On the Metrolinx document - check out Pickering Airport on the Peterborough line. It's really not about Peterborough commuters boys and girls, it's about paving over thousands of hectares of farmland when we don't have decent interurban rail. But back to the discussion at hand -
we all know the money well will dry up at some point.
Yeees... but that assumes there's only one source of money - tax dollars from one level of government or another. The LUAS LRT system in Dublin is so popular a group of developers are paying a chunk of the capital cost - $55m - to have a spur line to their housing/commercial development. The spur is 4.2km in total but this includes an extra length requested by the local council - I think the developer sought portion would only be about half that. With increased density they're going to make it back with a large profit.
Unfortunately TTC service has been so run into the ground by service cuts and delayed vehicle acquisition that people ride it out of necessity rather out of desire. This means that councillors hear complaints about the TTC rather than demands that its reach get bigger.
The St Clair line should have been a showcase line with new LRVs as well as new ROWs - in fact it should have been separated from the "old" network and associated with the Transit City lines rather than the downtown lines in terms of vehicle type, since there is currently no shared service between it and downtown, with crossovers and double blade switches rather than loops in the rebuilt ROW.
While Save Our St Clair did hold up the show their NIMBYing did cause people to notice some dismaying attitudes in the Roads Dept with respect to design (cars first, then maybe transit, pedestrians last) and after all the disruptions the same old inaccessible LRVs come rumbling down the "new" line which despite promises is apparently unused by emergency services due to the centre poles - I don't think even traffic priority is enabled?
No developer like the guys at Cityplace is going to say - "here's $55m, I want an LRT line because my clients want it and it will give me increased Official Plan density so I can make it back" because where's the confidence that the end product will be the kind of transit that people flock to? You can use tax increment financing but that has a political cost since it's involuntary.
We now have to wait and see if Cherry is that line, and there are some positive signs, but given its connection to King it doesn't have the same possibility of isolation from the failures of systems past as St Clair had, and since the vehicle tender is still not done it's likely to be the same tanks rattling up and down the shiny new ROW.
