salsa
Senior Member
Will these twin towers be dismantled on 9/11 next month?
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Will these twin towers be dismantled on 9/11 next month?
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
kotsy
Senior Member
*smirk*
Inkarnate
Active Member
Ouch...
salsa
Senior Member
In hindsight I should have known better than to come up with that silly joke. I retract what I said and apologize if it offended anyone.
Komiksulo
Active Member
Was any work ever done on how the Eglinton/Crosstown line would reach the airport?
howl
Active Member
Komiksulo
Active Member
Hmm. So they took it as far as Silver Dart Dr. I was wondering how it would connect to Terminal One.
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
See travel demand forecasting report: http://thecrosstown.ca/sites/defaul...ppendixn-travel-demand-forecasting-report.pdf
CDL.TO
Moderator
It would connect to Terminal 1. They just never figured out exactly how that would happen.
W. K. Lis
Superstar
Just wait a few more years. They'll change the roadways again. Then again, and again.
howl
Active Member
Since the airport is federally regulated it is not subject to Provincial EA regulations and therefore it was beyond the scope of the Crosstown EA. The TTC could have included it in scope anyways, but they probably figured it would be decades before it got there and who knows what physical and regulatory changes might be made in the mean time. Now, as long as the Province can get it to the property line, the Feds will have to figure out the last mile.
andrewpmk
Senior Member
Do you actually believe these projections? There is a tendency to systematically skew ridership projections to make them too low if the politicians want LRT and too high if the politicians want subway. I think they are deliberately underestimating population growth along the line. The projected population growth around Yonge/Eglinton and Don Mills/Eglinton is far too low to be realistic. For instance, box 287 is the northeast corner of Yonge/Eglinton, and they project absolutely NO population growth between 2006 and 2031. Well there are numerous condos under construction in this area already, so this is complete BS. The only way this is at all believable is if you assume that the Greenbelt Act is repealed and there is a drastic reduction in condo construction in Toronto, or there is a severe recession between now and 2031 and Toronto stops growing. There was a massive increase in condo construction after 2005 due to the Greenbelt Act which means higher ridership for pretty much any transit line, and the Miller administration didn't understand this.
In the case of the airport it is harder to tell, the main determinant of how many people will ride the LRT is how many people drive vs take transit, which in turn depends on how awful the traffic on the 401 is. The airport area seems to have lost a lot of jobs lately due to the 2015 recession and the decline in popularity of suburban office parks; there are for lease signs everywhere in Mississauga, so maybe overcrowding on the western end of the LRT won't be as bad as I thought. Then again, these projections seem to claim that a ridiculously low percentage of workers in Mississauga will use the LRT, and presumably that the vast majority will drive, and the traffic on the 401 is still horrible (though less horrible than it was a year ago before the 2015 recession) so this isn't very believable either.
There are various other problems with the projections, like the fact that it includes cancelled lines like Sheppard East LRT (probably doesn't make very much difference), the fact that it doesn't include newer projects like GO electrification (I think this might actually reduce ridership on certain parts of the LRT, particularly between Yonge and Black Creek), or the "SmartTrack" proposal, etc.
Let's hope that the ridership projections aren't extremely far off, or we will end up with severe overcrowding problems. I suspect that we will learn the hard way that underground LRT is a bad idea. It costs too much and has too little capacity. I am sick and tired of bad decisions being made about transit in Toronto due to politics.
nfitz
Superstar
Does it matter? The projections were linked in terms of questions about the alignment to the airport. No one was discussing the numbers.
I'm not sure there's any basis for suggesting that projections are systemically biased. That's a theory some transit fanatics have - though it's also a slanderous accusation to the ethically-bound professionals who do such work.
Accurate or not, there are indicative. If it says that the ridership is 300 at the western end of the line, and 3000 near the centre, then it's likely that ridership will be significantly higher in the centre than the western end.
The projected ridership of this line west of Islington was shockingly low, in the hundreds rather than thousands - though perhaps not when you look at how few people live in the area. Still, given the political bias at the time was to try and get the line built, that wouldn't explain why politicians would have wanted to bias it so low.
andrewpmk
Senior Member
Assuming that there will be practically zero population and employment growth along Eglinton between 2006 and 2031 seems systematically biased to me. With all the new condo development around Yonge/Eglinton and if the proposed condo development at the northwest corner of Don Mills/Eglinton gets built clearly population growth will be a lot higher than this report claims it will be. Read the report. There is likely to be 10000s of new residents in these two areas by 2031, and the report claims there will be hardly any. Already I have a suspicion that there is more development around Yonge/Eglinton than this report claims there will be in 2031.
The subway supporters are guilty of this as well, by doing things like assuming an imaginary "Vaughan Metropolitan Centre" will get built around Jane and Highway 7. This is an ugly industrial area and there are only a handful of buildings under construction in that area and this development is going to flop. Then again, the negative effects of building an unneeded subway are not as bad (wasted money) than the negative effects of building an extremely expensive underground LRT line which has too little capacity (overcrowding problems that are impossible to get rid of unless you build parallel or perpendicular lines for relief). Once you have built your extremely expensive underground LRT line there is no way to expand its capacity from 10000/hour to 30000/hour of a subway. The Ministry of Transportation knows better to build a highway with too little capacity and always buys a huge amount of land around any new highway so it can be widened, transit planners need to figure this out as well. Whenever possible transit infrastructure should be designed to have a 100 year lifespan.
I am unhappy with Miller's shady underhanded tactics for pushing his badly planned transit fiasco, while refusing to consider any alternatives (subways, GO electrification) and signing a big LRT contract just before the 2010 election to make it difficult to cancel. I am also angry at Miller for getting Ford elected which is because Transit City was so unpopular that many, many people hated it. If Metrolinx had been fully responsible for transit planning back then and the province had the sense to realize that Miller's plan was junk and refuse to give it any money, we would be far better off and Ford would have never become mayor.
The subway supporters are guilty of this as well, by doing things like assuming an imaginary "Vaughan Metropolitan Centre" will get built around Jane and Highway 7. This is an ugly industrial area and there are only a handful of buildings under construction in that area and this development is going to flop. Then again, the negative effects of building an unneeded subway are not as bad (wasted money) than the negative effects of building an extremely expensive underground LRT line which has too little capacity (overcrowding problems that are impossible to get rid of unless you build parallel or perpendicular lines for relief). Once you have built your extremely expensive underground LRT line there is no way to expand its capacity from 10000/hour to 30000/hour of a subway. The Ministry of Transportation knows better to build a highway with too little capacity and always buys a huge amount of land around any new highway so it can be widened, transit planners need to figure this out as well. Whenever possible transit infrastructure should be designed to have a 100 year lifespan.
I am unhappy with Miller's shady underhanded tactics for pushing his badly planned transit fiasco, while refusing to consider any alternatives (subways, GO electrification) and signing a big LRT contract just before the 2010 election to make it difficult to cancel. I am also angry at Miller for getting Ford elected which is because Transit City was so unpopular that many, many people hated it. If Metrolinx had been fully responsible for transit planning back then and the province had the sense to realize that Miller's plan was junk and refuse to give it any money, we would be far better off and Ford would have never become mayor.