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Transit City Plan

Which transit plan do you prefer?

  • Transit City

    Votes: 95 79.2%

  • Ford City

    Votes: 25 20.8%
  • Total voters
    120
I don't think the capacity of LRT is the problem. The problem is the way its designed and run here. That and the cost versus the benefits. The cost of subways is invariably higher than LRT, but so are the benefits.

I think a lot of these pro-subway people are hopelessly biased, but the same can be said by the pro-LRT crowd. I don't understand why it's so hard to come to compromise.

Oh wait, I do. This has nothing to do with subways vs. LRT. The battle right now is completely ideological/political. Or at least that's what it's become.

Sometimes it can be hard to defend subways when you have supporters like Rob Ford on your side.

It seems like absolutely nothing has changed in all the subway vs. LRT arguments since Transit City was first introduced. We all just keep talking at each other, no one listening to one another, and everyone will never agree on everything.

My only hope is that some new funding schemes come online from this whole debacle.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
I don't think the capacity of LRT is the problem. The problem is the way its designed and run here. That and the cost versus the benefits. The cost of subways is invariably higher than LRT, but so are the benefits.

I think a lot of these pro-subway people are hopelessly biased, but the same can be said by the pro-LRT crowd. I don't understand why it's so hard to come to compromise.

Oh wait, I do. This has nothing to do with subways vs. LRT. The battle right now is completely ideological/political. Or at least that's what it's become.

Sometimes it can be hard to defend subways when you have supporters like Rob Ford on your side.

It seems like absolutely nothing has changed in all the subway vs. LRT arguments since Transit City was first introduced. We all just keep talking at each other, no one listening to one another, and everyone will never agree on everything.

My only hope is that some new funding schemes come online from this whole debacle.
Click to expand...

As I've always said, the irony of right-wing/pro-car Ford being the champion for rapid transit and transit oriented development is incredible. The conservative members of council are the ones who are pushing for "long term savings" with a subway over an LRT, when it is usually liberals who argue for long term savings accompanied costly investments in the present.

Granted, it is very likely that the ridership on Sheppard and Eglinton may never reach a point to make the investment of going underground worthwhile, and it could become an eternal money pit. But it is the thought that counts. If Ford was as anti-transit as some claim, he would have demanded the province spend that $8 billion on widening roads or at least on diamond lanes.

Arguing between light rail and heavy rail is like arguing between a compact and mid-sized sedan. Despite myth, it is possible to run heavy rail at-grade in a ROW, or even in mixed traffic. The focus should be on how it operates, such as stop spacing, signalling and priority, speed limits, etc. Going underground can help make these kinds of measures easier to execute, but it is quite possible to pull them off if running on the surface as well.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
I don't think the capacity of LRT is the problem. The problem is the way its designed and run here. That and the cost versus the benefits. The cost of subways is invariably higher than LRT, but so are the benefits.

I think a lot of these pro-subway people are hopelessly biased, but the same can be said by the pro-LRT crowd. I don't understand why it's so hard to come to compromise.

.
Click to expand...
If Rob Ford had championed for full fledge subways then there would be no choice but for the entire run of the subway to be underground since you cannot run them in the middle of the road and Scarborough would have gotton their subways and Ford may have won the council vote. But he did not champion subways because all he was concerned with was getting it underground and never debated the advantages of subways vs LRT underground in council.
 
Palma said:
If Rob Ford had championed for full fledge subways then there would be no choice but for the entire run of the subway to be underground since you cannot run them in the middle of the road and Scarborough would have gotton their subways and Ford may have won the council vote. But he did not champion subways because all he was concerned with was getting it underground and never debated the advantages of subways vs LRT underground in council.
Click to expand...

As I said, there is nothing stopping the running of a 'subway' at grade in its own lane or even in mixed traffic. A few pages back I even posted some video examples of heavy rail trains doing just that. The only thing that would need to be done is that they would need to be dual-mode so they could switch from third rail to overhead wires when running on the street (granted, you could even run them with a third rail there too, but the legal and safety concerns could be too great).

The biggest problem with switching from 'underground LRT' to 'subways' on Eglinton is that the design plans have already been drawn up for the line and stations. Any construction costs saved by using smaller tunnels with a third rail would be lost on having to redraw the blueprints.
 
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Electrify said:
As I said, there is nothing stopping the running of a 'subway' at grade in its own lane or even in mixed traffic. A few pages back I even posted some video examples of heavy rail trains doing just that. The only thing that would need to be done is that they would need to be dual-mode so they could switch from third rail to overhead wires when running on the street (granted, you could even run them with a third rail there too, but the legal and safety concerns could be too great).
Click to expand...

You realize that the reason LRVs are more expensive than subway cars is that they have to be more crash-worthy right?
 
Palma said:
But he did not champion subways because all he was concerned with was getting it underground
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More accurately, all he was concerned with, and campaigned on, was the "War on Cars" -- it's not clear he wouldn't have walked away completely from Eglinton and transit in general if he could have.
 
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/edit...ays-leave-too-many-toronto-commuters-stranded

The typically biased Toronto Star claims that the Sheppard LRT (transfer at Don Mills) plan is better than the Ford plan because this person is commuting from Yonge/Eglinton to Sheppard/Markham Rd. However, there has long been a planned (but never built) proposal to extend the Scarborough RT to Malvern and it would have a stop near Sheppard/Markham. Had the Rob Ford plan gone through, this person would have been able to ride directly to Scarborough Centre and then take bus #132 or 134, and could have alternatively taken the Sheppard line then those two bus routes if that were built. This probably would have taken the same amount of time as taking the Sheppard LRT (which would not have been much faster than bus #85 which this commuter stubbornly refuses to use. I stronly suspect that the sorts of people who refuse to take bus #85 would refuse to take the Sheppard light rail and continue to commute on the 401). With this proposed extension this commuter would have a zero transfer commute.
 
Electrify said:
Fair enough. But the concept that 'heavy' rail is not as flexible as 'light' rail is what I'm trying to address.
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The TTC subway cars need much more room to turn so you better hope your on-street route runs in mostly a straight line.

andrewpmk said:
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/edit...ays-leave-too-many-toronto-commuters-stranded

The typically biased Toronto Star claims that the Sheppard LRT (transfer at Don Mills) plan is better than the Ford plan because this person is commuting from Yonge/Eglinton to Sheppard/Markham Rd. However, there has long been a planned (but never built) proposal to extend the Scarborough RT to Malvern and it would have a stop near Sheppard/Markham. Had the Rob Ford plan gone through, this person would have been able to ride directly to Scarborough Centre and then take bus #132 or 134, and could have alternatively taken the Sheppard line then those two bus routes if that were built. This probably would have taken the same amount of time as taking the Sheppard LRT (which would not have been much faster than bus #85 which this commuter stubbornly refuses to use. I stronly suspect that the sorts of people who refuse to take bus #85 would refuse to take the Sheppard light rail and continue to commute on the 401). With this proposed extension this commuter would have a zero transfer commute.
Click to expand...

Phew I was worried that you'd talk about Sheppard for a couple of paragraphs and fail to mention the 401. It was a close one but you got it in there at the end. But seriously are you saying there's no time savings of the subway + bus option versus light rail?
 
Tulse said:
To the extent that subway cars aren't crashworthy enough to run on streets, it's not as flexible.
Click to expand...

These kinds of modifications can be made at the manufacturing stage.

Paleo said:
The TTC subway cars need much more room to turn so you better hope your on-street route runs in mostly a straight line.
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Fortunately, the need to turn is very limited considering the straight grid design of our road network. Besides, there are plenty of tight turns on our subway system which are much tighter than turns in the suburbs.

EDIT: After doing some research, it seems that the turn radius is defined by the length of the rail car more than anything else. If using shorter train cars to allow for sharper turns is what distinguishes light rail from heavy rail, we should be proud of ourselves - as from what I can tell, it may very well be the only defining difference between the two modes while various other threads on the subject have failed to come to a consensus of what differs between them!
 
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Electrify said:
These kinds of modifications can be made at the manufacturing stage.

[...] it seems that the turn radius is defined by the length of the rail car more than anything else.
Click to expand...

So you want to make subway cars that look and function just like LRT cars. So why not just use LRT cars?
 
Rob Ford says he was elected as mayor to stop the waste in city hall, which includes the TTC. He said he wants the city to be run efficiently.

Is building a subway or underground electric railway a efficient means to move people across vast areas of city than light rail? Which would cost less? Which would provide rapid transit to more areas or section of the city?

Is building a subway for Eglinton Crosstown from Black Creek to Scarborough Town Centre for $8 billion better than building Transit City for Sheppard East to the zoo, Eglinton Crosstown from Jane to Kennedy station , and Finch West from Finch West station to Humber College and rebuild & extend the SRT from Kennedy station, through STC and extended to Sheppard East station (near Progress Avenue) for the same $8 billion?

Which would be a waste of resources for the transit users?

Stop the waste and build Transit City
 
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