I strongly despise the trends that have occurred over the past few decades in subway planning. Compare a station like Queen or St. George to stations like St. Clair West or Lawrence West. (Montreal has more glaring examples of how subways should not be built.)

It should not have take more than 30-60 seconds to get from the street level to track level, and you should never feel that you are descending into the depths of hell, more than 4 stories below the streets, into a cavernous monstrosity. True, escalators make the trip down into the depths of hell easier, but how often are these escalators under repair, or how often does a selfish _ _ _ _ _ hit the emergency stop button forcing everyone to make the climb by foot?

I imagine that this Spadina Subway Extension will trump even Montreal’s most poorly designed stations. Cut and cover subways, like those in Toronto and New York will always be my favourite design layout, and I am sure that I am not alone in this view. Not only do cavernous monstrosities set a gloomy tone, they are more expensive to excavate/build, more expensive to heat and maintain, more of a challenge to police, and overall more expensive to operate. Do a Google search on the cost of an elevator, it’ll boggle your mind.
 
Toronto - West said:
I strongly despise the trends that have occurred over the past few decades in subway planning. Compare a station like Queen or St. George to stations like St. Clair West or Lawrence West. (Montreal has more glaring examples of how subways should not be built.)

It should not have take more than 30-60 seconds to get from the street level to track level, and you should never feel that you are descending into the depths of hell, more than 4 stories below the streets, into a cavernous monstrosity. True, escalators make the trip down into the depths of hell easier, but how often are these escalators under repair, or how often does a selfish _ _ _ _ _ hit the emergency stop button forcing everyone to make the climb by foot?

I imagine that this Spadina Subway Extension will trump even Montreal’s most poorly designed stations. Cut and cover subways, like those in Toronto and New York will always be my favourite design layout, and I am sure that I am not alone in this view. Not only do cavernous monstrosities set a gloomy tone, they are more expensive to excavate/build, more expensive to heat and maintain, more of a challenge to police, and overall more expensive to operate. Do a Google search on the cost of an elevator, it’ll boggle your mind.
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Have you ever ridden on the Picadilly Line in London? I swear, some escalators you can't even see the bottom of the station.

On the previous topic, 4 TBMs for the city will be wonderful, but TBMs are actually a rather inexpensive part of tunnel-building. What's expensive is the planning and workers needed to maintain the TBMs. After that, you need people to construct the stations and whatnot. I still do hope the TTC keep them for use on other lines, notably Eglinton and the DRL.
Imagine if they used one of the TBMs for the underground section of Jane! Wouldn't that be something?
 
The station will also have an additional platform so trains can short turn, creating difficulties for the integration of above ground facilities.
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An additional platform just for short turning? Why not just a 3rd track? I wonder if that's an error.
 
The city should maintain a fleet of TBMs for ongoing subway construction. Remember Pitfield's idea of 2 km of subway a year? That's what this city needs. If there's an ongoing program of subway construction, then overall the subway building would get cheaper on a per km basis.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
The city should maintain a fleet of TBMs for ongoing subway construction. Remember Pitfield's idea of 2 km of subway a year? That's what this city needs. If there's an ongoing program of subway construction, then overall the subway building would get cheaper on a per km basis.
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I think at this point, we really need more than 2 km of subway a year. We should be getting an Eglinton Subway and the DRL at the least, and we need a lot more than 2 km a year to get those finished within a reasonable timeframe. Even if we do both of them in 2 phases (Eglinton could be Kennedy to Eglinton West, then Eglinton West to the Airport) we would need to do more than 2 km a year. Other than that, I'm not sure how much we would actually need extensions to the YUS and BD lines.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
If they're acquiring 4 TBMs, they better keep them afterward for future subway expansion.
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Only if there is another project about to start. The flip-side is that you propose extending the Yonge subway extension or the DRL until a machine is available?

If there's something about to start, sure; but if not, you don't want to tie up the $ in an asset that may not have any value by the time it is really needed. In the big picture, the cost of a TBM isn't that big of a deal.
 
nfitz said:
Only if there is another project about to start. The flip-side is that you propose extending the Yonge subway extension or the DRL until a machine is available?

If there's something about to start, sure; but if not, you don't want to tie up the $ in an asset that may not have any value by the time it is really needed. In the big picture, the cost of a TBM isn't that big of a deal.
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If Toronto is to rival New York City, we need those TBMs! We won't be world class until we have a whole fleet of TBMs working around the clock.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
If Toronto is to rival New York City, we need those TBMs! We won't be world class until we have a whole fleet of TBMs working around the clock.
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Why would we want to rival New York City? It's not a contest.

Besides, we've built more new subway in the last 15 years than New York City has built in 60.
 
nfitz said:
Why would we want to rival New York City? It's not a contest.

Besides, we've built more new subway in the last 15 years than New York City has built in 60.
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New York also has a huge head start on us. Cities like NYC, Paris, London, Tokyo already have massive subway systems and a spaghetti of subway lines. Until Toronto has the same, yes we should try to rival NYC. You expect Toronto to sit on its (now non-existent) laurels when it comes to transit expenditure? The days of Toronto as a model for transit systems has come to an end.

And why WOULDN'T we want to rival NYC? Should we dream small? Let's just rival Pittsburgh or Baltimore or San Antonio instead.

I think part of the reason the GTA has sprawled so much in the last 20 years is due to a lack of subway construction. If we densified Toronto with subways, then there'd be less need to build over greenfields.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
New York also has a huge head start on us. Cities like NYC, Paris, London, Tokyo already have massive subway systems and a spaghetti of subway lines.
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And you have to look why. These cities were massive in 1900, in pre-car days. Personal car ownership didn't really become a huge factor against transit until the 1950s. In 1900 New York City had 3.4 million and London was 6.5 million. Toronto was about 0.2 million.

Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
Until Toronto has the same, yes we should try to rival NYC. You expect Toronto to sit on its (now non-existent) laurels when it comes to transit expenditure?
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Absolutely not - did I say that? We are looking at massive capital expenditures on transit in the next 15-20 years. More so than anytime since the 1960s ... and I think we might beat that too. The city is now advocating 3 separate subway projects and 9 LRT projects (9 if you count Kingston Road ... not quite sure what they are advocating in that EA). And at the same time we are looking at a variety of RER-like services, and increased regional GO services (something that New York City has failed miserably at - hopefully we do not try and rival NYC's pitiful suburban train system).

Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
The days of Toronto as a model for transit systems has come to an end.
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Toronto has never been a model for transit system; this is some kind of Canadian urban myth that has no standing in the rest of the world. It belongs in the same toilet as the myth that Canada is stronger on environmental issues than the United States.

Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
And why WOULDN'T we want to rival NYC?
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Perhaps you can tell me why you think NYC's suburban train system is so great? And the lack of maintenance in their subway system makes Toronto look very good. In Toronto one is surprised when the subway station smells of urine. In New York City one doesn't even notice.
 
I admire the NYC subway system for its sheer size. We can take the best and leave the rest. I'm glad our subway system is so well maintained.

Yeah we're going to be spending massive amounts of money on LRTs which won't even improve travel times. What exactly is the point then? Why plod along in a streetcar exactly? Only subways will get people out of their cars. Streetcars won't. An LRT in its own ROW with subway-stop spacing might, but that's not what we're getting. I wouldn't call what we're getting LRT. Maybe Streetcar Plus (and the Plus stands for Plus $$$)
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
Yeah we're going to be spending massive amounts of money on LRTs which won't even improve travel times.
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Who says they won't improve travel times? Perhaps they won't do much for travel times at midnight ... but I take the Don Mills route enough to know that what takes me 20 minutes to travel at midnight, takes 35 minutes in rush hour. But if we blow the entire budget on a Sheppard East, Danforth extension, and Eglinton subway - I know I won't be seeing any savings - and only deteriorating service as road congestion increases.[/QUOTE]
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
Yeah we're going to be spending massive amounts of money on LRTs which won't even improve travel times. What exactly is the point then? Why plod along in a streetcar exactly? Only subways will get people out of their cars. Streetcars won't. An LRT in its own ROW with subway-stop spacing might, but that's not what we're getting. I wouldn't call what we're getting LRT. Maybe Streetcar Plus (and the Plus stands for Plus $$$)
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LRT will improve travel times and reliability, Just because a few people keep saying it won't does not make them right. Another point for building LRT, On most parts of the TC routes, LRT is needed to handle demand higher than even BRT can handle, never mind regular mixed traffic busses.
 
Good point. The Don Mills route is incredibly sensitive to spacing. If the bus leaves Pape just a minute early, it quickly bunches up with the bus that left 2 minutes earlier. But a minute late, or a big school crowd gets on, and then it's overloaded, stops everywhere, and is slow to start again, as it is difficult to get on/off, and slips further and further behind. Adding more buses helps a bit, but doesn't really fix it. The 3-car LRT units on a dedicated ROW with lots of doors would be a godsend.
 
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