Richmond Hill Yonge Line 1 North Subway Extension | ?m | ?s | Metrolinx

[xtremesniper]

Yeah, and that's just Markham's corner of Yonge and 7! Richmond Hill has something just as big planned and I'd assume Vaughan has plans as well.

Exactly. Richmond Hill has plans just on the north side of the 407 in that same mockup for their own intensification projects, and Markham and Vaughan have their own mega projects further down somewhat closer to Steeles.

Another one that no one mentions is the multi-building complex that is slated for the south-east corner of Yonge and 16th.

These projects are nothing to sneeze at.

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

Reading the comments on Munro, I am now thinking that the best option is an extension of the subway to Steeles combined with LRT north, all the the way to Elgin Mills. If it is demonstrated that the maximum passenger carrying capacity of the LRT line will be enough to meet demand for some time to come it would provide a transit option for the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time.
York Region takes greater control over the project and it's timeline, the fight between the disparate municipal governments working at cross purposes , each in the best interests of their citizenry, comes to an end and we don't have to wait until the DRL is built to begin providing transit to residents of York Region.
....
York Region is the fastest growing in the GTA and Markham, Vaughan and Richmond Hill all have solid growth plans that include urban density throughout the Yonge Street Corridor. This is a goal that should be supported but the bickering over which transit opportunity should have priority only serves to stagnate the disirable development.

Honestly, even if LRT could handle the capacity (and it can't), this is the exact problem we have now in Toronto. The province and the region already picked subway. Metrolinx is pro-subway. The EA is done. There is no reason for any more "bickering," though you wouldn't know, watching the Scarborough debate, that even starting construction means a deal is a deal.

If you KNOW it's the fast-growing part of the GTA (and top-3 in Canada), would you bring a subway right to their doorstep and stop it when all their planning is based around the capacity it unlocks? Spite? The whole problem is, as you kind of point out "municipal governments working at cross-purposes." That's why we have a REGIONAL transit agency to develop a REGIONAL transit network so you don't have one municipality trying to screw another and then that municipality going, "Oh, we really need a subway but I guess we'll just build an LRT because it's easier." (Or even worse, "We really need an LRT but we'll build a subway, subway, subway, because that's what the people DESERVE.")

Why would you stop and start again to look at an LRT? Make a plan, fund it, build it. The inability to pull this off (along with a lack of funding, of course) is why we keep falling further and further behind. Stopping the subway at Steeles would be just like building the Sheppard line to Don Mills. Keep nickle-and-diming your transit, keep doing the easy thing instead of what's necessary to get out in front of the problem, and keep watching traffic rise and sprawl increase, says I.

I'm happy some people corrected the comment above that the density is NYCC or below. It's higher in Markham's section, about the same (give or take) in Richmond Hill's section and that doesn't even include the development along Yonge Street itself. So, comparable to NYCC at worst and ideally higher. And NYCC wasn't starting from scratch (i.e. it was on Yonge Street, the civic centre was there, there was 2-story retail etc.) whereas these communities are.

The provincial minimum target is 400 people/jobs per hectare. RH's plan is for 450 and Markham's (pictured above) is for 1,000. Give them an LRT instead of a subway and both those numbers drop, especially the latter.

Oh, and Vaughan has raised densities along Yonge but it doesn't have anything at the terminus because there is a mature neighbourhood that backs into the hydro corridor. It's over 100,000 new residents by 2031 (though the subway delays likely put that date out the window).

EDIT: I'm adding a good graphic I found of the entire growth centre; both the Markham and RH plans.

 

[denfromoakvillemilton]

TJ, downtown is the fastest growing part of the GTA.

 

[jaycola]

I agree the Subway is what is absolutely necessary for this area (the area in which i live and work) in order to adequately meet the development potential and fulfill provincial intensification goals, but with every passing study, report and press release, the reality of the Yonge extension appears further and further away. The TTC has declared that the DRL is their priority before any extension to the Yonge Subway in opened. At a minimum we are talking 12-15 years before that project would be complete. The province and the Feds are now pushing for a Scarborough subway and no recent mention of the Yonge other than this one, apparently meaningless, Metrolinx "Benifits Case Analysis".

As it stands now, I can barely exit my Yonge and Steeles neighborhood between 8:00 and 9:00. I travel north to my office and if I am looking up Yonge, the cars are lined up bumper to bumper all the way to Highway 7. I also see a dozen cranes dotting the horizon right up through Richmond Hill, with thousands of new units presently in construction.

Generally my neighbours are not traveling into the CBD. In fact very few are. They are going to their offices in Scarborough, North York, Midtown, Downsview and Markham. I understand that the Yonge line is already at capacity but so to are the primary roads north of the city (Yonge, Bathurst, Bayview and Dufferin). Curbing sprawl, preserving farmland and greenspace and building denser communities are all easily supportable goals. What I see right now however is a timeline of as much as 20 years before any transit relief comes to this are and while the lack of higher order transit will likely stifle the planned growth, I don't believe we are in a position to wait decades for the subway to stretch north.

 

[diminutive]

Steve Munro's beef with the YSE has always kind of amazed me. He always talks about how important building the network is, yet for some reason seems inexplicably negative towards York Region's (completely logical plan) to use the YSE as the spine of their network.

Whenever the YSE even comes up that blog starts foaming about how some kind of GO service improvements 'aught to be enough even though its abundantly clear that the RH GO Line is *far* less desirable than a Yonge Line. Excluding the Richmond Hill - Union pair, travel almost anywhere along the Yonge corridor would be far quicker and more frequent through a YSE than a GO train. What's more frustrating is that, not even a month ago, SM went on about how using the rail corridors as a cheaper DRL was a harebrained idea. The rail corridors do a much better job of approximating potential DRL routes than the RH GO does of approximating Yonge.

Likewise for the issue of Yonge capacity. Any number of transit projects in the City can easily be said to contribute to crowding on the Yonge line. It's bizarre to attribute all of the negative consequences of Yonge crowding to the YSE, especially since many or most passengers originating in York Region won't even continue on the subway past Bloor. Why not postpone the Crosstown? Why not the SELRT? Why not argue against building condos at Yonge and Eg? You could make the argument that the TTC exists to serve Torontonians, but since all major capital projects are funded by the Province why should that matter?

It's not even clear that capacity constraints on Yonge are such a 'constraint.' Relatively inexpensive solutions like 7th cars or designating a few train sets as rush-hour standing-only seem more than capable of addressing the gap. And what's the huge deal with peak hour capacity constraints? There's no evidence that people are deterred from locating near the Yonge corridor. Every transit oriented city on earth deals with peak-hour capacity deficiencies. It's not the end of the world to have to wait for a couple trains at rush hour. Yet Steve Munro has been banging the drums of capacity-apocalypse. Just look at his word choice.

This is still far below the claims once made by the TTC to justify deferral of a Relief Line, a tactic that has left Toronto dangerously short of rapid transit capacity.

This is a dangerous assumption because it requires that more densely packing of passengers is sustained for the peak hour (with presumably even higher densities during the “super peak” or after any delays).

This scheme was dropped because of its potential capital and operating costs, because it would interfere with northerly extensions into York Region, but most importantly because the recession of the early 1990s sliced 20% off of TTC demand and the then-critical capacity issues on the YUS vanished.

The riders are back now, but we have forgotten just how close we came to completely filling the subway years ago

This is an irresponsible position and it does not align with good transit planning.

And that's just from ONE blogpost, and not even the full blogpost! These adjectives are never applied to projects he favors which have the exact same impact on Yonge. The severity of diction would make you think he is talking about Fukushima or Chernobyl, not a busy train at rush-hour. The even greater irony is that no one in the commuting public really cares that Yonge is nominally overcrowded today, both because the TTC uses conservative vehicle capacity assumptions and because even the TTC's biggest critics don't expect a lot of personal space at 8:30am in a major city!

The entire thing just comes off as inconsistent.

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

I agree with everything in the last two posts.

If doing something immediately was an issue, York Region could revive the BRT plan but I think their logic is not shooting themselves in the foot when the subway is so close. Despite all the dithering you accurately describe, the province hasn't backed down from keeping it listed as a priority project (and politically, the Liberals would be wise to get something moving in Thornhill while Peter Shurman is floundering).

I also live around Yonge and Steeles and I think people further south have no sense whatsoever of the transportation issues up around the municipal border. If there was really a choice between LRT now or subway later, it would be tempting to grab LRT. But I don't think that's the proposition we have before us and I think compromising would have too many negative consequences.

Munro is a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier. He is so fixated on headways and capacity and other technical issues but has no sense of how it all ties into planning both a regional network and a region. I understand why Toronto is Toronto-centric but people as knowledgeable as him should be better able to see the big picture. I understand the capacity issues etc. but they can be mitigated for a short period. Asking a ready-to-go line to wait until the DRL is conceptualized is crazy, especially given how wishy washy Toronto has been about it, except when York Region forced them to look in the mirror.

The other great flaw, as Jaycola points out, is the assumption that everyone is travelling to the CBD. It's one of the great flaws in our system that everything funnels down there and east-west and other connections are so weak. So people like Munro talk about how GO is a perfect substitute but it only gets people from RH down to Union Station. it's useless for getting to Eglinton or Bloor or anywhere else. (And it was him or someone else that suggested, even crazier, building a Sheppard connection at Oriole station so people can travel by GO train to there and then Sheppard to Yonge and then....really, I don't even know what kind of logic is going on there.) GO remains a great downtown "express" service but nothing is going to turn Oriole and Old Cummer into mobilityhubs; they're just more places to get on and off.

It would just nice to seem ambition for a change but we seem mired, as much as ever, in the same parochial crap dragging everything down.

 

[denfromoakvillemilton]

Munro wants the DRL built first, I don't see the problem with that. His opinion, really..

 

[diminutive]

Munro wants the DRL built first, I don't see the problem with that. His opinion, really..

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that opinion, but it is selectively applied. Even ignoring earlier Queen subway proposals, since the DRL was proposed in the 80s we've had, what, half a dozen projects? Where was Steve Munro's indignation at prioritizing the Crosstown over the DRL?

In an ideal world I'd agree that network expansion should happen in the core before York Region. The Yonge subway isn't about to undergo some kind of supernova though, there's no reason to be so prejudiced against the YSE and York Region for being active in actually promoting it, very much unlike the TTC/Toronto and its sudden realization that the DRL is such an essential prerequisite that it was never talked about until a year or two ago.

Given planned capacity upgrades, if we completed the YSE before some kind of DRL the capacity deficiency would be both absolutely and relatively smaller than it allegedly is today. I'm perfectly sympathetic that the YSE may not be the first priority for the region but am frustrated of the idea that if the ordering isn't exactly so there will be some kind of transit apocalypse, especially when that logic is applied highly selectively.

 

[rbt]

Whenever the YSE even comes up that blog starts foaming about how some kind of GO service improvements 'aught to be enough even though its abundantly clear that the RH GO Line is *far* less desirable than a Yonge Line..

When Metrolinx evaluates the GO option they put in a minimal investment. What happens if you put in an equivalent amount into the Richmond Hill line. What happens along the way to say Sheppard ridership at Leslie station?

An equivalent investment into the Richmond Hill GO route would straighten the line, allow for very frequent service, improve integration (fix Oriole station for example; make it an enclosed part of Leslie station), and allow for a standard TTC fare including free transfers.

It's not wrong to demand that Metrolinx spend $10K to take a look at options like this before deciding how to spend $3B.


I want to see Metrolinx evaluate ridership results of the following 2 choices (both achievable with $3B):
a) Richmond Hill to Union Station in 45 minutes for $3. Wait time averages 1.5 minutes.
b) 19th Ave (new stops North of Richmond Hill) to Union Station in 30 minutes for $3. Wait time averages 3 minutes.

Backtracking up Yonge adds time, transfers are free of course, and this doesn't help riders get to North York but it has the benefit of intercepting riders on Sheppard heading downtown and reaches further north.


It's annoying that Metrolinx fights hard against looking at genuine interregional options and performing a full network evaluation seeing as those are 2 things it was formed to do.


Don't get me wrong. Service north of Yonge is needed and a subway extension will certainly do the job; but would a well thought out express service downtown do the job better? Not cheaper, just different.

 

[Adjei]

How does the Richmond Hill Go Line help someone going to Yonge and Sheppard, Yonge and Eglinton, Yonge and St. Clair. The line is useless unless you are going to Union Station, not everyone is going to Union Station.

 

[k10ery]

Putting $3B into the Richmond Hill line could create 33km of new express Metro level service for the same fare as TTC.

I want to see Metrolinx evaluate ridership results of the following 2 choices (both achievable with $3B):
a) Richmond Hill to Union Station in 45 minutes for $3. Wait time averages 1.5 minutes.
b) Richmond Hill to Union Station in 30 minutes for $3. Wait time averages 3 minutes.

Backtracking up Yonge, free transfers of course, adds time and this doesn't help riders get to North York but it has the benefit of intercepting riders on Sheppard heading downtown too.

I totally agree with you. But you seem to be counting the costs of fare integration as equivalent to the costs of digging tunnels for a new subway. The revenue lost due to fare integration is money in riders' pockets. That's a lot better than building new transit, which is almost literally throwing money into a hole in the ground. Arguably, the money "spent" on fare integration should not count at all against the GO/Metro option.

Oh, and I think that straightened Richmond Hill Line shouldn't go to Union, it should go to a new station at Dupont and Spadina. But that's another matter.

 

[diminutive]

But $3B into the Richmond Hill line would effectively create 33km of new Metro service for the same fare as TTC.

The question is, are riders from Richmond Hill going downtown or to someplace closer like North York? If they're heading downtown, then the Yonge line is not the best way to spend that money.

It would create 33km of metro through an empty valley and with no obvious connection to Sheppard, Eglinton or Bloor, while also congesting Union with a bunch of mostly empty RH GO trains.

The only scenario where the GO train would have a huge time advantage is from RHC to Union. Anywhere else downtown and the Yonge subway could well be quicker. On the subway, it would be ~40m from RHC to Union. Current GO schedules put the trip at 35m for that pair. Now, assuming that we spend billions to upgrade RHGO and frequency was identical, maybe we'd shave off 5m from electrification (prob optimistic given the paucity of stops between Langstaff and Union, and also assuming no transfer stops even attempted at Eglinton or Bloor).

The same thing would apply at the other end. RHC-Union may be quicker by GO, even some kind of 3 billion dollar super GO, but Steeles-Union almost certainly wouldn't be.

So, yes, a RHGO would be better to Union. Anything north of that though would eat up all the time advantage from either having to transfer back to the subway to head north again or just heading north by foot. The demand forecasts have suggested that over 2/3rds of YSE riders who board at RHC get off north of King.

Oh, and I think that straightened Richmond Hill Line shouldn't go to Union, it should go to a new station at Dupont and Spadina. But that's another matter.

...?

That's even more ridiculous. Even ignoring the issue of spending billions of dollars to build a 30km detour through an unpopulated valley, and assuming that there was no ridership penalty for this ridiculous diversion, you would end up dumping all of the passengers back onto the Yonge line right where it's busiest anyways!

What on earth is the advantage of this?

 

[diminutive]

It's annoying that Metrolinx fights hard against looking at genuine interregional options and performing a full network evaluation seeing as those are 2 things it was formed to do.

It's true that Metrolinx has never considered quite what you proposed but that's mostly because it's ridiculous.

In the RH GO BCA they did compare an 'Express GO' (30m to Union) to the YSE and found Yonge would divert from RHGO. Now, in fairness, they didn't consider 3.5m average frequencies. Their model assumed 4t/h (7.5m average frequencies...). For the scheduled commuter crowd, would that be a huge deterrent? I dunno.

I mean, if you really wanted to play the 'RH GO is sufficient!' card the better case would be that you could get by with only spending ~500m on GO and the 2,500m balance on other deserving projects, generating a better overall return. I think Metrolinx tried to capture this type of logic with its extension to Steeles + RH GO option.

 

[rbt]

But you seem to be counting the costs of fare integration as equivalent to the costs of digging tunnels for a new subway.

Yes, I put the Richmond Hill line under the standard TTC fare so operationally it would run the same as the Richmond Hill or Vaughan subway extensions.

It's true that Metrolinx has never considered quite what you proposed but that's mostly because it's ridiculous.

Great. It shouldn't take them more than half a page to discredit it as an option then. At that point, I would say "Job well done" as they looked at actual alternatives.


Point being, they've not compared the Yonge solution to any other solution with a similar cost. Just how good or crappy are the alternatives with the same investment?

What could Metrolinx actually come up with if they took a month to look at it?

 

[rbt]

How does the Richmond Hill Go Line help someone going to Yonge and Sheppard, Yonge and Eglinton, Yonge and St. Clair. The line is useless unless you are going to Union Station, not everyone is going to Union Station.

It doesn't. Though a suspiciously large number of passengers are expected to go south of Bloor.

I know Richmond Hill GO line probably isn't the best option. I want to know why it isn't being considered with the same level of expenditure as Yonge so we know WHY it isn't a good option. $3B buys a crap ton of improvements.

while also congesting Union with a bunch of mostly empty RH GO trains.

Why go to Union? It's a $3B budget. We can spend $1B of that and run it in a tunnel beneath Eastern/Front/Wellington.

As I said, $3B can buy a crap-ton of improvements to a line like that.