Toronto Ontario Line 3 | ?m | ?s

With the Ontario Line RFP conveniently scheduled to close after the next election, I wonder if the government might have some issue finding companies willing to bring forth proposals. We all know that if the PCs lose the next election, which is probable, the next government is certain to throw this whole proposal out the window and revert back to the old Relief Line plans. Why invest millions of dollars putting together a proposal, if your proposal is just going to be used as political fodder, before inevitably getting scrapped?
 
^I’m not sure it’s a problem. Big construction consortiums are accustomed to competing at long odds ie at best they are bidding against three or more other firms. The cost of submitting proposals is just a cost of doing business, and the business that is won covers the cost of business development.
Also, I’m not sure that a new government would pitch the whole OL plan. To give Ford his due (I’m swallowing a little), it will be hard for a new government to walk back from the entire Eglinton to Exhibition scope. That’s a big gain no matter how this turns out.
The wild card that might turn the decision is the OL’s end capacity spec. If it can be shown to be undersized,, then perhaps the next government will have grounds to start over or revert to vanilla TTC subway technology. But if the technical planning for OL reaches the point where more design has been done than exists in shrinkwrap from the RL, and if the capacity is there, then Ford may have left enough behind when he leaves that the more prudent decision is to work with it.
It’s incredibly disappointing that we start one design and then tear it up to start over, and a huge disservice to the work doneby the RL. But only the voters can change the pols’ behaviour, and so far the average Joe isn’t complaining.

- Paul
 
TheTigerMaster said:
With the Ontario Line RFP conveniently scheduled to close after the next election, I wonder if the government might have some issue finding companies willing to bring forth proposals. We all know that if the PCs lose the next election, which is probable, the next government is certain to throw this whole proposal out the window and revert back to the old Relief Line plans. Why invest millions of dollars putting together a proposal, if your proposal is just going to be used as political fodder, before inevitably getting scrapped?
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IF (that's a big IF) the OL can actually be delivered within reasonable budget and having all studies completed, I don't see why the next government would want to rip it all up and go back to the RL which could be way behind in design. That said, if Ford is to deliver on his promises, the OL should been tendered around 2021 well before the next election if it's going to make it for 2027. Ford better do so to have a chance to get reelected. Ripping it up would be equivalent to cancelling the power plant. Certainly Ford didn't dare to cancel the Finch West LRT.
 
Steve X said:
... I don't see why the next government would want to rip it all up and go back to the RL which could be way behind in design.
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Agreed. Liberals certainly wouldn't object to the tender mechanism as it sounds GO RER style (capacity + performance targets).

Additional wanted GO expansion might be a reason (4th track) but it's probably easier to grade separate GO express/through tracks than it is the Relief Line simply because GO express tracks don't need as many stations.
 
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Steve X said:
I wouldn't call the OL a serious flaw. Two station have significantly shifted in location. Building on top of the railway corridor doesn't make it bad if it can be done. Alignment choices are often political, the RL was chosen to please the city while the OL is to please Ford. Different planners would prioritize on different criteria. Cost will always have the biggest constraint leading to opposition. Nothing is perfect. Queen Street is chosen cause they want a station entrance right in front of Nathan Phillips Square. Ripping up an existent design is probably a bad idea. Ford himself would have no knowledge of transit planning. The idea has to have come from ML themselves.


No one said the line is going to be built with light rail vehicles. A smaller heavy rail would likely be chosen. All the OL initial business case states the train will be smaller than TTC subway train but still much bigger than SkyTrain/Confederation Line with 3.0m width and 100m length trains and a train capacity of 730-850. To put that in reference, the trains should be similar to the 4-car TRs on Sheppard, slightly longer and slightly narrower. The SkyTrain/Confederation Line are in the 500-600 passenger per train range.

There is a flaw through. There expect to achieve 40 trains per hour to carry the same capacity as the TR does with manual operation (OL targets 29,300-34,000 ppdph) but realistically they would hit 35 trains per hour (25,500-29,750 ppdph). Nevertheless, that capacity would still be higher than those SkyTrains/Confederation Line which maxes out around 20,000-21,000 ppdph. So they might need 110m trains to make up the differences. The planned used of screen doors might help.

In summary, yes the OL trains will carry less riders than TR with ATO but no the line is not stupidly under capacity. They aren't the tiny SRT trains!
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The flaw is not that it’s undercapcity. The flaw is that the line has zero ability to absorb any extensions or increases in population or employment growth. Unless we elect to never extend this line, and unless our population projections are spot on (and they’ve been tremendously underestimating growth), we’re going to be in a really bad spot in 10 or 20 years.

Anything less than 30,000 pphpd is under capacity, and will need to be supplemented with additional crowding relief measures in the near future. Let’s not forget that the DRL long was expected to produce ridership of 20,000 pphpd a decade from now. And with Downtown Toronto’s population growth continuing to blow past even the most bullish population projections (growing twice as fast as expected), 20,000 pphpd is almost certainly underestimating demand.

20,000 pphpd is woefully under capacity. 25,000 pphpd will acommmodate initial demand (once extended to Sheppard) and nothing more. This line needs to be 30,000 or 35,000 pphpd.

If we’re not gonna spend the money to build this thing with adequate capacity today, we better be prepared to build a Relief Line 2 to serve North York and Scarborough in 20 years. It’s a penny wise, dollar foolish decision

What we should be doing is taking the $11 Billion from this line, and invest it in building the DRL North + South to proper spec. North is the phase that is more desperately needed anyways, and we’ll certainly have capacity to serve Torontonians for decades to come. We can then look at the western extension
 
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TheTigerMaster said:
The flaw is not that it’s undercapcity. The flaw is that the line has zero ability to absorb any extensions or increases in population or employment growth. Unless we elect to never extend this line, and unless our population projections are spot on (and they’ve been tremendously underestimating growth), we’re going to be in a really bad spot in 10 or 20 years.

Anything less than 30,000 pphpd is under capacity, and will need to be supplemented with additional crowding relief measures in the near future. Let’s not forget that the DRL long was expected to produce ridership of 20,000 pphpd a decade from now. And with Downtown Toronto’s population growth continuing to blow past even the most bullish population projections (growing twice as fast as expected), 20,000 pphpd is almost certainly underestimating demand.

20,000 pphpd is woefully under capacity. 25,000 pphpd will acommmodate initial demand (once extended to Sheppard) and nothing more. This line needs to be 30,000 or 35,000 pphpd.

If we’re not gonna spend the money to build this thing with adequate capacity today, we better be prepared to build a Relief Line 2 to serve North York and Scarborough in 20 years. It’s a penny wise, dollar foolish decision
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Looks like SmartTrack, as an express line for the east side, would be needed, after all.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
And with the OL consuming valuable space in the railways corridor, adding additional capacity becomes that much more impossible.
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It's not really any harder to build elevated/tunnelled electrified GO tracks than it is elevated/tunnelled TTC tracks; might even be cheaper as GO Express tracks have far fewer stations.

The real unfortunate bit is that GO corridor use was rejected when TTC proposed it years ago, and as a result instead of issuing a tender this year, we're waiting on a TPAP to start.
 
Reecemartin said:
Yes, I was recently at Thales and you'd be surprised how many systems are being built with plans for 90s frequency (40tph)
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The advantage of SelTrac is that it is capable of lower headways than any other off-the-shelf signalling system. (The fact that it is a made-in-Canada design is a nice little feather in the cap, too.)

Unfortunately, it's disadvantages are numerous enough to frequently make it more of a headache than its competitors.

Dan
 
TheTigerMaster said:
The flaw is not that it’s undercapcity. The flaw is that the line has zero ability to absorb any extensions or increases in population or employment growth. Unless we elect to never extend this line, and unless our population projections are spot on (and they’ve been tremendously underestimating growth), we’re going to be in a really bad spot in 10 or 20 years.

Anything less than 30,000 pphpd is under capacity, and will need to be supplemented with additional crowding relief measures in the near future. Let’s not forget that the DRL long was expected to produce ridership of 20,000 pphpd a decade from now. And with Downtown Toronto’s population growth continuing to blow past even the most bullish population projections (growing twice as fast as expected), 20,000 pphpd is almost certainly underestimating demand.

20,000 pphpd is woefully under capacity. 25,000 pphpd will acommmodate initial demand (once extended to Sheppard) and nothing more. This line needs to be 30,000 or 35,000 pphpd.

If we’re not gonna spend the money to build this thing with adequate capacity today, we better be prepared to build a Relief Line 2 to serve North York and Scarborough in 20 years. It’s a penny wise, dollar foolish decision

What we should be doing is taking the $11 Billion from this line, and invest it in building the DRL North + South to proper spec. North is the phase that is more desperately needed anyways, and we’ll certainly have capacity to serve Torontonians for decades to come. We can then look at the western extension
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The more capacity for downtown and the outlying core areas, the better IMO. If more capacity is to be produced from the outset, then DRL N+S should take a King alignment through the core and run up Dufferin in the west end after Exhibition, if the Ex remains the desired terminus. DRL II along Queen should be the next order of business. That line could target the more eastern and western sections of the downtown core, the Beaches in the east and possibly towards Humber Bay and beyond in the west.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
The flaw is not that it’s undercapcity. The flaw is that the line has zero ability to absorb any extensions or increases in population or employment growth. Unless we elect to never extend this line, and unless our population projections are spot on (and they’ve been tremendously underestimating growth), we’re going to be in a really bad spot in 10 or 20 years.

Anything less than 30,000 pphpd is under capacity, and will need to be supplemented with additional crowding relief measures in the near future. Let’s not forget that the DRL long was expected to produce ridership of 20,000 pphpd a decade from now. And with Downtown Toronto’s population growth continuing to blow past even the most bullish population projections (growing twice as fast as expected), 20,000 pphpd is almost certainly underestimating demand.

20,000 pphpd is woefully under capacity. 25,000 pphpd will acommmodate initial demand (once extended to Sheppard) and nothing more. This line needs to be 30,000 or 35,000 pphpd.

If we’re not gonna spend the money to build this thing with adequate capacity today, we better be prepared to build a Relief Line 2 to serve North York and Scarborough in 20 years. It’s a penny wise, dollar foolish decision

What we should be doing is taking the $11 Billion from this line, and invest it in building the DRL North + South to proper spec. North is the phase that is more desperately needed anyways, and we’ll certainly have capacity to serve Torontonians for decades to come. We can then look at the western extension
Click to expand...


TheTigerMaster said:
Except the Union railway corridor does not have the capacity for that style of service. And with the OL consuming valuable space in the railways corridor, adding additional capacity becomes that much more impossible.
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Good posts, you really nailed it. The OL plan is ridiculous, the kind of plan that will have people scratching their heads in the future.

We have a 'subway friendly' government who's taken control but they don't want to build a full capacity subway in the one place that actually justifies and demands it.
 
syn said:
We have a 'subway friendly' government who's taken control but they don't want to build a full capacity subway in the one place that actually justifies and demands it.
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We have no indication they want to build a full capacity subway anywhere. Deferring financial decisions until after the 2022 election isn't particularly favourable.
 
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TheTigerMaster said:
The flaw is not that it’s undercapcity. The flaw is that the line has zero ability to absorb any extensions or increases in population or employment growth. Unless we elect to never extend this line, and unless our population projections are spot on (and they’ve been tremendously underestimating growth), we’re going to be in a really bad spot in 10 or 20 years.

Anything less than 30,000 pphpd is under capacity, and will need to be supplemented with additional crowding relief measures in the near future. Let’s not forget that the DRL long was expected to produce ridership of 20,000 pphpd a decade from now. And with Downtown Toronto’s population growth continuing to blow past even the most bullish population projections (growing twice as fast as expected), 20,000 pphpd is almost certainly underestimating demand.

20,000 pphpd is woefully under capacity. 25,000 pphpd will acommmodate initial demand (once extended to Sheppard) and nothing more. This line needs to be 30,000 or 35,000 pphpd.

If we’re not gonna spend the money to build this thing with adequate capacity today, we better be prepared to build a Relief Line 2 to serve North York and Scarborough in 20 years. It’s a penny wise, dollar foolish decision

What we should be doing is taking the $11 Billion from this line, and invest it in building the DRL North + South to proper spec. North is the phase that is more desperately needed anyways, and we’ll certainly have capacity to serve Torontonians for decades to come. We can then look at the western extension
Click to expand...
I agree that if the OL doesn't meet 30k pphpd capacity, it would be a huge failure. Building to meet 30 years of demand is good enough when the money for the RL can be spread for a longer line. They can plan a new line in 20 years time if demand exceeded expectation. Today's taxpayers money is better off spent benefiting more people today than a shorter line that benefits less people 30 years later.

If the RL is to be built as planned to Danforth, we won't have this capacity problem cause we'll be debating 20 years later on getting this line from Danforth to Eglinton instead of trains being full. There isn't a problem with RL2 and RL3 when it is necessary. OL shouldn't be the last subway to be built in downtown Toronto ever. The OL built to TTC spec might cost over $20 Billion.

There is nothing called proper spec. TTC just wants it to be built to TTC spec so it works with the rest of the system. There are lines using 8-10 car trains that can carry 60-80k ppdph. I am for a line that will meet demand for the next 30 years. There isn't a reason to overspend money for TTC spec that might benefit 2 generations later when money can be better on other projects today.

We are worry that line can be overcapacity especially if extended to Sheppard and beyond. The further north the line is extended, more riders from York Region will use it. It's the main reason why we need the RL in the first place especially with the Yonge extension. That has diven ridership on Yonge significantly higher than it should be. Beyond the OL/RL, it would be necessary to invest in RER plus subsidies and make it affordable so long distance commuters won't end up taking up space on local subway lines for local riders. Maybe the OL/RL shouldn't be extended that far north to avoid what's happening to Yonge. York Region riders could stay on Line 1 and RER.
 
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