Transit City: Sheppard East Debate

[GraphicMatt]

No one disagrees with you. I think given unlimited funds that we should be all kinds of subway lines all over the city (and even to outside of it). Let's go nuts.

The reality is, unfortunately, that neither the province nor the federal government in Canada have any real idea how to fund our city. We have no money for operating transit and very little to build it. These limitations provoke compromise solutions.

You want large-scale subway expansion, then advocate for something like a city sales tax. It's not workable given the current fiscal reality. Something has to change.

 

[kettal]

LAz you are ranting on your emotions more than facts. The Eglinton connection to the airport is nearly as fast as Bloor Danforth subway speeds. Fact is very few people going to the airport , business travellers excepted, even want to use public transport. They have too much luggage to bring on a subway. And where are the business travellers going to or from? That's right, downtown.

Secondly, almost none of these amazing subway cities have a subway which is similar to Eglinton o Sheppard. They're all downtown-centric subways. So if you are going to bring up New York, DC, Paris, or any of these other examples, remember that none of these cities would hav built a subway through a street like Eglinton or Sheppard.

 

[LAz]

No one disagrees with you. I think given unlimited funds that we should be all kinds of subway lines all over the city (and even to outside of it). Let's go nuts.

The reality is, unfortunately, that neither the province nor the federal government in Canada have any real idea how to fund our city. We have no money for operating transit and very little to build it. These limitations provoke compromise solutions.

You want large-scale subway expansion, then advocate for something like a city sales tax. It's not workable given the current fiscal reality. Something has to change.

I am not sure that I want large scale expansion. Well, okay, I do, but I do not want it as fast as say some of the Asian guys who are currently building several lines at the same time. I think that the minimum would be to always be building/expanding a line... that is what these big cities do. We on the other hand see years of no work on expansion.

LAz you are ranting on your emotions more than facts. The Eglinton connection to the airport is nearly as fast as Bloor Danforth subway speeds. Fact is very few people going to the airport , business travellers excepted, even want to use public transport. They have too much luggage to bring on a subway. And where are the business travellers going to or from? That's right, downtown.

Secondly, almost none of these amazing subway cities have a subway which is similar to Eglinton o Sheppard. They're all downtown-centric subways. So if you are going to bring up New York, DC, Paris, or any of these other examples, remember that none of these cities would hav built a subway through a street like Eglinton or Sheppard.

Why must we always, and I mean always, focus on pleasing these business folk? They are not the only ones using the airport. I imagine them to be a minority. There are many metro systems in the world that go to the airport. Toronto's plans are not about having a metro line to go there.
What's scary is that the city still does not have anything. We should have had some sort of airport connection at least 10-15 years ago.
If the airport branch has to be downtown centric, then make the DRL go to the airport.

I feel that a number of systems that I have brought up are not only downtown centric. Did you maybe notice that they have ring/circle lines? On top of that, these cities are just building... they do not have the needs for such horizontal lines as Toronto does, but they have other types of needs. If they were like toronto they would have built far more by now.

For example, in Austria's capital the biggest line, the U6 (Floridsdorf - Siebenhirten) does not go to the downtown.
China's Guangzhou Metro which opened in 1997 is bigger than Toronto's, and has non-downtown centric lines.
Chile's Santiago metro has one or two non-downtown centric lines.
Paris's metro has a number of lines that are not downtown centric.
Go to Soeul, go to Mexico City, go to Moscow, go to elsewhere, you will see many non-downtown centric lines in many systems.
Toronto is not very different. Well, it is perhaps, in that there just is not the funding. If there is political will, like there was back in the 1990s, then things could perhaps happen. But... no... it's too costly as the regime that starts undergoing such an endeavor will see that it might not stay in power long enough to see it being finished. This is a symptom of having the neoliberal city. The neoliberal process, taking the government out of everything, and giving everything to the private sector, has proven to be a dangerous disaster.

 

[kettal]

Personally I find your measures of utility to be silly. Why is a subway to the airport even important? The rush hour gridlock which our city experiences every day is not made up of people going to the airport. Most air travellers would never use the subway since they have luggage with them. Why is it such a big priority?

I also find your obsession with length to be silly. DC might have a longer subway network, but it's used by fewer people than TTC, and is a lot less important to the citys daily operations. We could build a subway which nobody wants needs or uses, and that would move us up in the length department but doesn't make the city any better.

 

[RedRocket191]

Having just been to DC in October, I think I should point out that they are investing heavily in light rail. Two lines are currently under construction, and about a half-dozen more are planned. No new Metro lines are planned except for the Silver line already under construction.

 

[Justin10000]

Paris is also investing heavily in tramlines, and is building suburb to suburb tram-train lines. The only new Metro line Paris built recently was Line 14, and that was designed to siphon riders off RER A, and Line 1.
Metros are falling out of favour due to cost, and time to build. Even Madrid stopped building metros in favour of tramlines.

 

[LAz]

We could build a subway which nobody wants needs or uses, and that would move us up in the length department but doesn't make the city any better.

Well the motorization that has been going on here is the whole deal. In that framework, cars will dominate. But, two summers ago when petrol prices went up... and this will happen again... ridership BOOMED. Shit, in chicago i had to stand many times, on the Metra commuter train. That as like so rare... trains and everything was running behind due to too much usage. Our societies in north america are vulnerable to major swings , all based on the price of oil.

I hope that the assholes who decided to kill the city via suburbanization rot in hell.

Paris is also investing heavily in tramlines, and is building suburb to suburb tram-train lines. The only new Metro line Paris built recently was Line 14, and that was designed to siphon riders off RER A, and Line 1.
Metros are falling out of favour due to cost, and time to build. Even Madrid stopped building metros in favour of tramlines.

You are aware that these are two systems that are insanely HUGE. You are aware of that, right?

In france and most of europe populations are not really rising anymore. Therefore suburban tram lines are a fine idea. But, they already have their core city well connected with high speed transit. The equivalent to toronto would be construction of tram lines in mississauga or richmond hill. I think you're comparing apples to oranges.

Metros are falling out of favour due to cost, and time to build.

They are still being built and expanded all over the world. Metros are fast and effective. Sorry, end of story. Even cities that are bankrupt, like Donetsk in Ukraine... Donetsk can't afford to finish building it soon - BUT - they most definitely are not abandoning their tunnels to replace 'em with light rail instead. The subway is seen as a necessity. Other countries that have a very hard time affording this are doing it none-the-less... because it's simply worth it - Sofia and Warsawa for example.

Cities poorer than Toronto and richer than Toronto are aggressively expanding their systems.

Of course, the north american experience may be different, thanks to such high motorization. The abnormalities in the US have been exported off to Europe and elsewhere - and there road and auto accommodation had increased quite a bit in the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps to be more important than mass transit to the planners. However, thanks to such high petrol prices in the 2000s, the result is a retreat to continue building and expanding heavy rail, be it in messed up Belgrade, or modern Helsinki.

Personally I find your measures of utility to be silly. Why is a subway to the airport even important? The rush hour gridlock which our city experiences every day is not made up of people going to the airport. Most air travellers would never use the subway since they have luggage with them. Why is it such a big priority?

Why it important? Because there are many people who ride on it between the airport. Furthermore, it produces a viable alternative to those who go to the airport. The number of people going to the airport with a metro is only bound to increase as the price of petrol increases. This is the necessity - to have alternatives. That is precisely why Vancouver built their new metro line to their airport. It's a proven thing that works. Your question is like "why built metro lines"... how does one even go about answering such a no brainer? Why do you eat? Because you need to.

If you want to reduce rush hour traffic, you have to aggressively provide fast and affordable alternatives. Not being able to sit on commuter rail lines due to overflowing demand is my experience with what happens when the price of petrol increases.




Building and expanding the metro is simple. You just gotta see the car as a bad thing, an enemy or something like that. Start disliking the automobile.

Can you just imagine paying two times more for petrol like they do in europe? I would be so trilled if such conditions would happen here. It would force people to realize that their love of automobiles is "stupidity". But, I'll leave you to your hummar. Vroom vroom and away, lets go sprawl up towards newmarket. Fuck the urban growth boundary that has worked well in oregon. We don't need such stuff that is pure goodness.

 

[Second_in_pie]

Sheppard LRT: $63 million per km. Spadina Subway is $302 million per km. Even if you cut that in half, you're still more than double the LRT cost.

If stations on the Spadina line weren't built to rival European Cathedrals, the costs per km would be significantly lower, more like $250 or even $200 per km. When you have $125 million dollar stations that could be built for $30 million, there's no excuse.

Also, it's been said before, several parts of subway-able lines could be constructed for a significantly lower price by using alternate construction techniques. Trenching through the Richview corridor, raised guideway east of Don Mills on Eglinton and north of Eglinton for the DRL. These could lower significantly to the point that you'd be the laughing stock if you said we should build LRT instead. But the TTC has done a great job of brainwashing people that all subway is either gold-plated and over $300 million per km, or isn't right to build.

The airport is getting a heavy rail connection: Union Pearson Air Rail Link. Again, feel free to debate semantics.

Leading stop-free straight into downtown. If you don't think there's a market for travel outside of downtown, especially with the extremely decentralized development, density, and employment in the city, then you need to take a nice drive around sometime.

Monterrey, Boston, Calgary, Guadalajara, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Philadelphia, San Diego, Mexico City, Dallas, Denver, Newark, Saint Louis, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, Phoenix, Edmonton, San Jose, Minneapolis, Houston, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Charlotte, Seattle, New Orleans, Ottawa, Cleveland, Oceanside, Memphis, Seattle & Tampa *must* all be tiny towns masquerading as big cities. Either that or you need to start making some phone calls to tell planners in these cities that they're stupid.

Alright, where to start.

Monterrey's LRT network is really more like a metro; the lines are fully grade separated and there are true stations that you would expect on any other subway line in the world. This is the same for Calgary and Edmonton, as well as several of San Francisco's LRT lines, which has at least a partially developed BART as a metro.

Boston and Philadelphia both have quite well developed rapid transit (i.e. subway,) already, and so LRT is only filling in the gaps in their network, as it's supposed to. As for Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Denver, Dallas, Los Angles, San Diego, Minneapolis, Houston, Buffalo Charlotte, and Tampa, I'm actually kind of disgusted that you put those systems up as examples of successful transit systems. Okay, I guess they do have LRT lines, but is it really successful as a transit system? In all those cities, there is an insane amount of car usage, much more than we have here in Toronto.

Ottawa and Pittsburgh are both places where LRT has not worked out, but BRT has. Sorry, but the O-Train doesn't even count as LRT. I might be tempted to give this to you, but the BRT network way of building requires more BRTs than even Transit City is building (LRTs, whatever,) and that would be for a city like Pittsburgh, around 2 million people. Curitiba, the beautifully cut gem showing what a good BRT network can do, only has a metro pop of 3.5 million people, and has over 20 BRT lines. The GTA has almost twice that population, and the GGH has 2.5 times that. And the GGH is expected to have anywhere between 3 and 4 times that population within 25 years. Growth in Curitiba is quite stable and has been for quite a while, and I don't think that following those footsteps while we've already gone 20 years of transit construction away from that method and are already past the range where it would ever work, along with a half-assed attempt by those standards, are certainly not a way to build transit as the city's future.

My last beef here is Mexico City. I think you might have missed when you were searching through wikipedia "LRT lines in North America" that Mexico City ranks high in the world as one of the most developed subway systems, didn't you? It has over 10 metro lines on top of a developing LRT system which, once again, fills in the gaps through the subway system. Mexico City is also continuing to build more metro lines and is in the middle of an extension right now.

 

[kettal]

Why it important? Because there are many people who ride on it between the airport. Furthermore, it produces a viable alternative to those who go to the airport. The number of people going to the airport with a metro is only bound to increase as the price of petrol increases. This is the necessity - to have alternatives. That is precisely why Vancouver built their new metro line to their airport. It's a proven thing that works. Your question is like "why built metro lines"... how does one even go about answering such a no brainer? Why do you eat? Because you need to.

Vancouver actually did not build a heavy rail subway to the airport, they built a low capacity, single track spur to the airport. The demand of people going to YYZ at any one moment is not the kind of demand that requires a subway.

And the most hilarious reasoning you have here? Rising petrol prices. Guess which industry is te most susceptable to rising fuel peices? That's right, air travel. When fuel costs rise , you will see fewer people going to the airport, not more.

 

[Rainforest]

And the most hilarious reasoning you have here? Rising petrol prices. Guess which industry is te most susceptable to rising fuel peices? That's right, air travel. When fuel costs rise , you will see fewer people going to the airport, not more.

It is true that fewer people will fly.

However, currently the percentage of air passengers taking public transit to Pearson is very low: I heard about 3%, although I don't have a link.

With a good transit link in place, that percentage can grow so much that it overweights the decline in air traffic. So, fewer people fly and fewer people drive to the airport, but more people take public transit there.

 

[LAz]

Do you need more than one or two luggages? I certainly do not.




I am not aware of how vancouver's airport link is connected... but I am pretty sure that the Canada Line of the Skytrain is heavy rail. It is subway and is elevated off of the ground.

And get this... like all such lines in cities... it has stops between the airport and the downtown. Wow watcha know eh?




You claim that you the demand at a single time is not that great... well, what if it is? Are there serious studies made? Even if there was study you would say that "aww I wouldn't take it because I don't want to carry a luggage with me"...

These are important questions. Studies need to be made, but they are not being made because the end result would make too much sense - to link up the metro to the airport. Most major cities do such stuff. The airport is a so called node... it is a place where many people got to and from. While it is true that at one minute in a day there might not be too many, the fact remains that more people go there than they go to other places along Toronto's metro.
Do you even for a second consider what a downtown relief line with the west branch to the metro might look like? Or a eglinton extension to the airport? It would increase convenience a lot.








But, I think it's pretty pointless to debate with someone who had faith in the private sector for mass transit. On top of that, the ridiculuous kinds of excuses to not build have been seen on this topic. Anti-metro paranoia is far and wide. With your models that you look up to - systems worse than the current one in toronto - the only future of such planning is doom. Goodluck ruining toronto!

You might wanna add another highway or two or three through the city while you are at it. That complements no-metro building.




Meanwhile Moscow's metro gets new stations pretty much ever year...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_timeline_of_the_Moscow_Metro
They look down on our second rate city and laugh.



I know one thing for sure - I would love taking a metro to the airport, and that I would boycot a tram to the airport. You guys want eglinton to be a tram line. Has anyone even heard of such insanity of a tram going to the airport instead of a metro? Toronto is full of such insanity... who cuts off a metro to replace it with light rail? Only idiots in Toronto. With these maniacs behind the wheel the result is a second class city. I don't want this nightmare of a second class city. I do not buy into the cheap alternative of building light rail.


Seriously, you folk seem to be bent on hating metros and loving light rail. The lack of thought that you guys have scares me. I am sure that you are paid lobbyists for the ones who want the light rail to be built. There's no other explanation in my opinion.

 

[RedRocket191]

Seriously, you folk seem to be bent on hating metros and loving light rail. The lack of thought that you guys have scares me. I am sure that you are paid lobbyists for the ones who want the light rail to be built. There's no other explanation in my opinion.

I could label you as a cat, but I don't know you so I won't.

You don't know me, so don't label me.

 

[kettal]

I know one thing for sure - I would love taking a metro to the airport, and that I would boycot a tram to the airport. You guys want eglinton to be a tram line. Has anyone even heard of such insanity of a tram going to the airport instead of a metro? Toronto is full of such insanity... who cuts off a metro to replace it with light rail? Only idiots in Toronto. With these maniacs behind the wheel the result is a second class city. I don't want this nightmare of a second class city. I do not buy into the cheap alternative of building light rail.

If you want to boycott the airport LRT, you are only disadvantaging yourself. It's fast as the Bloor subway. Luckily, people who are this obsessed with status and "second class" rubbish are few and far between.

 

[rbt]

...but I am pretty sure that the Canada Line of the Skytrain is heavy rail. It is subway and is elevated off of the ground.

Where a railway runs has pretty much nothing to do with the light/heavy definition.

There are hundreds of examples of heavy-rail in non-dedicated corridors (damn near every freight train crosses a street at some point); and dozens of examples of light rail in fully dedicated corridors like the Vancouver Canada Line.

 

[Second_in_pie]

Where a railway runs has pretty much nothing to do with the light/heavy definition.

There are hundreds of examples of heavy-rail in non-dedicated corridors (damn near every freight train crosses a street at some point); and dozens of examples of light rail in fully dedicated corridors like the Vancouver Canada Line.

Actually, if I have my definitions right, the Canada line actually is heavy rail, but just a medium capacity system.


But why does it matter? The definition for a LRT is so loose that you could probably find a way to call CN's trains "LRT." The things that really matter are capacity of the system, grade separation, and overall speed. The definition ranges from a Calgary-style LRT that's just a medium capacity metro using overhead wires, or you could go the TC-approach which is much worse.