Overall, there's more good than bad in the plan, so I give it a thumbs up...even though the plan's one main outcome will be to hopelessly overcrowd transit downtown.
The YUS loop and most other downtown routes will be crippled due to potentially huge influxes of suburban riders and all the new SoB condo dwellers. Still, I'd rather worry about transit projects that are too successful than projects that don't get built at all. By 2020, surely, we will be forced to do something downtown (mmm...downtown relief line...it'll be useful for tons of new condo dwellers, too, remember).
I do wonder what will get built and what will be left on the side of the road...I honestly think some of the Transit City plans will thankfully be abandoned due to their extreme price tags (while a decent place for LRT, $900M for Finch West is absurd). Or, as I think someone earlier (I forget who) said, perhaps Eglinton will morph into a subway, which wouldn't cost much more, especially since they have substantial ROWs to work with out east and west.
OK, the GO train plans are spectacular - there isn't much to criticize.
The GO train revolution makes most of the Transit City plans even more ridiculous and obscenely expensive...but I'll bash streetcars another time.
There's so many little BRT plans that commenting on them isn't really worthwhile at this point - most will be quite cheap and will have local effects.
The Yonge subway extension is the best nugget in the whole plan...no other subway project would automatically thrive as much as it will. North York Centre's condos will march right up to Clark and the section north of Finch station should be 100,000+ riders right off the bat. The YUS line will become very crowded, but "too successful" is a really bad and only-in-Toronto-style backwards reason to not build it.
And, of course, the Sheppard subway gets no lovin'...no surprise there. I firmly believe Toronto could use a little Melgalomania...
A look at the map illustrates the strange obsession with NW Scarborough--it's practically solid red up there.
You mean NE Scarborough...I've mentioned many times how politicians and others with influence are completely obsessed with poor, underprivileged Malvern, especially the poor, underprivileged residents in sprawlly new $400,000 ravine-lot homes along the Rouge. It's not an accident that the 6 main Transit City streetcars intersect at Jane & Finch, Flemingdon Park, and Malvern, rather than where travel or development patterns suggest transit infrastructure should go.
Of course, for Malvern, the two streetcars will be in addition to the RT extension and the new Midtown GO service, all of which will fight for ridership from an area with 100,000 people. causing pitifully low ridership from Malvern on each route. Why spend $1 billion extending the subway to STC when you can spend over $2 billion on projects that help less people?
