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Finch West Line 6 LRT

TRONto said:
The way I see it, the % doesn't matter. Our carrying capacity for the change is what matters. Maybe our infrastructure could handle 5%.

Our levels of immigration over the past decade+ do not serve the existing or new Canadians in the GTA well as the housing expense has become too high. Transit like the Finch LRT could have been put in 20 years ago as we've always had strong bus ridership (assumption) without the gentrification pressure (see the lack of investment on the Danforth line). Now, any area that has the slightest public investment will be poised for gentrification due to housing pressure.
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So, what you're saying is... let's make sure we are always building transit in the city, so that we don't lose all of our local skill base, the skill base we now actually have again.
 
LemonCondo said:
So, what you're saying is... let's make sure we are always building transit in the city, so that we don't lose all of our local skill base, the skill base we now actually have again.
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That's not what I'm saying but I do agree 100% with your statement. We should be continually building transit. All of our streetcar lines have enough ridership to be subway lines and we have many bus routes that have the ridership to be upgraded to some form of rapid transit. We have the ridership, need the $ and leadership.
 
CapitalSeven said:
It is simply not true that immigration was at or above 1% for the last 25 years. Landings were always well below 300,000 till the current government came in and have really only hit 1% in the last couple of years,
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From Wikipedia, original source Stat Can:

Capture.JPG


I said it was stable at 1%, not above. It was actually a bit lower, but the fact remains that the rate has been stable for many years.
 
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TRONto said:
Our levels of immigration over the past decade+ do not serve the existing or new Canadians in the GTA well as the housing expense has become too high.
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Yeah, blame the immigrants for helping the economy barely replace and expand the aging workforce. What weird statements you are all making. The housing is not expensive because of immigrants, it's expensive because people are willing to pay more with historically low-interest rates and banks are willing to lend more in that environment. You you have a huge class of people who can afford a second or third condo because they know there will be some immigrant sucker who will have no choice but to rent a condo with over 50% of their income because that is the only option.
 
NoahB said:
Yeah, blame the immigrants for helping the economy barely replace and expand the aging workforce.
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I'm an immigrant myself, but this is one of the biggest misconceptions about Canadian immigration. Our system just punts its problems down the line onto the new crop of people suckered into coming here. And yes, excessive immigration is indeed one of the contributing factors to the housing problem. Anyway, we're extremely OT.
 
NoahB said:
Yeah, blame the immigrants for helping the economy barely replace and expand the aging workforce. What weird statements you are all making. The housing is not expensive because of immigrants, it's expensive because people are willing to pay more with historically low-interest rates and banks are willing to lend more in that environment. You you have a huge class of people who can afford a second or third condo because they know there will be some immigrant sucker who will have no choice but to rent a condo with over 50% of their income because that is the only option.
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I don't think his comment should be interpreted as some big net condemnation of immigration, what both you and @TRONto are saying are equally true. Immigrants are extremely important to our economy to replace out workforce, as well as provide a muscle for our more lower level jobs. However, it is also true that we as a nation (and especially as a province) have done a horrible job at actually managing our immigration levels, and keeping our infrastructure to the levels needed to handle all of the new people we are welcoming immigrants. We have consistently welcomed more people into our country than we built housing to house those immigrants, or transit capacity to move those people. It is quite obvious that the politicians of the late 90s and early 2000s were completely unprepared to properly plan how to manage the influx of immigrants into our country, and York Region is the prime example of everything wrong with our immigrant inflow: endless sprawl, non-existent public transit other than infill stations on the GO network (all of which relied on park and rides as a means of getting people to the train station), and even if we ignore our horrible planning of public transit, our highway network is somehow even more inadequate (The fact that the only way for cars to actually get to Downtown Toronto from Durham and Eastern York Region is a single 3 lane highway is frankly embarrassing). We have failed to manage our population growth in virtually every metric imaginable, and pointing out the fact that we need immigration isn't an argument against this idea.

Edit(s): I wrote this at like 2am so there are a few typos and cases of bad grammar
 
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The increases are ~18k and ~34k for 23' and 24' respectively so not exactly earth shattering.

Low weighting for economic immigrants in the increase, mostly going to family allotment.
 
Most of these "economic" migrants are just going to be sent to do the menial jobs that "born & raised" Canadians don't want to do. Working at Amazon warehouses, pouring coffee at Tim Horton's. Corporate Canada has no need to increase wages when the Feds give them tons of cheap labour to exploit. Also stymies R&D into things like Robotics, AI. Why does Tim's Horotn's business model even exist? Why pay people min. wage to pour coffee when we have vending machines that can literally spit your coffee out for you?

Anyways, the Finch LRT is looking great!
 
T3G said:
My point is that there are many forms of rapid transit. Giving Scarborough the most expensive one is a bad value proposition, not to mention it takes away monies that could be used on other, more constructive things.
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TossYourJacket said:
Yup. And often the choice is portrayed as "streetcar with no priority" vs "underground subway", which entirely ignores the idea of LRTs that actually get priority over cars, or even elevated transit lines. The absurd desire to bury everything in this city is insane, Eglinton West could have been 100% elevated but SUBWAYS SUBWAYS SUBWAYS. We didn't even try and find a way to built the SSE above ground cus of politics. It's so frustrating.
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Different "forms" of rapid transit i.e. some forms more rapid than others. People have for years been talking about how LRT is so great in Toronto - but our lines won't have strong signal priority and are often designed with too frequent stops etc. (basically all surface sections go down the middle of a wide road) its more streetcar than American style "LRT".

Toronto is weird, the subways we have broadly move very large numbers of people, and yet we are desperate to import the American model of large trams as the backbone of the transit network on major streets - even though Sheppard's 5 stations or the King car move as many people per day as most entire American LRT networks.
 
superelevation said:
Different "forms" of rapid transit i.e. some forms more rapid than others. People have for years been talking about how LRT is so great in Toronto - but our lines won't have strong signal priority and are often designed with too frequent stops etc. (basically all surface sections go down the middle of a wide road) its more streetcar than American style "LRT".

Toronto is weird, the subways we have broadly move very large numbers of people, and yet we are desperate to import the American model of large trams as the backbone of the transit network on major streets - even though Sheppard's 5 stations or the King car move as many people per day as most entire American LRT networks.
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I had promised myself I wouldn't get into another LRT/subway debate ... but here I am.

The issue with most American LRT networks is not that they lack capacity - it's that they run the trains, and nobody uses them, because car culture (and garbage planning). American heavy rail networks suffer from this issue too; San Francisco's BART, Atlanta's MARTA, and Miami (among others) also have low ridership. Toronto is busier than any rail transit network in the US, except the New York City Subway. It's not really about transit mode.

That's not an issue in Toronto; thus, our priority should be finding the most cost-effective way to move the largest amount of people with the shortest travel times. That LRT is not rapid in Toronto, is not an issue with the infrastructure itself, but rather our policies surrounding car use. We could give signal priority to transit vehicles tomorrow, if there was the political will to do so. Frequent stops is a planning issue - I have been critical of the Eglinton LRT in the past, but that's a horse which has already been buried underground and turned into fossil fuels.

The problem with the SSE is cost - $6 billion is an absurd amount of money for a suburban extension with three stations. It's New York expensive. An above ground metro could have worked, but where would it go ...

Since this thread is about the Finch West LRT, let me say that LRT is the best mode for this corridor - it's (relatively) cheap, and it replaces a heavy-demand bus route. Subway is inappropriate for this corridor in particular, as its demand isn't from through traffic/crosstown traffic, and any stop consolidation with a subway would hurt riders.

The fact that this is a low-key project, I think, is a great example to learn from. You don't have politicians a-les-Fords trying to meddle with it to buy votes, you don't get tunnels (Eglinton West) that are hugely expensive yet pass under single family homes, and you don't have NIMBYs desperately trying to kill the project/make it supremely expensive, in a classic Toronto manner. It also demonstrates that the main driver to cost is poor planning. This is the least expensive, and probably the best-value (or 2nd, after Ontario Line) project built in the last 40 years.

Okay, rant over.
 
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