Toronto Ontario Line 3 | ?m | ?s

They're spending money on LRT lines cuz they're cheaper.

They're spending money on LRT because they got a blank cheque and chose to spend it on LRT.

It doesn't matter in the slightest what it would cost to replace the whole thing with subway lines because the city would never build all the Transit City lines as subways, and it doesn't change the fact that some of the money could have been spent on subway projects had the city merely desired this. Had the city chosen differently, $10B would cover just about all the subway expansion this city would ever need, but by spending it on local LRT lines it's a drop in the bucket as far as improving local service goes...most of it's money down the drain. Meanwhile, the DRL waits patiently to be bumped up in priority before the cheques stop flowing.
 
If transit city had a blank cheque to fill out,they would have filled out 50 billion or more and made them all subways, fancy stations and finish the sheppard line to STC. The Sheppard 5.3-kilometre line from Yonge Street and Don Mills Road cost $993.9 million and almost 5 years to build. If you factor in inflation, cost of material, and labour; It would cost around 3 billion to build it today. Imagine it took that long to build from Yonge to Don Mills, how many more years and how much more money to build the rest of the lines in subway style? If you build total of 15.9km of lines, it might take 15 years and 15 billion.

Why other lines are place ahead of DRL, I have no idea. Maybe other parts of Toronto might get jealous? Downtown has been receiving a lot of tax dollars to revitalize the whole area including union station, harbourfront, entertainment district, etc. They're working on the TTC union station alignments also. The DRL is on the list. But having it pushed up the list depends on the govt. Also Transit City is different from Metrolix and different from DRL. Each is responsible for different areas of transit planning.
 
If transit city had a blank cheque to fill out,they would have filled out 50 billion or more and made them all subways, fancy stations and finish the sheppard line to STC.
The last thing Transit City ever wanted was a blank cheque. Transit City was announced before any funding was secured, then, suddenly, by a massive coincidence, they found the funding to suit them to a "t".

How do we know they couldn't have secured, if not $50 billion, then considerably more than $10 billion for subways? With the current long-term spending commitment to transit by Queen's Park, and the short-term deficit spending by the province and Ottawa, now is (or was) the absolute perfect time to think big and push hard for a massive subway expansion. But instead, we got TC, and the stagnation in subway building (except the kind York Region wants) will continue for who knows how many years.
 
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has city hall ever looked into a privatized subway line?

If there's any line in the GTA that is ripe for a P3, it's the DRL. It's basically guaranteed to make money from day one. Siphon the line off to a P3, let them build and operate, and the TTC can focus on Transit City, if that's what they want to do.
 
If transit city had a blank cheque to fill out,they would have filled out 50 billion or more and made them all subways, fancy stations and finish the sheppard line to STC. The Sheppard 5.3-kilometre line from Yonge Street and Don Mills Road cost $993.9 million and almost 5 years to build. If you factor in inflation, cost of material, and labour; It would cost around 3 billion to build it today. Imagine it took that long to build from Yonge to Don Mills, how many more years and how much more money to build the rest of the lines in subway style? If you build total of 15.9km of lines, it might take 15 years and 15 billion.
Actually, I get the feeling that even if the government decided to give the TTC $50 billion to spend however it wants, we'd still get LRT routes everywhere. It has nothing to do with cost or how good the service will be, because apparently LRTs are somehow nicer and a better investment than subway is.
 
Actually, I get the feeling that even if the government decided to give the TTC $50 billion to spend however it wants, we'd still get LRT routes everywhere. It has nothing to do with cost or how good the service will be, because apparently LRTs are somehow nicer and a better investment than subway is.

That's because LRT is apparently 'EuroStyle' and anything Euro-anything is hands down SUPERIOR IN EVERY CONCEIVABLE WAY to anything that is not seen to be 'EuroStyle'. Of course, who were the first people to have subways? Irrelevent apparently. Because, now all thse EURO countries are building LRT, of course, no one at TTC is looking at their subway maps. That doesn't matter, LRT is EuroStyle

EuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyle
 
If transit city had a blank cheque to fill out,they would have filled out 50 billion or more and made them all subways, fancy stations and finish the sheppard line to STC. The Sheppard 5.3-kilometre line from Yonge Street and Don Mills Road cost $993.9 million and almost 5 years to build. If you factor in inflation, cost of material, and labour; It would cost around 3 billion to build it today. Imagine it took that long to build from Yonge to Don Mills, how many more years and how much more money to build the rest of the lines in subway style? If you build total of 15.9km of lines, it might take 15 years and 15 billion.

Why other lines are place ahead of DRL, I have no idea. Maybe other parts of Toronto might get jealous? Downtown has been receiving a lot of tax dollars to revitalize the whole area including union station, harbourfront, entertainment district, etc. They're working on the TTC union station alignments also. The DRL is on the list. But having it pushed up the list depends on the govt. Also Transit City is different from Metrolix and different from DRL. Each is responsible for different areas of transit planning.

No, they would not have built them all as subways...the city isn't that stupid. The notion that they would have exists only on this forum at times when people employ increasingly ridiculous arguments to prove that "we can't afford any subway lines." It's a simple fact that we can afford to build some subway projects. We can't afford not to build something like the DRL.

Other projects will get funded before the DRL because Toronto did not request it. The only jealous people in Toronto are councillors, on occasion...suburban 416ers will likely make up the bulk of the DRL ridership base. Now, other cities/regions might get jealous, and since the province didn't cough up $50B to be spent in one year, there's projects sprinkled around the golden horseshoe. Too bad Metrolinx didn't overrule Toronto's request and prioritize the DRL, but at least they included it in long-term schemes...all Toronto did was erase the DRL from their schemes.

There is no money for Jane, Don Mills, and Scarborough Malvern LRTs yet. You would think if they got a blank cheque they would know what to write in the amount field so as to cover all the lines.

We both know that the blank cheque was a promise...nothing is guaranteed until after the money is spent and the project finished since it could be cancelled, even during construction. Hell, given how much Toronto has struggled for any transit funding at all in recent years, even a $1B cheque not tied to any existing project plans can be considered blank. Priorities change, governments change, money comes and goes, even the projects themselves mutate over the years.

The point is that the promise of a cheque fat enough to cover a huge LRT experiment ended up triggering a rewrite of Toronto's transit plans...the projected costs of the LRT lines have ballooned beyond the scale of the original blank cheque promise, though, which certainly affects why some are 'funded' and others not. Others, like Jane, were so ill-conceived at the time of blank cheque writing that they've been put on the back burner.
 
That's because LRT is apparently 'EuroStyle' and anything Euro-anything is hands down SUPERIOR IN EVERY CONCEIVABLE WAY to anything that is not seen to be 'EuroStyle'. Of course, who were the first people to have subways? Irrelevent apparently. Because, now all thse EURO countries are building LRT, of course, no one at TTC is looking at their subway maps. That doesn't matter, LRT is EuroStyle

EuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyleEuroStyle

Isn't that one of the laws of transport planning in Toronto? The Montpellier Principle: The desirability(x) of a given transit system is equal to the system's euro-ness(z) to the fourth power divided by the inverse of the system's ability to spawn street level cafes(y) less transit speed (p). So, x=[z^4/(1/y)]-p

I love express tracks, and would recommend using New York as a model. Due to the large geographic area the suburbs occupy, we might eventually build 10 or 12 subway lines throughout the suburbs. As the lines approach downtown, the spacing between them naturally decreases. Eventually, two lines meet, at which point they merge into a 4-track cross section with one of the two lines switching to express and the other staying local.

NYC is a bit anomalous though. For starters, while excessive interlining looks great on a map, it can lead to rather long wait times outside of the core segments. NYC has also paid off the capital costs of construction. It would make relatively little sense for us to build a line from scratch only to run limited service on it due to the high capital costs of rapid transit. I think it should be a given that for a RT line to be worth building, it should be able to support frequent service.

The reason I suggested a pseudo express/local for a DRL is twofold. First, I believe that the current systems are usually under capacity. If you look at the busiest segments of the busiest lines during the busiest hours, then maybe the system is appropriate. Outside of those hours though, demand is usually far lower than capacity. Instead of building lines tailored to peak and unrepresentative demand levels, we should try to better represent actual transit patterns. In the case of the DRL, I think it is fair to assume that a large portion of the routes potential ridership would consist of peak hour passengers heading strait to the CBD. Instead of building a huge subway system to handle this peak glut, we could simply build a limited stop unidirectional express service. That would allow us to downgrade the system to something RAV in size and cost. With the express track bypassing most stations, additional costs should be minimal. There should never be significant counter flow traffic on the line, so the second express train becomes redundant.

Second is the conflicted goal of the DRL to begin with about local service or Yonge/Bloor diversion. By operating an express train, the regular DRL service could operate as a closely spaced local RT system serving relevant communities while the express train functions as an attractive detour to Bloor and, hopefully in the future, bus/lrt traffic bound to Eglinton Station. We wouldn't have to compromise with stop spacing or whether we are building a GO train or streetcar replacement. Once again the additional costs shouldn't be massive considering all it would be is adding a third track and two or three triple tracked stations. It may be possible to charge a higher fare, but I wouldn't. A fourth track for a counter flow express train would seem redundant considering the nature of traffic.

EDIT: That said, I don't think it is necessarily a bad idea to add spur lines here and there. So long as those spurs can maintain service levels under 10m most of the time, it should be okay.
 
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If there's any line in the GTA that is ripe for a P3, it's the DRL. It's basically guaranteed to make money from day one. Siphon the line off to a P3, let them build and operate, and the TTC can focus on Transit City, if that's what they want to do.

Although the DRL would be extremely useful for many of the city's residents, its profitability is not so obvious. The problem is that almost all DRL passengers would use other TTC routes as well.

If the revenuie has to be split between the DRL's operator and the rest of TTC, I am not sure that the DRL's operator would receive a profit that covers both the operational expenses and the cost of capital borrowing.
 
Yes, we do. We're spending $10B just on LRT lines...we've never spent that much on subways and we never will if we continue to choose not to.

But do we spend $10B just on LRT lines?

Finch (including the Finch E / Don Mills bypass) and Sheppard are just under $1B each; Eglinton has got $4.6B. This adds up to $6.5B.

I do not count SRT, since a major investment is needed there anyway (whether it is for ART / Mark II, for LRT, or for Danforth subway extension). Those money cannot go elsewhere.

What are the alternative ways to spend the $6.5B?

1) Use them for Eglinton subway. That won't even build the whole Eglinton subway, but probably will build it from the airport to Don Mills, or from Kennedy to Weston Rd. Nothing for Finch and Sheppard, and still no DRL. I don't think this would be a good choice.

2) Eglinton LRT ($4.6B) and use the rest for DRL subway; that would probably cover downtown to Bloor / Pape.

3) Eglinton LRT ($4.6B), Finch West LRT to Yonge ($0.7B) and use the rest to extend Sheppard subway further east; that would get it to Warden or Kennedy.

Options (2) and (3) have their merits; but each include a substantial LRT component along with some subway construction.
 
The desirability(x) of a given transit system is equal to the system's euro-ness(z) to the fourth power divided by the inverse of the system's ability to spawn street level cafes(y) less transit speed (p). So, x=[z^4/(1/y)]-p

Brilliant! You just proved to me how poetic math can be.


...

woah..

I'm never going to be the same again ~

And no, I'm really not being sarcastic!!
 
^ And that does not even account for cost over-runs. The tab has already grown significantly since the inception of Transit City.
 
Throw in the other Transfer City lines and you get there.

All of this is still money that is proposed to be spent...only a few million dollars have actually been spent so far.

It looks like their thoughts have changed direction. I'd be surprised if they announce funding for Don Mills or Jane LRT next time, but omit DRL subway.
 

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