News   Mar 27, 2024
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Toronto Crosstown LRT | ?m | ?s

It is not that bad. The tunnelling contract 1 was signed September 2012 and work completed January 2015, and tunnelling contract 2 was signed November 2013 and work completed August 2016, and stations contract was signed late 2015 and was supposed to complete in 2020 but will complete in late 2022 pushing opening to 2023. So tunnelling contracts completed in 3 years, and station contract will have taken 7 years, 1.5 years of those during a pandemic. Seven years is similar to the Spadina extention I think. All these projects seem to take 7 years.

Really I would expect most stations other than the most central stations from Cedarvale to Mount Pleasant and Kennedy to reach substantial completion this year, and that all the street holes will be filled in except for Yonge-Eglinton. Right now they are just pouring concrete like crazy. Many of the central stations didn't have a shovel in the ground until 2017. Mount Pleasant only started in 2018 focused on a storm sewer and only really getting to the station in late 2018 with them pouring half the station box roof in 2019, and the other half at the very beginning of 2020.

I assume that the reason all three contracts didn't get signed in 2012 is financial, but you can't start the stopwatch until a contract is signed.
It wouldn't be that bad if the original construction time was estimated to be 7 (or say 6 because of the pandemic) years. The problem is that the completion date they gave to the public was three years off and counting.
 
pulls not surprised face

Anyone who's been paying attention to the Crossrail project could have told you this project was going to be late!
They haven't even started on the hard bit - all the testing, commissioning and final paperwork (making sure the fire alarms all work, all the various systems communicate with each other, the signalling system is fully tested etc etc).

Maybe it would have been better to have built a yard on the western side so the "easier" surface section can open earlier!
 
pulls not surprised face

Anyone who's been paying attention to the Crossrail project could have told you this project was going to be late!
They haven't even started on the hard bit - all the testing, commissioning and final paperwork (making sure the fire alarms all work, all the various systems communicate with each other, the signalling system is fully tested etc etc).

Maybe it would have been better to have built a yard on the western side so the "easier" surface section can open earlier!

You mean building a yard in the east? Even if they did, the utility of opening a section not connected to much (much less Yonge) wouldn't be that high. Anyways, I wonder if they would have made the latest deadline even without COVID - and it's just being trotted out as a convenient excuse now.

AoD
 
Late and over budget, who would have thought?

Wasn't one of the reasons for LRT was that it was more affordable and easier to build? I guess that theory has been blown out of the water. Elevation is far easier and faster to build and far less disruptive on local roadways because, unlike median running LRT, elevated rail usually goes along the side of a roadway.

After all this time and money Toronto will be getting a rather slow, unreliable, and lower capacity system than if they had built the damn thing grade separated in the first place.
 
Late and over budget, who would have thought?

Wasn't one of the reasons for LRT was that it was more affordable and easier to build? I guess that theory has been blown out of the water. Elevation is far easier and faster to build and far less disruptive on local roadways because, unlike median running LRT, elevated rail usually goes along the side of a roadway.

After all this time and money Toronto will be getting a rather slow, unreliable, and lower capacity system than if they had built the damn thing grade separated in the first place.
The crosstown would not be elevated through the central part. The grade level portion is straight forward and started way later as it's much faster to build (see Finch LRT).

An elevated Crosstown would still be below grade through the centre of the route and hit the same problems.
 
The 102D from Major Mac to Warden Station is pretty close to the 54A length too. Way over an hour.
according to the TTC's 2020 service report the 54 just a bit over a kilometre longer! They're really damn close! The Steeles, Eglinton east, and Bloor-Danforth night busses still beat both of them though with the 354 just being little behind 😮
 
The real orthodoxy buster here is the notion that P3 is by default better and cheaper, and transfers risks from the government to the private sector. Pretty much none of that had happened in this case.

AoD

Don’t forget Ml’s equally embarrassing outcome when it took Bombardier to court alleging failure to deliver on its LRV contract.

More recently, Ml’s approach to P3 for GO RER expansion went back to the drawing board when bidders balked at ML’s proposed way of doing things.

This is an organization that just doesn’t want to be accountable for anything, and especially not for project management.

- Paul
 
Don’t forget Ml’s equally embarrassing outcome when it took Bombardier to court alleging failure to deliver on its LRV contract.

More recently, Ml’s approach to P3 for GO RER expansion went back to the drawing board when bidders balked at ML’s proposed way of doing things.

This is an organization that just doesn’t want to be accountable for anything, and especially not for project management.

- Paul

Oh I am acutely aware of the move towards "alliance" model - with risk sharing back to the government - that pretty much puts an end to the whole "transfer risk to the private sector" P3 argument in the transit context in the GTA.

AoD
 

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