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

Lest I be accused of rose-eyed YSE boosterism, I do think the project could be improved and carried out for cheaper.

Get rid of Langstaff Station. 99% of it's ridership comes from park-n-ride. That's well and good and such but it's not worth spending 80m$ for 1,700 parking spots. If it's really so essential that the extension have those parking spots, build a multilevel garage at Richmond Hill Station.

Get rid of Clarke Station. Ridership is very low. Only 600ppl are expected to board in peak hour. 300 of those are transfers who could just as easily be directed to Steeles.

Scale back Steeles. They may have changed this, but the original designs for this thing were ridiculous. You don't have to have a massive underground bus terminal right next to Centerpoint's parking lot.

Maybe get rid of Cummer? It's higher ridership, but most of them bus transfers who could be redirected to the plenty-spacious Finch bus terminal.

I'm firmly of the opinion that it's not necessary to spend 80m on stations which see, at best, a couple hundred walk ins. Granted, the area is undergoing development. If in 50 years demand is different we could add in stations a la NYCC. Further, we could also simply allow higher densities in the vicinity of busier stations.

More thought should also be given to cut-covering the subway under Yonge. The road is 25m wide for most of the way with at least another 10m of setbacks. It should be possible to take 10m to build a cut.

The East Don River Crossing should also be rethought to avoid having to reconstruct all of Yonge. Alternatively, York Region should provide supplementary funding specifically for reconstructing the crossing. It's ridiculous to have the aesthetic wish list of Thornhill free ride on infrastructure funding. The a portal just north of Center Street could lead to a much simpler bridge over the valley back into a tunnel on the north side.
 
rbt said:
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?
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I'm not opposed to that (I also complain that Metrolinx doesn't include enough comparisons in its BCAs...)

I do think it's important to note though that they've compared alternatives which are highly similar to what you describe. Like I said earlier, many Metrolinx studies HAVE considered alternatives which are, if not exactly what you describe, then very similar. Express GO service with frequencies of 10m-30m have been frequently considered, with unfavorable benefits compared to a YSE.

Now, as it happens, you could have 15m peak hour frequency and ~30m travel times for significantly less than 3b. Do you really feel like increasing frequency to 8 or 10 trains per hour would drastically alter the analysis that Metrolinx has already done?
 
diminutive said:
I mean, if you really wanted to play the 'RH GO is sufficient!' card
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I'm not playing that card. I've yet to see anything from Metrolinx that shows this possibility has been explored.

What happens if you run the RH line underground from RH station north under Yonge for 3 to 4km with full local service? Probably ridiculous but the cost to explore it with a transit simulator is only a couple thousand dollars; 0.00005% of the budget on the table.

Lets spend 0.0005% of the budget and explore 10 seemingly ridiculous options.
 
Adjei said:
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.
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I don't get it. Why are people going to the condos at Sheppard and Eglinton at morning rush? Can someone explain that to me?
 
rbt said:
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.
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rbt said:
What happens if you run the RH line underground from RH station north under Yonge for 3 to 4km with full local service? Probably ridiculous but the cost to explore it with a transit simulator is only a couple thousand dollars; 0.00005% of the budget on the table.
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This is silly. That you have to resort to these kinds of swan-boat, spaghetti on the map 'alternative' routes suggests they aren't really alternatives at all. You would end of spending 50%-75% of your budget on a tunnel which leads from downtown to an empty valley. Back of the envelope, I doubt this would even cost under 3b, but whatever.

The fundamental issue is that, from Richmond Hill Center to Union, using the RHGO Line results in a route that is 50% longer than Yonge, has no major trip generators along it, is in a bloody floodplain, and has no development potential. Again, 2/3rds of Richmond Hill riders would be going somewhere north of King. You couldn't fix all of these problems for anywhere close to 3b dollars.
 
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diminutive said:
Do you really feel like increasing frequency to 8 or 10 trains per hour would drastically alter the analysis that Metrolinx has already done?
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Not the frequency of the trains, no. $3B can buy a lot of modifications to a line.

Equalizing the fare would be the first consideration. Not a surprise that a $3 fare with lots of transfer options is more attractive than a $6.50 fare with another $3 fare for transferring. The subway will, after a couple of decades, cost $50M/year in capital maintenance and surface lines are cheaper to maintain. How many trains can $40M/year run with zero paying customers and can some of the $3B be used between when the line is brand-new and when significant maintenance is required.


Is Union too far south and network analysis showed riders don't like backtracking? How about running the Richmond Hill line via tunnel under Richmond Street instead? Street chosen solely due to the name match; pick any other east/west street south of Bloor. This would be a $1.5B expenditure and has the side effect of reducing the train count at Union Station.


Exploring options is essentially free compared to building the result of the report. Lets see a bit of innovation inside Metrolinx to kill multiple birds with a single $3B stone.

The DRL to Exhibition Place showed they can present original solutions which improve several elements not explicitly being looked at; I want to see a lot more of that.
 
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rbt said:
Is Union too far south and network analysis showed riders don't like backtracking? How about running the Richmond Hill line via tunnel under Richmond Street instead? Street chosen solely due to the name match; pick any other east/west street south of Bloor. This would be a $1.5B expenditure and has the side effect of reducing the train count at Union Station.
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You're just rearranging the issue... Then the route would be convenient for King-Queen bound customers, but inconvenient for Union or College, Dundas, Wellesley and Bloor riders!

I've often advocated cannibalizing GO train corridors to run into some kind of DRL, so I'm very sympathetic to the underlying concept, I just don't understand how you see it as competing with a Yonge extension. This is also ignoring any service between Finch and RHC, I might add.

There's also the issue that any downtown tunnel used solely by RHC peak GO would have such low ridership as to never justify a tunnel in the first place.

rbt said:
Exploring options is essentially free compared to building the result of the report. Lets see a bit of innovation inside Metrolinx to kill multiple birds with a single $3B stone.
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Obviously I'm in favour of more options being studied. It's just not reasonable to to expect to study every potential permutation of spaghetti on the map to be studied.

Why not complain about the ECLRT EA not considering a rail corridor alternative? Trains could run down the Don Valley, through Union, then up to Mt.Dennis! It's pretty much exactly what you're proposing but rotated 90 degrees.

As it happens, and as I've said a dozen times now, Metrolinx has addressed substantial improvements to the Richmond Hill Corridor and how it relates to the YSE, improvements which would functionally amount to ~90% of what you are describing in terms of transport user benefits and appeal.

rbt said:
The DRL to Exhibition Place showed they can present original solutions which improve several elements not explicitly being looked at; I want to see a lot more of that.
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That's the stupidest DRL alignment yet produced, spaghetti on the map which exists solely to serve the equally stupid idea that we should have a second Union station for some reason. Why on Earth anybody would think terminating the DRL at a derelict theme-park is better than Dundas West is beyond me.
 
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innsertnamehere said:
none, considering Sheppard and Eglinton never intersect.
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I think he's talking at Eglinton-Yonge Station and at Sheppard-Yonge Station.

And to answer his questions, there are massive amounts at Eglinton-Yonge. And there are countless midrise offices there with plenty of redevelopment. Certainly nothing like near King Station though .

At Sheppard-Yonge there are less but still a decent amount. But there's lots of redevelopment in the S-Y area. There are probably more office buildings one station north at North York Centre Station.
 
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There is way more office space in NYCC than Yonge-Eglinton. Not directly at Sheppard - Yonge, but along the NYCC stretch. I count 16 LARGE office buildings on the stretch, with several smaller ones there as well.
 
Forgotten said:
I don't get it. Why are people going to the condos at Sheppard and Eglinton at morning rush? Can someone explain that to me?
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From Wikipedia
Major corporations have built their own office towers along Yonge Street in central North York, including Canadian owned Shoppers Drug Mart[4] and the Canadian head offices of Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Cadbury Adams, Lindt & Sprüngli, Equifax, and Xerox, while the Government of Canada maintains offices north of Sheppard Avenue
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My Lawyer is located at Yonge and Finch, my Dentist at Yonge and Eglinton, my Mortgage Broker at Yonge and Clark (in Thornhill), my Bank Manager at Yonge and 16th Avenue (in Richmond hill). It never occurred to me before but all of them have Yonge Street addresses. My doctor used to be at Yonge and finch but has since moved to Leslie and York Mills

Maybe a map of Employment distribution might be helpful for this discussion.
10061198994_eeda8aec0b_b.jpg


As stated many times before, Yonge happens to be the spine of the GTA with employment nodes all along it's length. Concentrating growth all along Yonge should be seen as a positive for the region.
 
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