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Danforth Line 2 Scarborough Subway Extension

ssiguy2 said:
An LRT replacement would be just as stupid as the one-stop subway and at least the subway would be faster. Miller brought in all this LRT talk about a decade ago now everything has turned into a subway vs LRT debate. The ONLY answer remains the cheapest, most efficient, fastest to build, and least disruptive..............SkyTrain extension.

The subway proponents are right about one thing............the STC should be grade separated but so should Eglinton. Simply buy MK111 cars and update any the line and save a cool $3 billion as well as a new maintenance and garage centre which LRT requires. The tracks haven't been started on Eglinton so use SkYtrain which will have twice the capacity of LRT, be far less disruptive, be much faster, and far cheaper to run due to automation. It of course could easily be extended West to Renforth and East to Malvern. Toronto would have a TRUE Crpsstown that would actually be rapid.

To placate the Scar residents as well as being based on some solid transit planning would be to have a GO RER/ST spur off the Stouffville RER line to STC. Yes, the service wouldn't be as frequent as subway but still high to Bloor/Danforth, be seamless across Eglinton, and still be just as fast to downtown as the longer wait will be more than made up by the faster speeds and fewer stations of RER.

All this could be done for under $3 billion.
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Disagree. This is just as bad as the LRT. You are still on a train from Malvern to Yonge that stops every 800m instead of every km on average on the subway or every 500m on the LRT. None of these solutions will ever move people fast enough to make transit a true alternative to their cars. Any travel over 10 km should be on suburban rail with stops at least 3-5km apart.
 
BurlOak said:
The Ford SRT/ECLRT had ridership of 12,000 - exceeding on-street LRT. And this was with the line ending at STC - if it were extended to Malvern, it likely would have been higher. When (and before) the Ford plan was killed, the solution was to force a transfer to put everyone onto the B-D. The ridership projections exceeded expectations but TTC found a solution that wasn't acceptable.
I am not so much for the SSE, as I am against the transfer LRT - but I understand why those who support transit in Scarborough would look to another solution when they have multi-government support for SSE.
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Barely exceeding, and still not at the minimum required for a subway.

Can you point to any legitimate studies for this proposed, one stop extension that justify it's construction?
 
syn said:
Barely exceeding, and still not at the minimum required for a subway.

Can you point to any legitimate studies for this proposed, one stop extension that justify it's construction?
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Certainly not. But we need a study which illustrates the political dangers, cost escalations, number of decades construction might be delayed, and possible amount of new studies that will follow upon completion of said study. Only after could this idiotic subway plan seem reasonable to move forward as part of a greater plan and certainly not on the details of the subway plan itself. I don't need that study or the latest opposition request for a study comparing of lines serving completely different criteria to know if we don't move forward this City is going to pay just as much down the road and continue to build nothing for much longer amongst other Political chaos that might follow.

Action is the main reason I can get behind this Tory plan and only if he gets all lines funded by upper levels. Otherwise fire up the transfer LRT vs. a new subway plan debate, take a side, fire up the car and get the popcorn ready
 
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We cant seem to shake the attacking nature of this thread - which is too bad, because we should accept the decision by council (yes it could change) and have discussions that relate to what is approved. If we want to talk about reverting to other older plans, then a fantasy thread for "Scarborough LRT Conversion - What Could Have Been" would be the place. The aggressive attacks, the back and forth, and the constant rehashing of old news is boring.

I had hoped this would stop when the thread was shut down for a bit a few weeks ago.
 
The extension is stupid so obviously people will continue to complain about it.

Nobody is forcing anybody to read the thread.
 
coopEng said:
We cant seem to shake the attacking nature of this thread - which is too bad, because we should accept the decision by council (yes it could change) and have discussions that relate to what is approved. If we want to talk about reverting to other older plans, then a fantasy thread for "Scarborough LRT Conversion - What Could Have Been" would be the place. The aggressive attacks, the back and forth, and the constant rehashing of old news is boring.

I had hoped this would stop when the thread was shut down for a bit a few weeks ago.
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While I share coopEng's concern about the ad hominem nature of many posts on this thread, I'm not sure we should be surprised or that the moderators should take a zero-tolerance line. Many SSE proponents, including Tory and most of Council, have justified SSE by attacking downtown residents. It's a nice bit of misdirection - don't look at the data or cost-benefit analysis, because they don't lead to the desired conclusion. Tory and Council's suburban majority have framed SSE exclusively in terms of dishonest and divisive identity politics. As a battle between poor, downtrodden suburbanites who deserve a subway however low density their neighbourhoods and however few new riders the line will generate, and downtown, latte-sipping, over-serviced elites who are "snarky" (I think it was Pasternak's phrase) when they observe that $4 billion is a lot for one subway stop. This forum banned one particularly over-the-top poster a while ago. It wasn't necessarily the right decision, as his posts perfectly illustrated the Ford Nation delusion and class war underlying support for SSE. I'd prefer that the moderators keep a pretty laissez-faire approach - the whole public and Council debate on SSE has been in the gutter for years, and it would be dishonest for this thread to hold itself to a higher standard.
 
BurlOak said:
Would dipping the south to Lakeshore help your Portlands access. I imagine you will have some type of Streetcar from Portlands to this line and to DRL. Maybe could consider some interlining if branches are made to Portlands and Exhibition. One would be Scarborough to Exhibition, the other would be Dufferin to Portlands, with the King portion being common.
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Maybe it can dip south at East Harbour, providing two stations for that site of higher importance?

And that interlining idea is not bad, considering we could provide frequent service on King and share a King tunnel. Where would the line going to Don Mills go though?
 
My point is that you're going to be very unhappy in this world if you subscribe to the idea that there is a right and wrong approach to design and planning. I enjoy reading the thoughtful posts of people on this forum who know more about the specifics of transit or minutia of ridership numbers etc. then I will ever but when all is said and done people matter, technical arguments don't. You don't know how hard it is for me to say that. While it was not my area of specialty I've sat in the classrooms of some of the top transit experts in the city in my day.

For instance we need to appreciate how relevant a development it is that people in Scarborough feel they deserve transit "improvement". In the previous generation the argument would not be about the technical merits of transit technologies, it would be the argument between people who want transit and don't want transit, with the people who don't want transit far outnumbering those that do in Scarborough. My cousin's husband who lives in Scarborough for instance once told me he would move if a subway stop was ever built near his house, seriously!

In defence of politicians here for an instant (also a hard think for me to do), they live in a world of buy in and compromise. We may feel that spending billions on technically unsound transit is an absurd action but there is a clear political consensus that this money is required to secure general buy-in from Scarborough voters to further other political and even transit objectives.

I should stop there but I'll leave you one last turn of the knife. In the long run it doesn't matter anyway. No one will care how the transit was built or how stupid an idea it was. Cities like people are dynamic systems that adapt to change. Caring about the minutia of ridership numbers is like taking a steady-state slice out of that dynamic system and thinking you understand it. Human settlements thrive regardless of good or bad transit planning according to other macro factors. Like a healthy tree growing next to a wire fence just envelops the fence and continues growing as if it was never there.
 
TrickyRicky said:
There's a lot of useless energy being expended in this thread. Is there any credible opposition to this project at any level of government? My understanding is no, there is only unanimous support. That support may be overtly, even cynically political but It goes to show that specific technical arguments mean little in this world.
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The most essential "technical" spec is funding. It's missing.
 
Dunno if it's just me, but I always get the feeling LRT proponents don't actually want the best for Scarborough and only want to cheap out on Scarborough. I guess it doesn't help that the LRT line just happens to cost less than the SSE.
 
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