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Danforth Line 2 Scarborough Subway Extension

I wouldn't count my luck. The NDP are great at winning by elections because of the vastly different demographics and voting intentions, and Hudak failed to win his own old riding before redistrubution.
 
Johnny Au said:
Etobicoke, York, and East York deserve world class transit. Etobicoke has the short end of the stick: four stations! York has half a station: the Heath Street exit of St. Clair West station. East York has a small part of Woodbine station.
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Take the bus anywhere from those places will get you to a subway stop in 20 minutes or so. Taking the bus from Steeles and Stains will take an hour, if not more
 
epcjay said:
Take the bus anywhere from those places will get you to a subway stop in 20 minutes or so. Taking the bus from Steeles and Stains will take an hour, if not more
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So if you take a bus from Steeles and Kipling, you will get to a subway stop in 20 minutes? Ok.
 
From the ward 6 transit meeting. KS is Stintz, MG is Grimes and AB is Byford. Loved his comment at the end...

13. Why did MG & KS vote in favor of Scarborough subway? Can AB make decisions without political input?

• KS is running for Mayor after she steps down as TTC Chair

• Province said it would use its $1.48 billion funding commitment to build a different, shorter subway to the Scarborough City Centre

• MG: we should have been building subways for the last 40 years

• AB: the numbers supported the subway; he is prepared to lose his job if necessary for speaking his mind
 
^ I continue to be amazed that people are surprised to learn that it actually makes sense from a ridership perspective, people simply don't believe that it will have the same (or at least very close) ridership numbers to the DRL.
 
Filip said:
From the ward 6 transit meeting. KS is Stintz, MG is Grimes and AB is Byford. Loved his comment at the end...

13. Why did MG & KS vote in favor of Scarborough subway? Can AB make decisions without political input?

• KS is running for Mayor after she steps down as TTC Chair

• Province said it would use its $1.48 billion funding commitment to build a different, shorter subway to the Scarborough City Centre

• MG: we should have been building subways for the last 40 years

• AB: the numbers supported the subway; he is prepared to lose his job if necessary for speaking his mind
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This is what will happen. The subway will use the SRT route and go to STC. Then sheppard will either be an LRT or the subway would be completed to STC if Ford comes back.
 
innsertnamehere said:
^ I continue to be amazed that people are surprised to learn that it actually makes sense from a ridership perspective, people simply don't believe that it will have the same (or at least very close) ridership numbers to the DRL.
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I find this hard to believe given how little development there is on the Scarborough RT subway, except at Scarborough Centre. The DRL would almost certainly have higher ridership than every line other than the Yonge line. Certainly this would be true if done properly (i.e. extended to Don Mills/Finch or Leslie/Highway 7).

People also keep ignoring that the Sheppard subway extension (Don Mills to Scarborough Centre) has a lot more development on it (the Consumers Road business park and various new condo developments) than the SRT replacement subway. Also keep in mind that the number of people going to Yonge/Bloor is not enormous. The amount of office space at Yonge/Bloor is only slightly higher than North York Centre and no new office buildings have been built at Yonge/Bloor for years, compared to one small office development at Yonge/Sheppard. Sure there is U of T, but demand to universities tends to be spread throughout the day because students have classes all day. The vast majority of people who work downtown are going south of Bloor and transferring to the Yonge line. So it doesn't really matter whether people transfer to the Yonge line at Sheppard or at Bloor, and the Don Mills line is needed anyway to deal with Yonge line overcrowding problems.

The Sheppard subway if extended to STC has a significant amount of office space on it, about 16 million square feet if you count Yonge from York Mills to Finch + Consumers Road + STC, though the vast majority was built in the 1980s. The Bloor-Danforth line + the proposed extension to STC is about the same. Downtown Toronto is many times the size of either of these. See the Toronto office statistics page on the Colliers website. They count Bloor-Yonge as "Midtown" along with Yonge/Eglinton and Yonge/St. Clair, "Downtown" is further south.
 
One of the greatest reasons to support the LRT in the first place was because it was inane at the time to change plans. What bothers me about current LRT supporters is that they act as if nothing has changed since then. With the council and provincial decision to switch to subway, one of the largest motives to support the LRT is gone and instead became a reason to support the subway.


While I too am finding Soknacki's Scarborough positions unfavorable, I am not going to hold it against him. He is campaigning as a fiscally responsible conservative after all and supporting the LRT is the fiscal conservative option.
 
innsertnamehere said:
^ I continue to be amazed that people are surprised to learn that it actually makes sense from a ridership perspective, people simply don't believe that it will have the same (or at least very close) ridership numbers to the DRL.
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andrewpmk said:
I find this hard to believe given how little development there is on the Scarborough RT subway, except at Scarborough Centre. The DRL would almost certainly have higher ridership than every line other than the Yonge line. Certainly this would be true if done properly (i.e. extended to Don Mills/Finch or Leslie/Highway 7).
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If what I've been told is correct, since the huge overestimation of the Sheppard Subway ridership back in the 1990s TTC has been very conservative about their expectations of future property development when doing studies into new transit lines.

These conservative expectations shouldn't have much of an effect on the Bloor-Danforth RT ridership extension since even the most liberal of estimates would show relatively little property development in eastern Toronto.

The situation *should* be different in the core of the city. Massive residential developments continue to be proposed and the CBD is *apparently* entering a new office construction boom. The latter is a very big deal since office developments do have a tendency to attract huge amounts of transit ridership; far more than what residential developments attract. If the TTC was very conservative with their estimates of new downtown development it may mean that we'll see far greater than the [IIRC] 12,000 pphpd projection on the Relief Line.

The projections used are outlined below and on page 14 of the DTRES. Hopefully someone can comment on how conservative these estimates are.

Regardless the ridership projections on the Bloor-Danforth RT extension definitely (but barely) cross the threshold for heavy rail rapid transit, which is why I support the option. Though I still do think spending a billion on this project is questionable when there are probably other places/ways it could have been more effectively used.

Future transit demands were forecasted using the City’s GTA Travel Demand model to determine transportation movements based on 2031 projected population and employment land use densities, and a transit network that includes the planned transit infrastructure and service improvements described in Section 1.2.1. Demand projection results were then processed through TTC’s assignment model, MADITUC.

The 2031 land use projections are based on the regional population and employment targets from Ontario’s Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe. These targets are summarized in Table 1-2. Within the City of Toronto, a modified forecast has been developed as the base case for the DRTES which meets the same population target for the City, but increases the employment total from 1.64M to 1.83M. This forecast is based on the City of Toronto’s “Flash Forward” Official Plan land use (for employment) with an additional 200,000 population to meet the Growth Plan target in Table 1-2.
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Andrew, how many times do we have to go over that connecting routes is what is key to ridership? Scarborough has stellar bus connections that feed its ridership, 90-95% of daily STC users probably enter the station through the bus terminal. No matter how many condos you build, ridership will be driven by connecting routes, as that creates a population that can access the line that is much larger than you can ever have with 40 floor condos lining the route. The DRL makes sense because it has a single key feeder route, the Bloor Danforth line. Sure, it runs through some of the densest neighborhoods in Canada, but in the end of the day that still only produces similar ridership figures as the Sheppard line. (take a look at the 504's daily usage numbers, it runs a very similar route to the proposed DRL)


DRL ridership planning comes from the places to grow act, which places Toronto at lower population growth rates than it is currently experiencing, though I must admit that population growth is occurring in an area that would not be using the DRL daily. unsure about employment growth. Toronto has struggled with that for decades. (though the growth it is experiencing is extremely transit friendly, largely located in the downtown core as office jobs) Toronto's population is set to be well over 3 million by the time the DRL is completed.
 
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