How big a debacle is the Sheppard line?

[Brighter Hell]

^so if accidents are such a problem, how can so many other cities (not just houston, but cities all over europe) pull it off so well? sheppard doesn't even remotely resemble spadina downtown. except between dufferin and bayview, the intersections are far apart, with a suburban street pattern and limited turning movements. much of the street is 6+ lanes and in a lot of other spots there's room in the right of way for expansion. there's lots of room for an LRT there and on other streets like it. just like that amsterdam example.

edit - someone mentioned tunelling. there probably would have to be a couple tunnel sections but it wouldn't be more than a couple km at most.

 

[rbtaylor]

so if accidents are such a problem, how can so many other cities (not just houston, but cities all over europe) pull it off so well?

Often by having streets close together and laying down alternative track.

The same reason that Queen/King/Dundas/College work. When something happens on one street, you can route around it.

Diverting from Sheppard to Finch or York Mills is going to leave one heck of a walk for the people who were displaced.


For routes with no diversion, it doesn't work well. They either have very high spending for operations (clear diversions quickly, bring in alternative modes quickly, etc.) OR they may have missed a ton of potential in the corridor -- a large missed opportunity cost, assumming the corridor had large potential to begin with.

High ridership doesn't mean they've maxed out the potential benefits of the corridor.


Opportunity cost (missed potential) is the reason we don't just sit around and do nothing. Spending $0 on capital and $0 on operations is by far the cheapest option on paper but doesn't do much to improve the life of the residents.


This is basic business math. The value of the corridor is worth $P (maximum potential) if you spend $C capital with $O operating costs. Please note that potential for a city includes direct (farebox) and indirect benefits (business/residential growth, environmental benefits, etc.). The maximum potential maximum impact to the quality of life of Torontonians.

We will need to assign a dollar value for quality of life.

If you spend $C - c and achieve $P - p potential with operating costs at $O - o, you had better hope that $c is larger than ($p + $o) * 20 years.


In most business cases the total cost for any given implementation ends up being pretty much the same. If you reduce the capital, you miss out on some potential.

That is, the total long term cost is the pretty much the same regardless of implementation, including building nothing. For the city, you sacrifice quality of life for cash on hand. To simplify things, I'll assign a dollar value to a transit trip to reflect the benefits of that trip being made that way.

You might assign a different (higher or lower) value to a bicycle trip or trip by foot.


I think you will find the case to be true with the Sheppard corridor as well (Sheppard/Yonge via SCC to Kennedy).


First, start with "doing nothing". The peak potential ridership for the Sheppard corridor is probably on the order of about 400k trips per day between Yonge/Sheppard via SCC to Kennedy station linking with the SCC.

Total cost is about $5B for subway that entire length, which could achieve the peak potential ridership. LRT in PROW will not (read Soberman report on SRT to find out why). LRT in ROW with mixed intersections will not.



The trick is determining the "value of a ride". Congestion, environment, economic growth, etc. all factor in to it. What could the economy be like. What impact has it had to the cost of living, etc.

People want transit, and today it costs about $5 per trip. $5 is about the sum of capital subsidies, operational subsidies, and customer revenue. We know the value of public transit is higher than the cost (otherwise we would all drive in Toronto) so lets go with a value of $7 per transit trip to reflect the downtown cores economic growth resulting from the subway.


Starting with doing nothing (no busses or anything), we have:
C = $0
R = $0
O = $0
Opportunity Cost = (value of a single ride: $7) * (400k * 52 * 5 * 20) = $14.56B over 20 years.

Total cost of doing absolutely nothing (not running busses or anything) is about $14.56B over 20 years if you believe the $7 value for a ride which I pulled out of thin air. Use your own number to represent the value of a transit trip. Some European cities put the value at much higher than $7 CDN.

Frankly, I would believe it. The amount of tax revenue that the feds and province pull out of the city is huge on an annual basis. A large chunk of that comes from the downtown core. The downtown core growth is based (for transportation) almost exclusively on public transit investments.

If we don't invest in any additional growth, the city stagnates and will not grow economically. Lost opportunity.



Go from there and plug in the numbers for LRT, subway, busses, etc. LRT and busses will not achieve full potential for this corridor BUT they could get enough of the opportunity cost to make savings on capital worth while -- I just find it highly unlikely.

Subway with borrowed capital:

Capital: $5B + (interest over 10 years) -- so say $9B in total
Operations: Estimating about $175M per year * 20 years
Farebox revenue: 400k trips * $1.5 per trip * 52 * 5 = $156M per year * 20 years
Opportinuty Cost: See above: $14.56B

TTC budget is $1B. Take 70% of that to run the subway in total and the Sheppard corridor is about 1/4 the length of the entire network again -- so about $150 to $200M per year.


Grand total is about $4B in profit over 20 years for Torontonians in quality of life benefits (direct and indirect). Some in environmental benefits, some filtered through the various governments for services, some in your pocket book from increased economic activity.


All of these numbers are examples only and I not put time for growth or construction, but you know there is some truth to that.

We know the benefits of a strong transit system have value far beyond the farebox revenue, otherwise it wouldn't exist (too expensive).

It is also important to realize that the benefits (potential achieved) is backend loaded over a number of decades and that politicians who started the process are generally long gone by then.

 

[cdl42]

Traffic accidents have never become a big issue in any light rail system that has been built (with the possible exception of Houston). That's a very spurious argument. There's level crossings on all the GO lines, and those carry many thousands of passengers per hour, but we don't see any calls for the complete elimination of level crossings.

"The opportunity cost in the form of a perceived lack of reliability is higher than the capital cost savings from not having a fully separated ROW."

I'll reinterate that collisions shouldn't be a problem. That stated, the only way to fully seperate the ROW on streets like Sheppard would be with a tunnel, which would add many multiples of billions of dollars to the cost. How many collisions does it take to counteract the savings of $2 billion?

If you're talking about making transit attractive, most who have looked in to that question have found that as long as it can compete with travel time, light rail is often MORE attractive to passengers than subways. People prefer to look at scenery than stare at blank tunnel walls, believe it or not.

And as for Calgary... their next phase includes a new downtown tunnel (in conjunction with the existing 7th Ave service). They're wisely building the system as demand and service requires it, not by some precieved hierarchy of modes.

I've been to cities like Amsterdam where subway service in the central city is non-existent (designed as a suburban commuter network), with light rail providing a fast, reliable service covering the city. It really is something else, if possible I would reccomend to everyone to check it out.

It really is unfortunate that we have no good examples of light rail close to Toronto. People really do seem to have problems comprehending what is possible.

 

[rbtaylor]

The costs in Calgaries equations are significantly different than they are in Toronto.

Tunneling is a different cost and the corridor potential is different.

Eglinton and Highway 7 are also different corridors with different potential, thus possibly requiring different treatment.


The whole point of that speach was to have you recognize that "Do Nothing" can have a huge cost associated with it -- missed opportunity.

The various shades of implementation will achieve various reductions in the opportunity cost.

There's level crossings on all the GO lines, and those carry many thousands of passengers per hour, but we don't see any calls for the complete elimination of level crossings.

I brought up GO earlier as an example of at grade transit in Toronto. I'm well aware of their network.


The important question to ask is whether GO transit is achieving the maximum potential of their corridors today? Have they achieved every single potential rider, every bit of potential economic growth, and every "quality of life" benefit (pollution/health, time savings, etc.)?


What benefits are we missing out on because of the current implentation of GO lines (pick one line)? Assign a dollar value these benefits. This is the opportunity cost -- the expenses associated with missing the benefits.

What changes could be made to achieve a larger %age of the benefits available in the corridor? How much capital would need to be invested?

Even if it is not worth investing the capital, the missed opportunity still has a expense.


You may well decide that running GO with at grade intersections is fine because the missed opportunity (improved service, increased frequency, etc.) only has a value of $500M but capital required was $650M.

It still means at grade crossing cost us $500M, it just happens to be cheaper.


Looking at GOs capital budget, I see they are investing heavily into grade separation activities, primarily for time benefits at rail/rail crossings.

 

[maxy505]

A brief interlude:

The Sheppard Line needs to be built west of Yonge St first with a Y at Downsview to allow every other Spadina line train to service Sheppard. This will add about 5 minutes of extra travel time to get downtown and help to take the load off the Yonge Line... TTC has already decided that every other train is to run to York north of Downsview at this time.

-drum118

This sounds like a really good alternative to a DRL for the short-to-medium term, considering only its "downtown relief" aspect and not service expansion. We all know there won't be a real DRL built any time soon.

This solution would offload most of the Sheppard riders from the Yonge line, as well as some of the Scarborough BD users (not many now; more, the further Sheppard is extended).

I don't think the old Yonge-BD interlining problems would apply. If any leg of the 3 coming into Downsview had a problem, trains could continue to run between the 2 remaining terminals.

 

[maxy505]

In most business cases the total cost for any given implementation ends up being pretty much the same. If you reduce the capital, you miss out on some potential....

That is, the total long term cost is the pretty much the same regardless of implementation, including building nothing. For the city, you sacrifice quality of life for cash on hand. To simplify things, I'll assign a dollar value to a transit trip to reflect the benefits of that trip being made that way.

rbtaylor, according your reasoning any and all capital improvements are approximately equal. And obviously by "pulling numbers out of thin air" you will be able to demonstrate this.

The estimating procedure you followed is simple enough, but only as good as the huge assumptions it works on. For example:

If we don't invest in any additional growth, the city stagnates and will not grow economically. Lost opportunity.

There are all kinds of assumptions implicit in that. What if people and businesses, instead of being taxed for a subway, invest their money in other things? The return might be greater or smaller, but it's not zero.

Go from there and plug in the numbers for LRT, subway, busses, etc. LRT and busses will not achieve full potential for this corridor BUT they could get enough of the opportunity cost to make savings on capital worth while -- I just find it highly unlikely.

The LRT corridor would be double or triple the length of the subway corridor; it's pretty much impossible to calculate the aggregate direct and spinoff effects in a way that gives you a number for a formula. You can't rely on the results you get from "Go from there and plug in the numbers for LRT, subway, busses, etc. "

 

[Brighter Hell]

rbtaylor, you're making a lot of assumptions there. the biggest is that potential ridership in the sheppard corridor is the full capacity of a subway line. but a subway line with express tracks has a higher theoretical capacity, let's say 600k per day, so why not use that as the potential? the answer is simple - because raising capital doesn't raise potential after a certain point. would you use the maximum capacity of a 6 lane expressway for the potential traffic to yellowknife? of course not. you use a number that's realistic for that corridor i the time frame you're working with. for sheppard 400k is too high for potential - there's no way it will ever have the same kind of ridership as the yonge line, let alone in the 20 year timeline you're using. something like, say, 150k would be more reasonable.

now i'm not sure that i'm completely getting that formula because i'm getting different numbers than you are... so i'll let you do the math. use a more realistic potential number, like 150k, taking into account that operating costs would likely be lower. i think you'll get a negative number, not a profit.

now do the same for light rail. ridership would be slightly lower, operating costs would be lower, and capital costs would be much much lower. i have a feeling you'll get a profit.

to be completely fair, you'd have to add to that the number of light rail lines that could be built using the money saved by building light rail and not subway. you'd save several billion from that $9 billion figure you used. if you did similar calculations for a few other lines that could be built with that money and added up the profits from each, something tells me you'll be dealing with billions of dollars in profits over several corridors.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

"Total cost is about $5B for subway that entire length"

I'm going to assume you've pre-inflated that number a bit since, although I doubt it would cost that much today, construction won't be starting any time soon on the entire stretch.

"for sheppard 400k is too high for potential - there's no way it will ever have the same kind of ridership as the yonge line, let alone in the 20 year timeline you're using."

Ever is a long time, and the 400K he was referring to includes the stretch of subway from Yonge to STC to Kennedy (since, without other extensions, to Malvern, etc., it would essentially be one continuous line).

"The Sheppard Line needs to be built west of Yonge St first with a Y at Downsview to allow every other Spadina line train to service Sheppard. This will add about 5 minutes of extra travel time to get downtown and help to take the load off the Yonge Line. Once this is built, then the line is to be extended to Victoria with the rest of Sheppard being an LRT line until 2030-50 at the earliest before becoming a subway. If you are going to build it pass Victoria Ave, then it must go to Morningside Ave and putting a terminal on the south-east corner since there is a large lot there now."

The VP to Downsview segment of your Sheppard plan sounds great (it may not even add travel time for some people if they're headed for somewhere along the University line), but I think express/Rocket buses can handle the remaining stretch to STC before the subway comes - much of the subway's potential riders are currently taking the 401 and adjacent routes like York Mills and Finch and will not switch to any form of LRT. Your plans for transit expansion in the Malvern/Rouge/Cornell/Pickering area are, as always, overly ambitious .

 

[rbtaylor]

you're making a lot of assumptions there.

Indeed, and the assumptions I provided are obviously incorrect.

I gave a very low end value and competely neglected to account for competing alternatives (401, 407, streets, walking, etc.).

Transportation is pretty complex since most revenue is indirect. You invest in transit, water, sewer, electricity, to achieve growth increases income and consumption tax revenue.

In reality, you don't "achieve" growth, you allow pre-existing demand for growth to occur by expanding the infrastructure needed to support it. The potential is there first. You enable it to happen afterward by removing the restrictions that prevent it (cost, performance limits, congestion, etc.)



A simpler example would be a single webpage on a website (single page, not several pages). They're actually similar since both city building and website building are long-tail events. Results are paid out over many order of magnitudes longer than it took to build a piece of infrastructure in the first place, with minimal investment required afterward until the end of lifetime when you need to abandon or rebuild.

Nearly every webpage has a potential revenue stream of about $12000 over its lifetime. This is a number worked out over about 5 years of experimentation across nearly 15000 websites on various topics with 30 to 100 pages each that my employer has indirectly put up but very closely monitors. We enable small businesses to get online and sell their products or expertise. Execution makes a huge difference in revenue achieved.

By doing nothing, not creating a webpage, you are immediately out on $12000 in revenue. That is about the maximum potential for a webpage, and you didn't achieve it.

If take a couple of hours and create a very simple general webpage and put some Google Ads on it you might achieve $10 over the lifetime of the page (say 10 years or $1 per year). Your actual cost is the 2 hours invested. The missed potential is $11990.

If you hire a photographer, editor, do research to find an under represented niche with excessive advertising capital, do appropriate search engine optimization, hire experts to help write the targetted content, etc. Now take the time to attract specific advertisers and earn a commissions.

You may quickly invest $10K in time and expertise into that single webpage of a few thousand words -- and find you come very close to achieving the maximum potential of about $12k in revenue from it.

The potential maximum is about $12k as a result of advertiser and commission capabilities. If you spend more than $12k building a single webpage, we can pretty much guarantee that you will have a revenue loss.

There is an equation that tails off with multiple pages on a website. This is the result of competing with yourself or having better attraction of advertising revenue and sales commissions (nice curve).




Consider the Sheppard corridor, between NYCC and SCC. What would happen if there were no infrastructure limitations and growth was allowed to occur until demand peaked. Transportation would be free for use, never slow or delayed, easily accessible at all points; perfect.

Do this in your mind with other places. Would "perfect" transit in Walkerton enable supressed growth to occur? Probably not. Some bush field in the middle of Northern Ontario? Bayfield Street in Barrie? Highway 7? Kipling in Etobicoke? Jarvis south of Bloor?

This is your maximum potential for a given corridor. Some is immediately not achievable -- there needs be be a trade off between access points and speed. There will be a user fee.


When I look at the Sheppard Corridor I see huge amounts of potential growth capped by infrastructure limitations.


Downtown is the same way. You could build nearly any traditional public transit improvement out of downtown in most directions and it will be at capacity and limiting growth in the area within 15 to 20 years.

 

[unimaginative2]

There's a huge difference between accident risks on a GO train line with level crossings and those on a city street running along with cars. The former has barriers and relatively few intersections, while the latter comes into contact with cars at every block. There is no comparison between a typical modern North American LRT line and the Spadina line or a hypothetical Sheppard LRT. In almost every other city, LRT lines run along highway, rail, or other corridors. Many even have full level crossings with barriers where they intersect with roads. I recently travelled the Gold Line in LA and it's an excellent service with pretty much nothing in common with what I experience on Spadina. This is why I completely support LRT in corridors like the Stouffville GO line. It would be fast and very likely quite popular. This is completely different from a streetcar in a median strip on a road that is questionable in terms of width to accommodate it. A Sheppard LRT could well take longer from Scarborough Centre to Yonge than the existing bus, since the bus has the ability to pass stopped traffic and wouldn't have to wait for the endless left turn light cycles inherent in median ROW running. This isn't that big of an issue in the central city where distances are relatively short, but when you're crossing half the city up in North York and Scarborough, this is intolerable.

 

[jordancerovic]

"The Sheppard line already serves eastern North York, although a station at Vic Park would make bus connections easier. People in north Scarborough who live west of the Kennedy bus do not travel south to the B/D line, they take buses over to the Yonge line. Depending on where they live, catching a bus south to the Sheppard line and transferring twice to get onto Yonge may not save any time. No one sits on the Warden bus for an hour when they can take Steeles or Cummer or Finch and be at Finch station in 20 minutes."

Right, they take buses to Yonge. But if the Sheppard subway ran that far out, they would take a shorter ride to Sheppard and then take the subway to Yonge. A lot of those people who take Steeles East or Finch East (routes with very high riderships I believe) will at least consider taking the Sheppard subway instead. That's why I think that as you extend it, people will adjust and its ridership will continue to increase.

The idea that a bus ride from Kennedy to Yonge on, say Steeles (do you have any idea how long a ride that is?), would somehow take as long as a ride from Steeles to Sheppard and a 15-20 minute subway ride is simply wrong.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

"Right, they take buses to Yonge. But if the Sheppard subway ran that far out, they would take a shorter ride to Sheppard and then take the subway to Yonge. A lot of those people who take Steeles East or Finch East (routes with very high riderships I believe) will at least consider taking the Sheppard subway instead. That's why I think that as you extend it, people will adjust and its ridership will continue to increase."

I know. I didn't say what you just said because it's obvious and I've said it before. I was just saying that an extended Sheppard line won't lure many people from the area between Don Mills and Kennedy who currently take the Bloor line because so few of them travel down to the Bloor line, let alone those who take the SRT downtown or even take the SRT to the Bloor line and then travel north again (travel of this behaviour makes up a miniscule percentage of the people who take the 190, for example - I'd say the 190's ridership is heavier towards Fairview since more use it as a Sheppard express route than a Fairview to STC link). It won't attract many new riders from eastern North York - the line has already done this by being run out to Don Mills. Loads of people taking Steeles, Finch, York Mills, etc, routes will switch to the Sheppard line if it ran farther across the city (tens of thousands of trips per day probably), but many will not - they'll only switch if it saves them time or effort and if they're going all the way to Yonge...this is why the Bathurst bus and Queen streetcar are busy despite being only one concession over from parallel subway lines and why, while many will switch, routes like Finch won't see a wholesale shuffling of their ridership over to the Sheppard line, only those travelling long distances.

"The idea that a bus ride from Kennedy to Yonge on, say Steeles (do you have any idea how long a ride that is?), would somehow take as long as a ride from Steeles to Sheppard and a 15-20 minute subway ride is simply wrong."

Did you mean to say "The idea that a ride from Steeles to Sheppard and a 15-20 minute subway ride would somehow take as long as a bus ride from Kennedy to Yonge on, say Steeles (do you have any idea how long a ride that is?) is simply wrong"?

If so, you're wrong. Yes, I know how long that is because I take that bus every day. I live east of Kennedy, and most days it's about 30-35 minutes (including the delays from congestion on Yonge) but after 9pm (when I'm usually coming home) it's 25-30 minutes, and if I take Finch or Cummer, it's 25 minutes. The Steeles night bus can get to Kennedy from Yonge in 17-18 minutes (Finch usually takes 20, unless they wait for a light cycle or two at Warden if they get too far ahead of the schedule), faster than a subway and you're not 50 stairs below ground when you step off a bus. If Steeles and Finch had Rocket bus service, they'd be even quicker. Also, when you factor in a transfer onto a north/south route that has miserable frequency, jumping on a bus straight to or from Finch station will still be faster for some people, including me. Sure, on average, lots of people will see quicker commutes with the Sheppard subway, but this is also assuming traffic on roads like Finch and Steeles gets so bad that express buses stop being viable and 45+ minute bus trips to Finch station become the norm...then the Sheppard subway's ridership will soar.

This discussion about serving Kennedy & Steeles wouldn't even be needed if GO was improved - guess where Milliken GO station is. It only comes 4 times a day and costs an arm and a leg when paired with a Metropass, so I don't/can't take it. It seems like 90% of the people who take it are wives that work in the MINT towers who are dropped off at the GO stations by husbands who then drive to work in suburban office parks. Removing suburban-to-downtown commuters who could be taking GO from the subway expansion equation should be a priority but it's being ignored.

 

[Brighter Hell]

A Sheppard LRT could well take longer from Scarborough Centre to Yonge than the existing bus, since the bus has the ability to pass stopped traffic and wouldn't have to wait for the endless left turn light cycles inherent in median ROW running. This isn't that big of an issue in the central city where distances are relatively short, but when you're crossing half the city up in North York and Scarborough, this is intolerable.

an LRT in its own right of way would be able to pass stopped traffic a lot better than a bus could. and there's no reason traffic signals couldn't be times to give the train priority instead of left turning cars like on spadina. the distance is longer but the travel would be a lot faster - on most of the road intersections and traffic signals are far apart, turning movements are limited, and pedestrians are few and far between.

 

[cdl42]

Indeed. Traffic can get pretty backed up on streets like Finch and Sheppard, often bad enough that it takes multiple light cycles for traffic to get through an intersection. A median ROW would allow vehicles to cruise right past that and proper light signal priority could keep the vehicles moving.

"In almost every other city, LRT lines run along highway, rail, or other corridors."

In most cities, it's a combination of both. Like Calgary where the line runs along 36th St. In LA the Metro Blue Line uses the median of Long Beach Blvd for a good portion of its length. This is standard throughout Europe as well.

 

[miketoronto]

Unless the signals are timed, a ROW won't work on Sheppard. Lets look at it this way. In the time it takes the SPADINA STREETCAR to get from Front to Bloor, the Sheppard bus can go from Don Mills to Meadowvale.