Steve Munro's Commentary
From his blog:
Transit City
Today the TTC unveiled an astounding plan for a 120km network of LRT lines for the City of Toronto. You can read all about it on the website created for the plan at this link.
Nothing like this has ever been announced in my 35 years of transit advocacy. Even the 1990 David Peterson government’s scheme for many subway lines doesn’t come close. That plan was mostly bits and pieces patched onto an existing network and recycling a lot of old plans. Very little was actually built and most remnants of the program were killed off by Mike Harris.
Transit City is completely new. Many of the lines in this plan have never been part of old transit studies, or have appeared as full-blown subway lines, not as LRT.
This is the plan I have been waiting 35 years for. Ever since the Streetcars for Toronto Committee fought to keep our streetcar system as the nucleus of a much larger suburban network, I have waited to see a real LRT network promoted by the TTC and embraced by the City.
Already, some critics are wondering how this will get approved and funded. We seem to have no trouble proposing subway lines we don’t need at bankrupting prices, and it’s time people knew that there is an alternative. This will mean some hard political choices about the use of road space — it’s always easier to bury the transit system than to deal with design and traffic issues on the surface. But now, after decades, we can have this debate with a real plan as a starting point.
I will comment in detail on the plan over the weekend when I have time for a longer post, and will incorporate the many comments received on this subject.
Transit City (2) The East Network
Transit City is such a big announcement that boiling it down into reasonably-sized posts is a challenge. Rather than writing one article about the routes overall, another on technical bits and pieces, and yet another on the possible future, I’m going to treat major portions of the network as one post. My hope is to keep related discussions about individual lines in the same place.
The eastern portion of Transit City is made up of:
* A Sheppard East LRT from Don Mills Station to Morningside.
* A Scarborough-Malvern LRT from Kennedy Station east via Eglinton and Kingston Road, and then north on Morningside beyond Sheppard into Malvern.
* The eastern part of the Eglinton LRT from Don Mills east to Kennedy Station.
In addition, two other studies are now underway:
* Extension of the Scarborough RT east and north from McCowan Station to meet the Sheppard LRT.
* Kingston Road from Victoria Park to West Hill.
All of the LRT lines would be at grade with the exception of the Sheppard line’s interchange at Don Mills Station.
This network will make a huge impact on our ability to get around in Scarborough by transit. Rapid transit won’t exist solely for the purpose of getting people from the Town Centre to the Danforth Subway. Increased riding on the new lines should also bring better riding and service on the bus routes that will feed these lines.
An important decision in this design is the location of the connection between the Sheppard line and the RT. Rather than forcing service south off of Sheppard (as the subway proposal would have done), Sheppard stays on the grid and intersects with an extended RT at Markham Road. This make the line valuable for travel within Scarborough, not just as route to the subway at Don Mills.
The Scarborough-Malvern line could operate as an integral part of the Sheppard line with through service east from Don Mills Station, down Morningside, and west to Kennedy Station. However, there is a need for service north into Morningside Heights, and also the possibility of extending the Sheppard line east. Which routes make the most sense is a decision for far in the future, but because we are talking about a network, not just one line, that’s a choice we can make when the time comes.
At today’s press conferences, both Adam Giambrone, TTC Chair, and Mayor Miller dodged the issue of whether the Sheppard Subway is off of the table. Their clearly well-rehearsed line was that LRT lines can lead to demand growth that would, in time, justify installation of a subway line, maybe in 25 or 30 years. From a planning perspective, that’s as close to “never†as we will ever hear, and it’s far enough off that any thought the investment in a surface LRT would be wasted is easy to dismiss.
If, indeed, the Sheppard East corridor ever reached subway demand levels, the obvious question would be something like this: How much of the Sheppard demand is local to the line, and how much is going someplace else? The people going “someplace else†could be moved onto another service such as a parallel Finch or Steeles route if that suited their travel pattern, and that could be a lot better for the network overall. Again, this is a decision for the future and we should not preclude an LRT network as a starting point.
Some have suggested that the Sheppard LRT should run through the subway tunnels if only the platforms could be lowered. Yes, the Sheppard Subway should have been built as LRT, but that decision is way behind us. The real shame is that with the line underground and the stops so far apart, any hope of generating “Avenue†style development on much of Sheppard from Don Mills to Yonge is unlikely.
The planned extension of the RT to Sheppard is not part of the Transit City financial bundle. Indeed, the likely cost of this extension, roughly $600-million, may force the TTC to take another look at retaining the RT technology. With new LRT lines proposed all around it, the RT really will be an expensive orphan. That’s a discussion for another thread.
The Kingston Road corridor study is already in progress. Parts of that street badly need development, but there’s a big question about what form this should take and how much there should be. The transit service will be an integral part of that design. There are various schemes for a western destination of the route including:
* A redeveloped Victoria Park Station
* A connection to the existing streetcar system at Bingham Loop (Victoria Park and Kingston Road)
If the line comes into downtown via Kingston Road and then possibly the Portlands LRT (not yet even in the EA stage), I’m not sure it will be competitive for travel time with a route feeding into Victoria Park Station. Again, these are options to be discussed and decided in the future.
The Eglinton line is the real giant in this plan. It runs from Kennedy Station to western Etobicoke and will likely be the last line to be completed simply because of its cost and scope. The eastern portion, from Don Mills to Kennedy will be valuable, but not until the Don Mills line is in place. I will talk more about this in another post.
This is a well-integrated plan for Scarborough’s transit future and shows what is possible as an alternative to just replacing the RT with a subway line. The cost of the Scarborough-Malvern and Sheppard East LRTs is about $1.2-billion, and the lines cover a lot more territory than the proposed subway from Kennedy to STC (at roughly the same cost). Moreover, there are options for inexpensive extensions, a hallmark of LRT networks. With luck, Scarborough Councillors will buy into this plan and support it as a foundation for the future of their neighbourhoods.
Transit City (3) The West Network
This is one of a series of articles about the Transit City plans announced on Friday, March 16. I have subdivided the subject to keep the posts to a reasonable size and so that the discussion comments can be groups to a handful of closely related lines.
The western portion of Transit City consists of:
* A Finch West LRT line running from Finch Station via Finch Avenue to Highway 27
* A Jane LRT line running from Steeles West Station west to Jane and south to the Bloor Subway
* The western portion of the Eglinton LRT from the environs of Pearson Airport eastward
Other studies underway include:
* Extension of the St. Clair streetcar line west to Jane
* The Blue 22 express service in the Weston corridor from downtown to the airport
All of the LRT lines would be at grade except for Eglinton east of Keele and probably the south end of the Jane line. More about that later.
The Finch LRT is a striking proposal because it places a new transit service in the middle of an arterial street despite the siren calls of a hydro corridor between Finch and Steeles. This decision is vital to the success of the line to serve local riders on Finch, not just long-haul commuting rider from northern Etobicoke looking for a quick ride to the subway. This line will provide a strong east-west link into north Etobicoke that is not designed to handled downtown-bound traffic.
Together with the Sheppard subway and LRT, the Finch LRT will provide paths across the top of the city. Yes, someone who wants to go from Scarborough to, say, Humber College will have to transfer several times: Sheppard LRT to Sheppard Subway to Yonge Subway to Finch LRT. That is not ideal, but the real question is how many people really want to make that trip.
No matter how we design the network, there will be breaks because the logical corridor for a northwest service is on Finch, while we already have an established corridor on Sheppard in the east. There will be a discontinuity at Don Mills station, no matter what, and another one at either the Yonge or Spadina line (assuming a westerly expansion of the Sheppard Subway that we can’t afford and for which there is no justification in demand). It’s not perfect, but I doubt the residents of the Finch Corridor are going to complain too much.
The Jane LRT is an interesting route both for the neighbourhoods it serves — areas where much better transit service is badly needed — and because it has never been on anyone’s map for possible rapid transit. At the north end of the line, the connection to Steeles West Station gives a tie-in with both the subway and the expanding York Region network.
The south end of Jane is a problem that will take a will to hold good transit in a higher position than political expediency. The very south end of the route runs through an area where at-grade operation would be quite difficult, and a short underground section would almost certainly be needed. However, there is a better way for a route serving the north end of Jane to get to the Bloor Subway: down the Weston rail corridor on the route planned for Blue 22. If we take this approach, a number of things happen:
* Service could be operated from Dundas West Station north and west via Eglinton to the airport. This would be an alternate route to a connection with the Eglinton LRT line at Eglinton West Station.
* The Jane route would connect with the St. Clair car at Keele Street rather than an extended route at Jane.
* If Blue 22 does not get built, this eliminates the justification for some of the proposed changes to the Weston rail corridor especially in the town of Weston itself.
The downside would be that the southern part of Jane, below Eglinton, would not have LRT service.
The Eglinton LRT would be at grade west of roughly Keele (the exact location to be determined). Originally the Richview Expressway was to run where Eglinton is now, and that’s why the right-of-way is so wide. There is no question that there is room for an LRT line in that corridor. Western extension of the Eglinton line into Mississauge is an obvious future option, and would also provide for an airport service from the west.
This is not as unified a view of transit as we have in Scarborough, but that’s partly due to the geography and the location of some existing lines. Like the Scarborough proposal, the western part of Transit City will bring faster travel to areas that are now far from subways and their frequent service.
Transit City (4) The North-Central Network
This post continues a series of articles about the Transit City announcement on Friday, March 16. I have subdivided the discussion to keep these posts to a reasonable size and to focus discussion on each part of the network.
The North-Central section of Transit City comprises:
* The Eglinton LRT originating at Kennedy Station (see discussion of the East Network) and running straight across town to Person Airport or beyond (see discussion of the West Network).
* The Don Mills LRT from Steeles Avenue to the Danforth Subway.
These are the two largest and most expensive parts of the proposed network, and they will likely take the longest time to fund and build. Both of them require some underground construction, especially on Eglinton, and this will lead to the inevitable demand to “just build a subwayâ€. That urge can and should be resisted.
The Eglinton line ties much of the existing and planned network together with a new crosstown service. However, its intent is not that thousands will live in eastern Scarborough and work at Pearson Airport. The Eglinton LRT will speed travel in that corridor for a great variety of trips between many neighbourhoods.
The central portion of the line from Laird (roughly the top of the hill west of Leslie) to about Keele (or slightly to the west) must go underground because there is no place to fit a right-of-way on the street. Some media coverage today included apoplectic shopkeepers on Eglinton West decrying the plan as putting them out of business without realising that the line will not be on the surface through their neighbourhoods, and equally distraught motorists wondering how the TTC could possibly fit a St. Clair-like right of way through the central part of Eglinton.
A big challenge will be the interchange at Yonge and Eglinton. The “one below†level of the intersection is already occupied by passageways connecting the four corners to the subway station. “Two below†is the Yonge Subway. Putting the LRT “three below†would be very expensive and complex, and “one below†will require rethinking the underground pedestrian circulation systems with possibly another path from the subway up to “one below†at the north end of Eglinton station.
The situation at Eglinton West is not as complex because there is no complex of tunnels at “one below†to worry about. Moreover, whatever exists of the Eglinton West subway structure might be reused for the LRT tunnel.
Eglinton’s total cost is estimated at $2.240-billion, slightly less than the cost of the Spadina Vaughan subway extension. By the way, the subway cost does not include a provision for vehicles, whereas the Eglinton LRT estimate does. The cost/km for Eglinton is roughly $70-million showing how the moderate cost of the surface sections offsets the high cost of underground construction through the heart of the city. This option is simply unavailable to all-subway schemes that are doomed to stay underground.
Eglinton is a good candidate for staged construction with the outer ends being completed long before the tunneled central section. Again, because we are building a network, we can fill in parts of it as we go and as funding is available rather than requiring an all-or-nothing commitment.
The Don Mills line will provide a much-needed trunk parallel to and east of the Yonge Subway. South of Thorncliffe Park, the route must cross the Don Valley, and this could be the opportunity for a beautiful piece of bridge architecture. Going underground (and underwater) would be hideously expensive and is unnecessary. South of the Don Valley, things get more complex.
As proposed, the line would run down Pape to Pape Station. Obviously, this would be underground. Whether Pape is the ideal terminus, I’m not sure, and a lot will depend on options for continuing the line south and west into downtown. That’s a long-term consideration, but we do have to design in that possibility. A Don Mills via Pape LRT would take much traffic off of the local roads in East York. Today, the Don Mills and Thorncliffe Park buses serve Pape from Danforth to the Leaside Bridge, and the Flemingdon Park bus runs from Broadview Station up to O’Connor and then east and up Pape to the bridge. Much of the traffic these routes carry would move onto the Don Mills LRT, but with a much faster connection from the Thorncliffe/Flemingdon areas to the Danforth Subway.
Plans for a busway via Don Mills and Redway Road to Castle Frank Station can now be given a quiet funeral.
Eglinton and Don Mills are the two most expensive, the two most challenging, but if not the two most important, certainly well up the list for their impact on the future of our transit network.
Transit City (5) The Southern Network
The southern part of Transit City overlaps the existing streetcar system and some of the studies already underway. Transit City itself includes:
* The Waterfront West LRT from Union Station to Long Branch
Other related schemes include:
* The Waterfront East plans for East Bayfront, West Donlands and the Port Lands. EAs for the first two of these are already underway.
* The St. Clair streetcar right-of-way and its extension to Jane Street (see discussion in the West Network post).
* A review of operations and service quality on the 504 King Route released today on the supplementary agenda for next week’s TTC meeting. [I will comment on this at a later date.]
* The proposed Front Street Extension.
The Waterfront West line has, until now, been described as ending in southeastern Etobicoke, currently planned for a new loop at Park Lawn and Lake Shore. I am pleased to see that the Transit City proposal recognizes the potential of all of southern Etobicoke and extends the LRT plan all the way to Highway 27. For years, it seemed like the Park Lawn terminus was an inevitable first step in replacing the streetcar service to Long Branch with buses and further isolation of the area from the rest of the city.
Lake Shore Boulevard could undergo a renaissance as a major new residential and commercial community, and good transit service can help this to happen.
The WWLRT would run from Long Branch Loop at Brown’s Line and Lake Shore (the western terminus of the 501 Queen route) east via Lake Shore, through the underpass into Humber Loop just west of the Humber River. It would run along the existing right-of-way on The Queensway (built as part of the Gardiner Expressway project when streetcars were removed from that part of Lake Shore in 1957) to Sunnyside.
Here things get a bit hazy with competing versions of the route between Roncesvalles and Dufferin. In one version, the LRT would run via existing tracks on King to Dufferin and then south into the CNE grounds. In the other, the line would swing down to run parallel to the railway corridor and would be probably buried under the embankment north of the existing railway.
Either way, the line arrives at the northwest corner of the CNE grounds and would run on the surface east to connect with the Exhibition Loop now used by the Bathurst and Harbourfront streetcars.
East of Strachan Avenue CNE, the line is likely to veer northeast via Fort York Boulevard in its own right-of-way and cross Bathurst just south of the bridge over the railway corridor. The line continues east on a road that doesn’t exist yet but would be an extension of Bremner Boulevard, skirts the south side of the Dome, nips down into a tunnel through the north side of the Air Canada Centre’s basement, and thence into the existing tunnel to Union Station Loop.
This is certainly a line with its challenges.
The section between Sunnyside and Dufferin will, I believe, wind up running along the railway corridor and that’s where Transit City places it. Schemes to use the street trackage in Parkdale via Dufferin and King may sound good, but this is an area of notorious traffic congestion whenever the Gardiner is closed or blocked and during special events at the CNE grounds. If the line is going to be a credible route into downtown from Etobicoke and Swansea, it needs to get there quickly.
This brings me to the route through the railway lands and especially around the Dome and ACC. Both of these have large events that attract much traffic congestion and a lot of pedestrians. The WWLRT’s route from Spadina to Bay must avoid being trapped in predictable snarls at these locations.
Another twist in the western waterfront plans is the almost but not quite dead Front Street Extension. [As I write this, I am getting a bit punchy after hours of Transit City and Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch is playing itself in my brain.] Some have advocated placing the WWLRT on a median in the FSE (or in place of the FSE) as a way to attract people omto transit from southern Etobicoke.
I don’t agree because I see no need to connect any new road serving the Liberty Village area to the expressway network. A local road extending Front West from Bathurst to Dufferin will do quite nicely, and the last thing we want to do is to sanitize the road project with a transit component. The last time we tried that, we almost got the Spadina Expressway.
Moreover, using the Front Street corridor would require the WWLRT to swing north of the railway corridor and would require a completely different approach into downtown. Before the TTC came up with the Fort York / Bremner route as an alternative to a toonerville trolley trip along Queen’s Quay, this might have been worthwhile, but I am unconvinced now.
The Eastern Waterfront studies are not part of Transit City but they have passed the “Terms of Reference†phase and are about to move into a round of public meetings to deal with planning and technology alternatives. There is some debate over the design in the Queen’s Quay and Bay area. The existing Harboufront tunnel portal is not seen as an asset to the local community, and idea of a second portal east of Bay is meeting with some opposition. This is very much a discussion in progress and alternative schemes for connecting the Queen’s Quay service to Union Station will surface over the next months I am sure.
The Port Lands, east of the Don River, are not likely to develop for over 10 years and transit service to them is little more than a planning map for future consideration. No EA has begun for this section of the eastern waterfront transit service, but it is an important component because of the projected future population living east of the river and south of Lake Shore Boulevard.
Eventually, a line in the Port Lands could hook up with Queen Street and some have suggested that it could also be the inner end of a Kingston Road LRT. A lot depends on future developments and on how fast a trip a rider could reasonably expect from the Beach to downtown via that route.
In the post on the Western Network, I mentioned the Jane LRT and the possibility of routing it to the Bloor Subway via the Weston rail corridor to Dundas West Station. Such an alignment would eliminate some of the justification for extending the St. Clair streetcar and its right-of-way west from Gunn’s Loop at Keele Street.
If there is an LRT line built down the Weston corridor, it could eventually be extended south from Bloor into the core, although the approach gets tricky south of King Street. However, such an option is so far in the future, and I suspect so unlikely to be built, that I am not going to spend a lot of time thinking about design details and options.
Transit City (6) The Money
This is part of a series covering various aspects of the Transit City announcement of March 16. In previous posts I have looked at various aspects of the network both as presented and as in might evolve and improve. Now let’s look at how this stacks up against other transit proposals for funding.
The total cost of all seven lines is $6.1-billion. Assuming that this is spend over a 15-year construction period, that’s about $400-million per year. The value includes a fleet of 240 vehicles at a presumed cost of $5-million each. These would be much larger than present-day streetcars and have a capacity close to that of a subway car. Examples of cars in other systems can be seen both on the Transit City site and on many other transit activists’ and ethusiasts’ pages. I’m not going to get into cataloguing the options here.
Of these lines, by far the most ambitious is the Eglinton line which consumes over 1/3 of the total program cost. This line has the highest cost/km ($73-million) due to its tunnel section for about 10km across the central part of the city. This line can be built in stages with a good chunk of the underground part coming last.
A major purpose in getting out the Transit City proposal was to allow the City, the media, the citizenry and the politicians at many levels of government to have something concrete to talk about. We all know that cities, especially Toronto, want more money for transit. Everyone knows what a subway is, but few know about LRT. Discussions about the future of transit inevitably bog down in a hopeless circle of “I only want a subway†and “We can’t afford subwaysâ€. Being a transit advocate in that environment is challenging.
Today saw the federal Finance Minister kvetching that he wasn’t going to fund this program. He harumphed that when he plans something, he figures out how to budget for it first and then he does the detailed plans and announcement. Minister Flaherty totally misses the point — the intent is to stimulate discussion and show that Toronto doesn’t want to just pour whatever funding it gets into a black hole from which nothing concrete emerges.
Indeed, the Federal Government is quite capable of spending money like water (or at least making announcements) without bothering to explain how this squares up with their alleged penury when it comes to supporting the provinces and cities. But the Feds, even the Tories, are honourable, intelligent people who, I’m sure, will come to see the light someday.
In any event, we now have a document to talk about. $6.1-billion sounds like a lot over the next 15 years, but remember that we are already on the hook for $2.5-billion for the Spadina Vaughan subway, and until today, the TTC’s next priority was the Sheppard Subway extension to Scarborough at another $1.5-billion or so.
The economic comparisons between the subway and LRT plans are illuminating. For $6.1-billion, we get 122km of LRT including roughly 15km of underground construction. We will serve 175-million riders a year of whom over half are new to transit. The cost/km is about $50-million on average, including vehicles, and the cost/million riders is about $35-million.
The Spadina Subway extension to Steeles will cost about $1.5-billion (all figures are 2007 dollars). For this, we get 6.2km of subway at a cost of $242-million/km. The cost per million riders (based on the TTC’s own estimate of 30-million annual riders) is $50-million.
These per-rider figures cannot be compared directly. In the case of the LRT network, we are building new lines where the average trip length per ride is in many cases going to be longer than the entire Spadina Subway extension to Steeles. If we look at capital costs on the basis of passenger-km, the spread between the LRT plans and the subway will be wider than the figures above indicate.
The big difference, of course, lies in the construction costs where LRT is about 20% of subway. This includes some underground construction in the LRT plans, and excludes vehicle costs in the subway plans.
Yes, $6.1-billion is a lot of money, but it will buy us a lot of transit service.
To those who weep and wail wondering where the money will come from, I ask only that they be as critical of transit schemes when they involve multi-billion-dollar subway lines. We’ve already built Sheppard and Spadina is on the way. Somehow we found the money for those lines.
We will have to find the money because not finding it, not funding massive improvements in transit, will strangle the city in traffic. That will have a huge cost of its own both in congestion for the trucking industry, time wasted by commuters, pollution from exhaust fumes and the gradual loss of a healthy city environment.
We need much more transit than just the Transit City proposals — we need more buses and streetcars on existing routes, and some major capital projects don’t appear in the Transit City cost estimates. All of this is part of the cost of being a major city.
Building a Transit City is something we all have to do, and every government has a role to make it work. I will turn to the political context for this transit announcement in a future post, but it’s getting late, and I’ve been writing for quite a while.
Transit City (7) Thirty-Five Years
After spending the whole day at City Hall and the evening writing about Transit City and responding to many, many comments, a few personal words.
Back in 1972, the Streetcars for Toronto Committee fought to preserve Toronto’s streetcar system and with it, the basis for an expansion of low-cost rapid transit into suburbs that were still farmland. I have walked along Finch Avenue East when it was a dirt road with sheep grazing on one side and apples ripening on the trees on the other.
We almost got the start of that network with the Scarborough LRT line, but Queen’s Park had a better idea and GO Urban was born. That boondoggle led eventually to the RT and in the process convinced everyone that low-cost transit was impossible and subways were the answer.
Only one problem: we couldn’t afford them, and that’s over two decades ago. Endless wrangles on where to build one subway route wasted huge amounts of time and reinforced the idea that transit was not going to serve the suburbs. What has become the gridlocked 905 follows directly from the folly, from the abdication by planners and politicians to make a good, working transit system in the outer 416 as a model for what could grow into the 905.
Megamayor Mel’s contribution was “downtown North Yorkâ€, an oxymoron if ever there was one, and the Sheppard Subway. I remember Mel saying “real cities don’t use streetcarsâ€. This is the same person who called in the army to shovel snow, and who sold out his opposition to the Harris amalgamation plan in return for a guaranteed shot at the Mayor’s job.
I remember the long dry years when the contempt for public input and transit advocacy was palpable. No point in wasting my time on carefully researched deputations.
Today was an event I’ve been waiting for although I never really expected to see it. This is an LRT plan on a scale and with the political support we should have had 30 years ago.
And so my deep thanks to many who have supported my transit advocacy over the years, to the politicians and press who have listened to my incessant rants about LRT and transit in general, to the professional staff at the City and TTC who against the odds have kept up a belief in transit, and to the growing and lively activist community who bring new hope that people actually care about what happens to our city.
AoD
