W. K. Lis said:
Yonge Street, north of Finch, is not Scarborough. It will need stations at Cummer/Drewrey and Steeles, within the city proper, much more than any Scarborough subway station(s), singular or plural. In fact, there should be stations at Yonge & Blythwood and Yonge & Glen Echo before any station in Scarborough.
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Agreed that Cummer should absolutely have a station. Huge redevelopment potential around Newtonbrooke Plaza and surrounding areas that should be unlocked.

But Blythwood and Glen Echo don't need stations. They would be Rosedale's with low walk-up traffic, don't really have much development potential unless we lift zoning bylaws, and would mostly serve to slow subway trips, increase possibility of emergencies/delays and reduce overall capacity.
 
There is a story to this post. I was about 90% of the way through typing it and moved my laptop to grab my coffee this morning, and blew it up. So now I know how to use the 'SAVE draft' button. Won't make that mistake again. I think that version may have been better.

I am a lucky guy. I grew up in Etobicoke. Both Royal York station and Islington station were about a 30 minute walk from home. Somehow walking to the subway always seemed faster than waiting for a Anglesey 2 or a Islington 37 or a Royal York 73. When I got to the subway, I was free.

In contrast, my cousin lived in the heart of Mississauga. In Cooksville. His mom always had to bring him into the city and then we could go exploring. It made us dependent on her to get him into see me because most of the time - the movie, for example - would have been over by the time he got in to the city on a Mississauga Transit bus. I'd meet him at Islington station.

We rode the subway end to end. We learned the platform arrangement at each - centre or side, and the colour of the tiles in each. (Who knows or remembers that before Dundas was lemon yellow that its original vitrolite tiles were a blue/grey?)

I thank my lucky stars for the subway. We went to the ROM, the Eaton Centre, Maple Leaf Gardens, Casa Loma, downtown in general exploring what is now the PATH, Ontario Place, the Uptown Cinemas, the Toronto Reference Library, the Albert Britnall bookstore, the Big Bop, Queens Park, and the Zoo. Later, my first - not in downtown - job at Yonge and Sheppard. We were free and independent from the time we were about twelve. And later on we took it to high school and then to other schools for athletic events, dances and other school functions.

I am going to bet that there are kids and folks in general in Scarborough, in Richmond Hill and in Vaughan who could find their worlds vastly enlarged by a subway connection. (Or get to a decent job.) No bus is going to provide that connection. The point isn't transit - whether it's possible to connect. It's RAPID transit. Getting from A to B in time to see the movie (school, job) at such and such a time.

In the debate here, there is a huge discussion about whether Richmond Hill, or Scarborough or Vaughan deserve or merit a subway based on many objective, rational and scientific criteria - ridership, cost, etc. But at a certain level, this is becoming very petty and arbitrary. I lived in Toronto. My cousin lived in Mississauga. Ten km apart. Vastly different perceptions of how easy it was to get around.

The pettiness is caused by a belief that someone's transit win is going to be someone else's transit loss. And this is due to the (mistaken) belief that the funding envelope is a zero-sum game and if we build X then Y won't get built. The envelope can not remain fixed. It has to become much larger. Hats off to the current Toronto mayor for recognizing that there will be additional fees and taxes to finance this. It is a realistic statement of fact.

So to Vaughan in 18 months, I say welcome to the club. I bet there are more than a few people who might look for a job or go to school in a different place. And to Scarborough - no problem with linking more of that city to the rest of what used to be called Metropolitan Toronto. And finally to Richmond Hill. No problem either - as long as the "big J" relief line is built first. Clearly there are real capacity issues in the present system.

Yes, financing all this is a big challenge. But we can also destroy the great city and metropolitan area if we choke it to death. This is going to take some vision. Vision does imply risk. After thirty years of no vision, even the enthusiasts here can sound like cynics. We can build it on the cheap and say we'll improve it later. That won't happen. The way to do it is right in the first place. So no problem with the large stations in the TYSSE / Line 1 extension.

I hope that next December, there are a few thirteen year-olds within distance of Vaughan Centre or any number of the six new Line 1 stations who find their world has become a good deal larger. That is and will be a very good thing.
 
Very nice post @TransitBart , you are right. Transit access equates with human agency. Expanding transit access expands individual agency to work, play and live throughout our city. It goes both ways too, while those thirteen year-olds in Vaughan are gaining access to the rest of the system, the thirteen year-olds in Toronto are also about to get much better access to Canada's Wonderland too!

We definitely need to move on from thinking of transit projects as some zero-sum game, competing with each other for funding. We need to levy more taxes dedicated to transit in this city, and we need to join the rest of the developed world in having the Federal Government provide regular transit funding to our cities. It is ridiculous - we are the only country in the G20 without a dedicated transit fund at the federal level and yet 80% of our population and 80% of our GDP comes from our cities.

This frustration and inter-municipality competition for scarce resources can be mitigated if our 3 levels of government and our electorate got their collective shit together and just took transit expansion seriously. Thankfully the province's Big Move and City Planning's newest initiatives are looking at building an overall transit network rather than individual projects, this is a welcomed first step.

I am going to bet that there are kids and folks in general in Scarborough, in Richmond Hill and in Vaughan who could find their worlds vastly enlarged by a subway connection. (Or get to a decent job.) No bus is going to provide that connection. The point isn't transit - whether it's possible to connect. It's RAPID transit. Getting from A to B in time to see the movie (school, job) at such and such a time.
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This is a common theme in Toronto transit politics that shouldn't necessarily be true.

I grew up in a transit rich area, reasonably close to the Yonge subway. However, while the Yonge subway is useful for getting to downtown and elsewhere, on Eglinton we use the bus to go east-west and to get to the subway from neighbourhoods east and west of Yonge. Here, the bus is extremely frequent - a bus every minute at rush hour, never more than 5 minutes off peak.

For us, the bus was that connection. It connected us to all the major schools in the area, to our respective neighbourhoods and shopping, and to the all-important Yonge subway. It was not as rapid or comfortable as a subway true, but it served its function by being very very frequent. Frequency means reliability. As a resident of the area, I never in my life had to worry about the bus being late or not coming - and I rely on it every day to get to university.

Now, the Eglinton Crosstown is coming due to the very high ridership of the Eglinton lines, and this is going to be much appreciated. But I think Eglinton demonstrates that the suburbs CAN be served by a bus network if the bus network is done well, is frequent and is reliable. We can vastly enlarge the worlds of the kids and folks in Scarborough and elsewhere with transit upgrades that are not necessarily subways subways subways!

Imagine if we upgraded all our major suburban bus routes to a kind of BRT-lite on the cheap. This would mean bus lanes and queue-lane jumping at all major intersections. Suddenly, bus service bunches a lot less (in effect increasing frequency from the perspective of the transit rider waiting at the bus stop), and is a lot more rapid and reliable. Combine this with LRTs on Eglinton and elsewhere and you are looking at a comprehensive transit network that does a lot more for a lot less than a $4 billion subway hole in the ground.
 
WislaHD said:
Very nice post @TransitBart , you are right. Transit access equates with human agency. Expanding transit access expands individual agency to work, play and live throughout our city. It goes both ways too, while those thirteen year-olds in Vaughan are gaining access to the rest of the system, the thirteen year-olds in Toronto are also about to get much better access to Canada's Wonderland too!
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Actually - I could get to an IKEA on the subway. :) It's a 10 minute walk from Vaughan Centre.
 
With the new IKEA warehouse on Gordon Baker Rd, I can now order a shelf online and walk over from my house with a cart and pick it up at $0.
 
Good post, @TransitBart .

I've spent 1/2 my life in Willowdale and 1/2 my life in Thornhill; more than enough time to understand how absolutely meaningless the municipal border is in terms of how people move around. Like you, getting to the subway and then downtown was a vital connection to baseball games, record shops, university and many other things. If we'd kept building the way we should have through the 80s and 90s, my guess is the region would be much more united, connected and sustainable.

But we didn't and now it's a series of sad battles over scant funds between imaginary enemies; old Toronto vs its suburbs, all of them together against the 905 etc. So much squandered potential and so many political games and so few people who care about the riders - the real people who just want to get from A to B with a minimum of hassle and expense, no matter where they are in relation to some line someone drew way back when.

p.s. Thanks for explaining on this thread what the Ikea on Gordon Baker is for. I drove by and was wondering :)
 
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
Good post, @TransitBart .

I've spent 1/2 my life in Willowdale and 1/2 my life in Thornhill; more than enough time to understand how absolutely meaningless the municipal border is in terms of how people move around. Like you, getting to the subway and then downtown was a vital connection to baseball games, record shops, university and many other things. If we'd kept building the way we should have through the 80s and 90s, my guess is the region would be much more united, connected and sustainable.

But we didn't and now it's a series of sad battles over scant funds between imaginary enemies; old Toronto vs its suburbs, all of them together against the 905 etc. So much squandered potential and so many political games and so few people who care about the riders - the real people who just want to get from A to B with a minimum of hassle and expense, no matter where they are in relation to some line someone drew way back when.

p.s. Thanks for explaining on this thread what the Ikea on Gordon Baker is for. I drove by and was wondering :)
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The thoughts on the subway I can take credit for. The explanation of the IKEA location I can not. It was marcus_a_j.
 
TransitBart said:
The thoughts on the subway I can take credit for. The explanation of the IKEA location I can not. It was marcus_a_j.
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@TJ O'Pootertoot - I was wondering what it was going on when they started covering up the red bricks with blue siding that looked oh-so familiar. I was worried that all the brick was going to be covered up, a shame if it had. There are a few other low-key, nicely designed office and warehousing buildings in the area. I grew up in northwest Scarborough and used to ride my bike between all the buildings. It's also an area that could use better transit. The proposed BRT on Steeles would be very beneficial for the number of people that work within a km of Steeles east of Hwy 404. With connections to a future Line 1 station at Steeles, new GO Station on the Richmond Hill line (totally theoretical) and Miliken GO station, the BRT ride would be very attractive. The 53 bus is always busy, and it's one of the routes I would take to get to the subway growing up (also very reliant on busses to the subway). If one ignores Steeles as the boundary between Toronto and York/Markham and combines the employment areas from both municipalities, it's actually very large. There could be more if/when BMO and Steelestech develops their respective properties.
 
marcus_a_j said:
@TJ O'Pootertoot - The proposed BRT on Steeles would be very beneficial for the number of people that work within a km of Steeles east of Hwy 404. With connections to a future Line 1 station at Steeles, new GO Station on the Richmond Hill line (totally theoretical) and Miliken GO station, the BRT ride would be very attractive. The 53 bus is always busy, and it's one of the routes I would take to get to the subway growing up (also very reliant on busses to the subway). If one ignores Steeles as the boundary between Toronto and York/Markham and combines the employment areas from both municipalities, it's actually very large. There could be more if/when BMO and Steelestech develops their respective properties.
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follow this thread and you'll see getting people to ignore Steeles as a boundary is a very big IF indeed. but, yeah. I think the 2008ish transit plans - with the Yonge extension, long-term Steeles BRT, don Mills LRT etc. - were really good at serving that 404 employment corridor and future development in the urbanized suburbs. Very little of it is outright off the books (the LRT, for one) and of course the highway 7 rapidway is open now, but the timelines for other elements are still very mushy. A lot of potential to harness, no doubt.
 
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