Hipster Duck
Senior Member
That's obviously the goal, but I think it's valuable to push for new ideas to be included in that 50-year plan, otherwise it's just going to be the same old rehash of Transit City and miscellaneous 905 municipal plans. CityRail is about pushing a technology, S-Bahn/RER-style regional rail, that doesn't exist in Toronto. It's not about pushing for a specific plan. Many of the people who are planning transit right now don't even know that the idea of regional rail exists. As long as it's sold as an evolutionary upgrade of GO service, it's not going to have political cachet, it's not going to have integrated fares, and frankly it's not going to happen in any kind of satisfactory form. A group of ordinary people got together to introduce and promote the idea of the DRL, and that's a big part of why it's now on the agenda.
Sorry to bring up an old post, but I forgot to answer it a week ago.
While CityRail is not a "plan" per se, it still is pretty clear about where the lines will go and even suggests where the stations will go. None of this should be the goal of an initiative that is trying to push awareness of a certain technology. Like all the other recent "plans", CityRail makes the cardinal mistake of showing where the lines would go, rather than focusing on the benefits of the technology, figuring out how much it will cost, who will pay, who will operate, what the perceived benefits are of this technology over others, and how it fits into existing plans - both land use, or otherwise. I liken this strategy of presenting a plan as "all attack and no defense" - you step on the toes of competing plans based on where you are going to put it (for example, the Stouffville plan is very similar to the now defunct OneCity plan for regional rail or that i-MetroE plan floated by that Markham MP(P?)) which means that your competitors can marshall their resources to attack you, even if their outcome is similar, but you have no fundamentals (like cost estimates, or alignments with land use and official plans) to fall back and defend your own plan with. I think this is why so many Toronto transit "plans" go down in flames.