Toronto wants subways
Posted: January 13, 2009, 12:28 PM by Peter Kuitenbrouwer
George Grossman asks: "Has anyone mentioned a westward expansion of the Sheppard subway? In my opinion THE most glaring omission in the system is the lack of subway connection along Sheppard between Downsview and Yonge. (i.e. between the Yonge line and the Spadina line) We're talking about 5km of subway, probably less (?)
Howard Levine writes, "As one of four people who had requested a hearing under the Environmental Assessment Act for the St. Clair Streetcar Project, I was deeply disappointed when the Minister instead appointed us to sit on a "Liaison Committee". Together with TTC and City Transportation staff, we have met for several years now for endless hours in an mostly futile attempt to ameliorate the on-going and seemingly never ending project. If this project is to be a template for the Light Rail components of Transit City, Toronto is in for a transit fiasco beyond contemplation."
Don Rodbard, who lives near King and Spadina, writes, "There is some really slick construction going on around the world, mostly bridges, that uses slender concrete columns to support off-site fabricated road/rail spans that are tensioned after installation forming a durable integrated structure that in many cases aren’t as terribly ugly as say the Gardiner or some of the older steel elevated trains. Why can’t we run elevated transit down the middle of some of our wider streets and not give up the limited vehicle flexibility that we all have learned to live with?
Dick Chapman, meanwhile, notes, "With a player like Jack Layton on the scene in Ottawa, the city should enlist the former T.O. councillor in renewed efforts to wring massive new funding from the feds to underpin Toronto's subway expansion. Of course any success Layton achieves in this regard will be politically self-serving, but who cares? If he succeeds, everybody wins. If we stop to fret the political losses and gains, nothing ever gets done. Now is not the time for partisanship, in case anybody hasn't noticed. We seem to be on the brink of a global economic abyss and a lot of us already have vertigo. Subway building in our largest cities would be a wise expenditure of the mysterious stimulus packages which so far seem aimed at propping up the major banks with benefits that suspiciously seem likely to trickle down only as far as the banks' shareholders. Unlike added subway capacity. Does anybody here need reminding how wide is the gap between transit funding from Canada's senior governments and that provided in Europe and the U.S.A.? I think not.
D. Vallance writes that we probably can't afford more rapid transit, noting that the Chinese have a car that will sell for under $7,000; to make transit fast enough to compete with that is out of our reach, he says.
Meanwhile, Andy Manahan of the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario notes that subways would cost us a lot less if we built them consistently instead of piecemeal. A report “Building a Stronger City: Subway expansion in Toronto,†which his previous employer (Local 183) commissioned in 2003, noted that continuous construction is half the price of piecemeal subway-building.
He notes, "when the Sheppard subway project was completed there were negative impacts from both labour and machinery perspectives:
(1) Skilled project engineers and labour left this region to find work of a similar nature in other jurisdictions.
(2) Toronto sold both Tunnel Boring Machines at fire sale prices. If there had been a steady stream of transit projects, then these TBMs could have been kept in operation for their full life span (and the capital costs more appropriately amortized).
A continuous and steady expansion transportation program for the GTAH will result in a much more effective deployment of capital and labour. I have encouraged Metrolinx to incorporate these concepts into the Business Case Analysis as a continuous expansion program will bolster economies of scale and reduce costs.’’
