Toronto Ontario Line 3 | ?m | ?s

TheTigerMaster said:
Yup. Sometimes living in this city gets really irritating. Toronto is the 4th largest city on the continent. In another 2 years we'll be the third, only behind New York and Mexico. Yet we still think like a small impoverished sleeper town of 500,000 people with stupid 2 station extensions. We could easily afford to dump transit all over this city. In 2014 the first candidate who promises to raise my taxes to do it will have my vote. Let's just hope that OneCity inspired some of them.
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We lack ambition..
 
TheTigerMaster said:
What? I don't want to believe :rolleyes:

How did they do it for so cheap!?
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Effectively the same way that the original section of Yonge was built so cheap and Vancouver's response to that disruption was much the same as ours with Yonge; it'll never happen again. The tender wasn't intended to allow cut & cover; but it did.

If you add in economic losses to the cost of the Canada Line, something I've not seen done, Canada Line isn't as cheap as the official price quoted.

St. Clair was a cakewalk compared to what retailers and residents of those streets in Vancouver put up with.
 
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I think the DRL needs to be rebranded as the Don Mills Subway. It's not necessarily geographically accurate, but hey, neither is Spadina. When most people hear "Don Mills" they think "inner suburbs". And the thing is it will become more geographically accurate over time, because any future extensions will go up... Don Mills.

It would be nice if Toronto would switch over to the un-geographical names for lines (Canada Line, Confederation Line, etc), but I don't think that's likely to happen. So we need to settle for a name that is somewhat geographically accurate, but at the same time doesn't get anyone's defences up just because it has the word "downtown" in it.
 
rbt said:
Effectively the same way that the original section of Yonge was built so cheap and Vancouver's response to that disruption was much the same as ours with Yonge; it'll never happen again. The tender wasn't intended to allow cut & cover; but it did.

If you add in economic losses to the cost of the Canada Line, something I've not seen done, Canada Line isn't as cheap as the official price quoted.

St. Clair was a cakewalk compared to what retailers and residents of those streets in Vancouver put up with.
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Vancouver also had the "we need this done by the Olympics, so just let us do this" factor. Toronto doesn't have that right now. Ottawa doesn't have that now either, so they've managed to work out a construction plan that really minimizes disruptions, despite tunnelling right under downtown Ottawa.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
Yup. Sometimes living in this city GT ets really irritating. Toronto is the 4th largest city on the continent. In another 2 years we'll be the third, only behind New York and Mexico. Yet we still think like a small impoverished sleeper town of 500,000 people with stupid 2 station extensions. We could easily afford to dump transit all over this city. In 2014 the first candidate who promises to raise my taxes to do it will have my vote. Let's just hope that OneCity inspired some of them.
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Meant to say 2 decades. Not 2 years. My bad
 
rbt said:
Effectively the same way that the original section of Yonge was built so cheap and Vancouver's response to that disruption was much the same as ours with Yonge; it'll never happen again. The tender wasn't intended to allow cut & cover; but it did.

If you add in economic losses to the cost of the Canada Line, something I've not seen done, Canada Line isn't as cheap as the official price quoted.

St. Clair was a cakewalk compared to what retailers and residents of those streets in Vancouver put up with.
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Hardly. Unless a given corridor is generating huge amounts of sales, the economic loss of cut and cover wouldn't come close to approaching potential cost savings. And, in any case, bored tunnels are extremely disruptive as well since you still have to build cut-cover station boxes. And since the station boxes have to be deeper to reach the bore, the disruptions are far longer lasting.

Cambie merchants reported a ~35% drop in sales during Canada Line's four year construction. Had the route been bored there would still have been a substantial loss of business, and for far longer than four years. While the cut-cover method would almost surely result in higher external costs in terms of disruption, the net difference between it and a bored tunnel wouldn't be significant in terms of projects which cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars per meter.

It's also interesting that the Canada Line used stacked cut-cover designs. The exterior width of the tunnel box was only 5m! The road impact of that wouldn't be any worse than building an LRT ROW.

P.S. According to the CFIB, average construction related losses on Cambie were in the range of 100,000$ for businesses. Even if this applied to hundreds of businesses and bored tunnels somehow had no negative construction impacts, neither of which is true, the cumulative external cost wouldn't be more than a few million dollars.
 
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I'm sure those businesses now love the fact that there's a subway ;)

Anyways cut and cover would be inappropriate for DRL south of Bloor. But its perfect for when the Don Mills Subway is built. Wide streets and few businesses to complain.
 
also important to remember that cut & cover can leave behind dead streets, a perfect example is yonge street. before the subway, the street was fairly high end shopping. after, it was replaced with strip clubs and cheque cashing stores.
 
innsertnamehere said:
also important to remember that cut & cover can leave behind dead streets, a perfect example is yonge street. before the subway, the street was fairly high end shopping. after, it was replaced with strip clubs and cheque cashing stores.
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Maybe thats true... But I see daily more and more stores on Eglinton closing because of the LRT construction and it is NOT cut and cover... No business is going to want to be around during construction and its a coin flip what comes after construction is done.
 
sixrings said:
Maybe thats true... But I see daily more and more stores on Eglinton closing because of the LRT construction and it is NOT cut and cover... No business is going to want to be around during construction and its a coin flip what comes after construction is done.
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very true, but the damage is less than straight up closure of the street. besides, most of eglinton's retail is already fairly low end.
 
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