiple governing bodies, projects must also satisfy a wide range of constituencies. Political considerations are often as important as technical ones, and schemes that are initially well defined can end up like Swiss Army knives, fulfilling any number of functions. Long-suffering engineers call this “scope creep.” Washington and Oregon, for instance, spent years collaborating on plans for a new bridge on I-5, spanning the Columbia River. What started as a simple proposal quickly morphed into a full highway expansion (including the rebuilding of five miles of interchanges), along with a light-rail extension. The cost rose to more than three billion dollars, after which the idea was abandoned.

A major cause of scope creep is the fact that infrastructure spending is at the mercy of political winds. Planners know that opportunities to build are limited, so when they do get a chance they tend to milk it for all it’s worth. Politicians, meanwhile, like big, splashy projects that will win headlines and capture the public’s attention. This is why we end up putting money into new projects while skimping on maintenance, even though the return on investment from simply keeping roads and bridges in good shape is usually higher.

Politicians are fond of a quote commonly attributed to Daniel Burnham, the father of Chicago’s Exposition of 1893: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” It’s an inspiring sentiment, but emblematic of what you might call the Edifice Complex, a habit, among politicians, of imagining that anything big and glitzy must therefore be worth doing. That’s how Detroit ended up with a People Mover monorail that moves very few people, why San Jose is set to spend more than a hundred and fifty million dollars on a transit station intended as “the Grand Central Station of the West,” and how New York managed to spend four billion dollars on a Path station designed by Santiago Calatrava. On the Second Avenue line, too, the stations, which account for most of the cost, are lavish structures with huge mezzanines. They’re a pleasure to walk through, but more modest stations would have worked just as well.

Conservatives often reflexively dismiss infrastructure spending as a boondoggle, and liberals, perhaps in reaction, often reflexively defend it, no matter how wasteful. But the pool of dollars available for something like public transit is limited. The result of extravagant spending on subways and the like is that we end up with fewer of them than other cities. For the price of what New York spent on Calatrava’s PATH station alone, Stockholm is building nineteen kilometres of subway track and a six-kilometre commuter-rail tunnel. Worse, cost overruns fuel public skepticism toward government, making it harder to invest the next time around. It’s good for government to do big things, great things. But it’s better if it can do them under budget.
 
So basically:

- Environmental assessments
- Red tape & Governmental miscoordination (City Hall vs Queens Park)
- Politics (the reason why the Scarborough, Sheppard and Vaughan extensions were built in the first place)
- Scope creep (bigger, fancier stations)
- Increased inherent complexity of projects (i.e. requirements for additional exits, handicap access)
- Labour costs
- Land costs

Sometimes I feel like projects take too many opinions into consideration (i.e. how can we not hurt people's feelings, etc.), when the more logical solution would have been to build it and then allow people to adjust to their new realities.

That's how it was done up to the late 60s and the way it's still done outside of the Western world- it gave us a lot of our legacy infrastructure, but when it went wrong (highway construction through existing neighbourhoods), it went really wrong.

I wonder if the process Caisse is taking in Montreal for their REM might be the solution- taking project construction away from politics and placing it into non-government hands- like the way it was done in the past with the private rail lines and transport networks.
 
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Cllr. Colle today suggested that the Relief Line will cost $20 billion in city council.

Also commented that he questioned [people] about using LRT north of Bloor and was met with a huge opposition from people saying there shouldn't be a forced transfer. (and paralled that to Scarborough debate)

I don't think the forced transfer is even the issue tbh, so much as ridership exceeding LRT technology for the DRL.
Does Cllr. Colle realized that $20 billion for the Relief Line is about 6.6 % of Toronto's GDP or about 2.6 % of Ontario's GDP. I also think the subway should be extended from Danforth to Don Mills Stn, because the high density areas in Throncliffe and Flemington Park and the connections of the Crosstown LRT, Line 4 and the potential of the Sheppard East LRT (If they don't cancelled it)
 
Does Cllr. Colle realized that $20 billion for the Relief Line is about 6.6 % of Toronto's GDP or about 2.6 % of Ontario's GDP. I also think the subway should be extended from Danforth to Don Mills Stn, because the high density areas in Throncliffe and Flemington Park and the connections of the Crosstown LRT, Line 4 and the potential of the Sheppard East LRT (If they don't cancelled it)
I think he may have been referring to the 'full' Relief Line from Dundas West to Sheppard/Don Mills with that figure.

I re-listened to Colle and he actually said 'potentially over' $20 billion, to correct my original post. One thing is for certain, this isn't being done without serious Federal support.
 
So basically:

- Environmental assessments
- Red tape & Governmental miscoordination (City Hall vs Queens Park)
- Politics (the reason why the Scarborough, Sheppard and Vaughan extensions were built in the first place)
- Scope creep (bigger, fancier stations)
- Increased inherent complexity of projects (i.e. requirements for additional exits, handicap access)
- Labour costs
- Land costs

Sometimes I feel like projects take too many opinions into consideration (i.e. how can we not hurt people's feelings, etc.), when the more logical solution would have been to build it and then allow people to adjust to their new realities.

That's how it was done up to the late 60s and the way it's still done outside of the Western world- it gave us a lot of our legacy infrastructure, but when it went wrong (highway construction through existing neighbourhoods), it went really wrong.

I wonder if the process Caisse is taking in Montreal for their REM might be the solution- taking project construction away from politics and placing it into non-government hands- like the way it was done in the past with the private rail lines and transport networks.
We spend way too much time consulting different potential stakeholders. There was an article on one of the national papers talking about how this makes Canada uncompetitive, in context to the pipelines. I think @AlvinofDiaspar posted it, so he might know what I am referring to. I think the same ideas apply to local transit projects.

I don't know what kind of balance is 'correct', as we certainly don't want the repetition of 'highway construction through existing neighbouhoods'. On the flip side, how much easier would the debate be if we were able to simply expropriate one side of Danforth/McCowan and run the subway in a trench to STC? I don't want to allow the bureaucrats to act autocratically, but caving to every possible NIMBY objection is no longer a viable path either if our objective is to create a globally competitive city. Or even, to merely avoid strangling ourselves on the bottleneck of our inadequate transportation infrastructure.

The Feds need to get this national infrastructure bank right. It could be the way out of his conundrum. (At least in terms of providing regular transit funding and setting our transit objectives straight in regards to fact-based planning rather than political pandering/patronage.)
 
We spend way too much time consulting different potential stakeholders. There was an article on one of the national papers talking about how this makes Canada uncompetitive, in context to the pipelines. I think @AlvinofDiaspar posted it, so he might know what I am referring to. I think the same ideas apply to local transit projects.

I don't know what kind of balance is 'correct', as we certainly don't want the repetition of 'highway construction through existing neighbouhoods'. On the flip side, how much easier would the debate be if we were able to simply expropriate one side of Danforth/McCowan and run the subway in a trench to STC? I don't want to allow the bureaucrats to act autocratically, but caving to every possible NIMBY objection is no longer a viable path either if our objective is to create a globally competitive city. Or even, to merely avoid strangling ourselves on the bottleneck of our inadequate transportation infrastructure.

The Feds need to get this national infrastructure bank right. It could be the way out of his conundrum. (At least in terms of providing regular transit funding and setting our transit objectives straight in regards to fact-based planning rather than political pandering/patronage.)

I do not recall that specific case, but I might well have posted something along said lines. In any case, it isn't spending too much time consulting different potential stakeholders - it is the ability for stakeholders to use consultation and other mechanisms as a delaying tactic (e.g. SOS in St. Clair). Also, I'd question whether it make sense to treat transit projects the same in the EA process - like, does it make sense to subject say mode changes on an existing corridor (with fundamentally the same use) the same way as a completely new one?

AoD
 
I do not recall that specific case, but I might well have posted something along said lines. In any case, it isn't spending too much time consulting different potential stakeholders - it is the ability for stakeholders to use consultation and other mechanisms as a delaying tactic (e.g. SOS in St. Clair). Also, I'd question whether it make sense to treat transit projects the same in the EA process - like, does it make sense to subject say mode changes on an existing corridor (with fundamentally the same use) the same way as a completely new one?

AoD
Indeed, the EA should always have been on a transit corridor basis, rather than as a predetermined project (and technoloy...) basis.

Ironically, the Relief Line underwent exactly that kind of study by Metrolinx. The Yonge Relief Network Study had studied several different options including LRT, subway, RER and express subway options. And guess what; the study clearly came in support of the subway option. (Which was an innovation when the study came out, considering the corridor was highlighted for LRT in Transit City.)
 
Indeed, the EA should always have been on a transit corridor basis, rather than as a predetermined project (and technoloy...) basis.

Ironically, the Relief Line underwent exactly that kind of study by Metrolinx. The Yonge Relief Network Study had studied several different options including LRT, subway, RER and express subway options. And guess what; the study clearly came in support of the subway option. (Which was an innovation when the study came out, considering the corridor was highlighted for LRT in Transit City.)

To be fair, that's not an EA though.

AoD
 
Perhaps an LRT north of Eglinton could be a spur of Line 5, maybe have a western spur as well that goes up Jane north of Eglinton.
Maybe the LRT would have to be on Bayview and not Don Mills. After all, the common part of these branches would have to be tunneled.
 

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