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The Eglinton East LRT is currently projected to be $3.9 Billion without any underground stations (all of those were cut out when they made it a standalone line). To look at another city, LA is building the East San Fernando Valley Line which will be entirely on street, and cost ~3.7B for 6.7 miles.
I currently live in Ottawa, where we have a Fully Grade Separated Transitway and a Fully Grade Separated LRT to compare and contrast. I'll tell you right now, the LRT is not that much nicer to ride on than the transitway bus services (and I mean the LRT on a good day when its running as expected). In fact I'd personally prefer riding on the transitway over the LRT (although a good part of that is due to busses skipping over stations off peak), with the only caveat being that transitway services have bonkers scheduling these days.
As someone who lives in Markham and frequents Highway 7 often, the busses are fairly packed (especially in the afternoon during rush hour). The issue with VIVA Purple is while headways are around 9 minutes for both branches combined during rush hour, the split between Kennedy and Warden causes one branch to be slower than the other, and you'll usually see one bus 1-2 minutes behind the other, then 15-18 minutes for the next one.
Did he mention what year?
youd hope for finch itd be this year haha
I assume in the case of Eglinton East you have to factor in road realignments, utility relocations, new MSF, new Vehicles, clearing for the new ROW in the roadside segments (Morningside/Ellesmere), rebuilt intersections with new signalling, building proper stations, and I'm probably missing some crucial details. This is in stark contrast with Adelaide where its just adding tracks and pantograph wires to existing roadways.
That's correct, as with most large transit infrastructure projects, a substantial cost also goes to road reconfigurations, and the upfront replacement and relocation of utilities.
It's because BRT allows you to reuse a ton of existing infrastructure. If its an already busy corridor, you don't need to purchase new busses or build a new Garage (in fact you might be able to save on operations compared to status quo due to needing to run less busses due to less congestion), trickier stations could generally have corners cut (not that I advocate for it, but you wouldn't need to build complicated infrastructure at Kennedy Station compared to just having the bus leave the ROW to turn onto the existing bus loop). This is before I bring up that we are generally pretty efficient at building roadways compared to building and maintaining rail ROWs. If we look at how much highway expansions cost, the 427 extension to Major Mackenzie cost $616M for a little under 6km of highway (or about 100M/km) which includes a large amount of grading work and grade separations needed for a 75m wide ROW. This is considerably cheaper than Eglinton East which is 200M/km or 381M/km (depending on if the 3.9B number is the whole route to Malvern and Sheppard/McCowan, or just phase 1 to UTSC). Fact of the matter is we have both LRT and BRT projects built in this regions whose costs we can directly compare, lest we forget about the Hamilton LRT debacle where the government revealed that $1B was enough to build the B-Line as a BRT, whilst was only able to build the 3 westernmost station as LRT.
thestar.com
Actually it's this document. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2024/ex/bgrd/backgroundfile-242258.pdf
