rpgr, it's not a few million. The Sheppard streetcar will cost over five hundred million dollars.
We're losing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have the province fully fund any transit project we wish, including subways, and we're throwing it away for an ideological love of streetcars. Light rail is suitable for many routes, but certainly not as a complete replacement for subways. The real zealots are even pushing for the conversion of existing subway lines into streetcar routes.
Transit City is a flawed and political plan. Glenn de Baeremaeker said it himself: the greatness of Transit City is that it gets a streetcar into every councillor's ward. That doesn't sound like rational transit planning to me.
Black Creek to Leslie is about 50% of the line and you're forgetting the most congestion along Eglinton occurs through that section. West of Jane the ride would be very quick. As for the east, my hope is they'll gradually weave the line above and underground where necessary to Kennedy. I can see why you're so opposed to the Sheppard LRT now though.
Yes, I know it's lots of the route, but so what? Spadina, like these routes, doesn't run in mixed traffic at all. Congestion is irrelevant, and yet it's still wildly unreliable. I fear the same for Eglinton, except worse since we will have spent well a billion and a half on a tunnel that still has completely unreliable service.
Back in the DRL/Network 2011 days, the TTC studied the idea of extending the Queens Quay streetcar north on Bay in a tunnel. They decided that it's a terrible idea, since the capacity of the underground section is vastly higher than the surface section, and so most of the capacity is wasted. It also talked about reliability problems from the surface section spreading into the underground section.
What's futile about getting more bang for your buck? Please explain how 120kms of LRT at less than $6 million/km equally distributed throughout the city is worse than hundreds of millions per kilometre of subway that only benefit a small section of the city/GTA at large?
Transit City is not $6 million per kilometre. I can't fathom where you got that figure. According to the report, Sheppard East will cost $555 million for a 13.6 kilometre route. That's $40.8 million per kilometre, plus ancillary costs like a completely new maintenance and storage facility just for that route since it won't be connected to the existing network..
The Transit City report promises travel times competitive with the car, and yet St. Clair's promised time savings are less than 10% off the existing mixed traffic streetcar. I doubt very much that even those minuscule savings will materialize at all.
If the LRT is S-Bahned between Brimley and McCowan, with a short VP extension and same-platform interchange, commutes from Yonge to STC could be as little as 20 mins (10 mins on subway, 10 mins on LRT).
What does "S-Bahning" an LRT mean?