They are essential to have driverless operation, so yes they will happen. They also have a huge ventilation and fire safety benefit, because the passenger areas are separated from the tunnels/trains.
Yeah, I think often people forget that the issue the TTC is running into with adding PSDs to existing stations is that aside from TYSSE, they weren't built for them, not that PSDs are some high-cost item on their own. The existing station platforms have a crawlspace under them (which means the platforms are cantilevered to some extent, and adding PSDs requires putting structural supports under the edges of the platform to support the weight of the doors. Plus I think for a number of stations, that work is gonna end up with them doing a bunch of asbestos removal during the process. All of which drives the costs way up for the existing stations (also the TTC weirdly always frames PSDs as something they need to do in every station simultaneously, which also produces the high total cost they always quote).
They really need to use TTC font instead of what's shown there.
I haven't looked into it yet but 1 billion /km sounds expensive
Tunneling under downtown Toronto and building complex interchange stations, I am actually understanding the ~$1B/km pricetag.
I guess this all but confirms the line will not open until 2030 at the earliest? Did I read that correctly?News
Ontario Transit Group has been selected to deliver the south portion of the Ontario Line
Contract Awarded for Ontario Line South Package
Infrastructure Ontario and Metrolinx have awarded a fixed-price contract to Ontario Transit Group for $6.1B ($5.6B for capital costs and $0.5B for financing and transaction costs) to design, build and finance the Ontario Line Southern Civil, Stations and Tunnel (South Civil) package.www.infrastructureontario.ca
I think that's accurate. Shouldn't be surprising that this will take 7+ years.
I think it's less the station complexity and more the environment the tunnel is going under being far more complex that contributes somewhat to the costs. There's way more tall buildings to avoid having an impact on, there's the fact it doesn't stay aligned to a single street like Eglinton does, it runs below PATH tunnels, the tunnel itself is deeper, etc. That said, it's still a pretty complex job to add that many concourse levels and escalators to Queen station while keeping it operational and not having any impact on the surroundings buildings. If Metrolinx caused the south end of the Eaton Centre to fall into a sinkhole, that would look pretty bad on them, so they probably wanna avoid that.