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Sheppard Line 4 Subway Extension (Proposed)

sixrings said:
except that the same people who want the subways in scarborough are also stop the gravy cut my taxes people. I have said repeatedly I have no problem paying extra taxes for these lines. Now convince the other 2.5 million Torontonians that and we can have a conversation. Instead everyone wants this but then cries poor and begs the provincial government and feds to pay which results in promises with delays and delay and delays in funding simply to buy votes and nothing gets built. Unless Torontonians themselves are going to pay their own share this isnt going to happen economy or not.
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When is the last time the City exclusively paid for a subway line? 1954?

There's a snowball's chance in hell that the City can pay for a $7 Billion transit line.
 
DB9 said:
The strangest part to all this is that most proponents want the Scarborough subway underground. There doesn't seem to be any serious conversation about having the subway at street level or above ground to save money or make it economically feasible.
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City council had that conversation, asked city staff to prepare a formal comparison, and found that building the subway above ground would save less than $200 million, minus the cost of replacing the SRT with bus service for several years.

For Sheppard, a surface route isn't feasible, and an elevated guideway above a major road normally isn't much cheaper than tunnelling in the 21st century. When city staff looked at the possibility of a fully elevated route above Midland Road, it came in at just $116 million cheaper than tunnelling the same route. When you factor in the other costs of elevating the subway - things like lost tax revenue from lower property values, lost tax revenue from the traffic disruptions, etc. - it's not worth the tiny amount of savings.

sixrings said:
As long as we elect conservative mayors I won't believe we're serious about transit
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I don't remember David Miller having any interest in building the Relief Line.
 
sixrings said:
As long as we elect conservative mayors I won't believe we're serious about transit
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amnesiajune said:
I don't remember David Miller having any interest in building the Relief Line.
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While Miller was mayor, more than a billion dollars was invested in ATO and new trainsets for Yonge Line, which mitigated future crowding problems and delayed the need for a Yonge Relief Line.

Meanwhile, ridership on several surbuan bus routes was rapidly increasing and was expected to outstrip what could realistically be moved by buses. This is especially for for Eglinton Avenue and Finch Avenue West. Transit City addressed that issue. The Transit City LRT lines will collectively move more people than the Relief Line.

Being "serious about transit" in Toronto doesn't begin and end at the Relief Line. There will always be investments necessary elsewhere in the city to keep the network healthy.
 
I'm going to assume that was his plan after TC. BTW Sheppard lrt would have been running by now but it wasn't good enough for Scarborough
 
TheTigerMaster said:
While Miller was mayor, more than a billion dollars was invested in ATO and new trainsets for Yonge Line, which mitigated future crowding problems and delayed the need for a Yonge Relief Line.
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Sure, but then he proposed three LRT lines - Eglinton Crosstown, Sheppard East, and a Finch West LRT as far east as Yonge - that would throw more people onto Yonge. And despite being told that the Relief Line would be necessary to accomodate the added ridership, he proposed building another LRT line in phase 2 - Don Mills - without the Relief Line to support it.

The comment was complaining that, supposedly, all our conservative mayors aren't serious about transit. If that's the case, and the DRL is the top priority like the comment said, the NDP must be a conservative political party.

sixrings said:
BTW Sheppard lrt would have been running by now but it wasn't good enough for Scarborough
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If Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne had ever gotten around to building more than the railway bridge by Agincourt, perhaps. Two years before the anticipated opening, that was the only work they had actually done. The design wasn't even finished for any of the LRT.
 
TC wasn't perfect but it was lightyears better than Fords one stop to STC Or Torys non existent Smarttrack.
 
amnesiajune said:
Sure, but then he proposed three LRT lines - Eglinton Crosstown, Sheppard East, and a Finch West LRT as far east as Yonge - that would throw more people onto Yonge. And despite being told that the Relief Line would be necessary to accomodate the added ridership, he proposed building another LRT line in phase 2 - Don Mills - without the Relief Line to support it.
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The belief at the time was that ATO would be able to manage ridership demands for another decade or so, before we'd need to move onto other solutions (DRL). Back in 2007, I don't think the Don Mills Subway (Relief Line Long) was on anybody's radar. All the Relief Line proposals were the traditional "U" configuration, with perhaps an extension to Eglinton. So if our planners were blind to the future need of this subway line, I can't really fault the mayor for not protecting the corridor; he's just the mayor, he's not a transit expert.

The first time I saw the Don Mills subway line proposed was around five years ago on Steve Munro's site. It seems to me that nobody at the TTC even considered that the Don Mills corridor would one day, by necessity, be home to a subway line. Even around 2011, when TTC concluded its Downtown Rapid Transit Assessment Study, they never considered a relief subway line on Don Mills. The furthest north proposal they examined brought the DRL to Eglinton.

Seemingly the only reason a Don Mills subway is being very aggressively pushed today is because of Metrolinx's stunning 2015 Yonge Relief Network Study report, which asserted that none of the relief options on the table today could handle Yonge Line demand, and that a subway on Don Mills would be necessary. Suddenly the Don Mills subway proposal went from a ridiculous fantasy to urgent necessity virtually overnight. Since then we've seen the Province and City act swiftly to amend their plans and make the necessary investments necessary to see the Don Mills subway built as quickly as possible.
 
DB9 said:
The strangest part to all this is that most proponents want the Scarborough subway underground. There doesn't seem to be any serious conversation about having the subway at street level or above ground to save money or make it economically feasible. Sheppard still looks the same as when I grew up there - a wide suburban avenue with a patch work of parking lots, strip malls, gas stations and old apartments. I don't see why we have to spend extra billions on an extravagant tunnel.
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I would have preferred it above ground given the geological challenges we now know and the stop which could have continued. Overall not many would complain about the BDL above ground in an appropriate route. The recent report which analyzed route options did look at the RT corridor and had the value pegged it just below $3B at a similar cost to the tunnel. Surely it would be cheaper in the end and the extras stop would have been worth it to me. They also determined the shutdown of the RT was too problematic and surely Smarttrack had something to do with it as well. At this point delaying will cost us all $$$. There was an opportunity not to tunnel but the anti Ford council banded together and went against his LRT enhancement for SCC. What can you do? Delaying isnt going to save us any significant $$ and the Political toxicity needs to come to end.

Also there is little resistance to the Eglinton LRT which is above ground as it serve a different purpose from the SSE and its too bad we cant convert the Sheppard stub to LRT or use a vehicle that could be seamlessly connected. But that also doesn't seem possible so the reality is the subway is the only option that will see support for Sheppard in Scarborough
 
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although i wanted a connected eglinton i think building underground would have caused people on finch to demand underground, as well as sheppard and then to the airport...
 
Juan_Lennon416 said:
Sheppard would have been built as an LRT and then operate like a streetcar. You have no faith in conservative mayors...we'll I have no faith in TTC management running LRTs properly.
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I fail to see how a lrt ride to a don mills downtown relief line is a hardship to scarborough riders. Seems more like people won't be happy until the subway bstops at their doorstep. BTW many people like streetcar and the lrt spacing would be more like express busses
 
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