I think that's the biggest take away from Transit City. Most of the lines would've been better off as cheap BRT routes that would serve to build up ridership until the "real" rapid transit solution came in years later. One of the biggest aspects for LRT construction is that permanent infrastructure gives a sense of finality to the service, that the transit will be there for a long time untampered, which makes investments in those parts of the city more attractive, however its also a double edged sword. A Don Mills LRT with its own ROW including a tunneled segment and possibly an elevated/guideway segment along the Don Valley also means that the political will to replace it any time after opening is also extremely slim. If you build a Don Mills LRT to Pape, then build a DRL to Pape as well, there wouldn't have been a northern extension of the DRL for another 20-30 years being generous, and unless they built a western extension, the DRL would've remained a Pape-Osgoode shuttle rather than using its capacity to be a proper arterial to bring people downtown, you know, the thing metros are really good at.
Ye I made that comment before Metro6 made that video on the Don Mills LRT. I thought at the time that the DRL was part of it since I saw a few maps of TC that featured the DRL, so I assumed that while it wasn't part of Transit City, it was something that was being worked on alongside Transit City, and in hindsight it looks like I was giving TC too much credit.
I know you blocked me a long time ago, but this really needs to be called out.
No the Ontario line doesn't "need" as much capacity as possible, and it especially doesn't "need" full length TRs, at least for 40-50 years after opening. In Conjunction with projects like the Stouffville Line RER, the Ontario Line can easily run at its fullest capacity for several decades before capacity really becomes a problem, and at that point, it would just make more sense to build another relief line going along Victoria Park or something, instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket.
Miller gets a lot of blame because Transit City itself was not a good transit plan for numerous reasons. As a "missing middle" transit plan at best, it was okay, but it was the worst type of value engineering where the usability and upgradeability of the infrastructure was a serious concern. Even without Eglinton West being buried, the central tunnel section is long enough that the idea of replacing it with higher order transit if the demand becomes high enough is completely out of the question. Unless you want to shut down the entire line for 5 years to raise the platforms to high platforms so that you can run light metro stock like it should've from the start, you're stuck with low floor LRVs basically for the next 50-60 years, and that corridor will have capacity constraints 10-20 years after opening. People like to compare Transit City to the old streetcar network, about how it was meant to be a temporary solution until higher order transit is built, similar to the old Yonge and Bloor-Danforth Streetcars, but even then that's quite inaccurate. Building a subway under a surface streetcar route is easy. Building a subway that replaces an already underground streetcar line, not as much.
And before someone brings up the fact that in the same post I talk about how the Ontario Line doesn't need the capacity of full length TRs, meanwhile I'm complaining about the capacity on Eglinton, there's a massive difference between complaining about a line not having the ultimate capacity because of vehicles that are slightly narrower than the traditional subway network (Vehicles that form the foundation or play a major chunk of many different metro networks around the world such as Sydney, Paris, and soon enough Montreal), vs complaining about how lines will be run by low floor streetcars that struggle with internal circulation, accessibility, and are prone to delays by having sections interact with streets. The context between the Ontario Line and Eglinton Crosstown is quite different.
The existence of the DRL put in place the question of whether the Don Mills LRT could or should exist, you can't have both the DRL and Don Mills LRT, you have to choose one, and by the fact that under miller the major thought was that the Yonge Line would be able to handle all of its capacity issues forever, makes me really question this notion. Sounds like something you pulled out of thin air to defend your stance on Miller.
Except he didn't get anything done. To be fair it wasn't exactly his fault since Rob Ford cancelled all of his plans, but is Miller really to credit for Eglinton's existence when the reason it was built came long after Miller left office? It would be like if the DRL was built instead of the Ontario Line, its existence would be credited to the team behind Network 2011 rather than Metrolinx and the Wynne government. Seems sort of disingenuous.
