Deadpool X
Senior Member
This post is mildly amusing. It can become very amusing if you can find those slides!
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Deadpool X
Senior Member
One benefit of having Kipling as the gateway station is that it's also next to a GO station. It's imperative to have MiWay buses connect to GO to improve the network.
Can buses drop passengers at Cloverdale station to connect with subway and then continue to Kipling to connect with GO? Maybe.
drum118
Superstar
The thought around the Coverdale Gateway Hub would see a new GO Station there as well expanded bus area for TTC buses that are currently lacking at Kipling. The new GO Station would fully accessibly to TTC and all bus systems compare to the lack of it at Kipling. This would also include more bus bays for miWay and GO as well for future needs that are currently lacking at Kipling today. The whole Hub would be next to the rail corridor freeing up space to the north for a parking structure under a development.
miWay will still either run Route 26 to/from Cloverdale in place of Kipling or reroute it by the East Mall. Those who currently get on/off between the East Mall to Islington will have to transfer to/from TTC as well pay an extra fare.
miWay Route 3 will have to use the East Mall as will and it will have an impact on riders going west from the East Mall as a fair number of riders get on the westbound stop at the East Mall.
Dan416
Senior Member
I have no issue with extending to Cloverdale. What I don't get is that assertion that there could be a GO station at Cloverdale. Cloverdale is nowhere near the rail line. Do you actually mean Honeydale and not Cloverdale?
nfitz
Superstar
I'd assumed that the talk of a GO station at Cloverdale would be as a replacement (or in addition to) the GO bus station at Kipling - which would then be mostly redundant.
M II A II R II K
Senior Member
It’s faster to walk between the 2 bus terminals from the outside actually
toaster29
Active Member
I mean, we went decades with having Kipling and Islington being connecting stations for MiWay - and still have 1 MiWay bus going to Islington. So, there's no reason we couldn't do the same with Kipling and Cloverdale. Although, I would hope an added benefit of an extension would be to reduce the number of buses on Dundas in this section, so all TTC routes that use Dundas to access areas west of Kipling would just use a Cloverdale as their 'hub'.
drum118
Superstar
As I noted above, the new subway station and bus terminal will be next to the rail corridor like Kipling for Cloverdale that will service the new GO station better than Kipling. Its supposed to be at Honeydale with a Cloverdale name
drum118
Superstar
The only reason for the 26 to service Islington and Kipling now is how route 26 was setup decades ago as well about 500 miWay riders going to/from the Islington area in the first place on a single fare.
There was a plan last year where miWay would take over the full operation of TTC 49 and 50 routes and it hasn't happen yet.
Route 26 was a direct route to Islington as well other route. When miWay move to Kipling it was decided to extend the 26 to Kipling to allow riders on other routes now going to Kipling to transfer to the 26 to get to Islington on the same fare..
If line 2 does get extended to Cloverdale, there are 4 options for miWay riders getting to/from Islington.
Option 1: Extend route 26 from Kipling to Cloverdale which is no big deal excepted for the extra deadheading and needing another bus added to the route.
Option 2: Fare integration that would allow miWay riders to get to/from Cloverdale to/from Islington.
Option 3: The original plan for Islington new bus terminal was to have a bay for Route 26 that could still take place if fare integration take place or takes over TTC route 50.
Option 4: If TTC route 49 is taken over by miWay, miWay routes 3 and 20 would use Kipling, otherwise route 20 would follow current routing to Cloverdale with route 3 using the East Mall to/from Cloverdale. Only an handful of riders get on/off between the East Mall and Kipling today and no big deal for using the East Mall route.
mildlyamusingusername
New Member
So I dug in a bit and found some of my old notes. Bottom-line is we don't really know for sure (shocker) but there's a few hypotheses that in combination realistically cover the bases. In terms of the hypotheses, the first was that we overbuild our stations (York extension used as an example here). The second was that we use too much labour on our sites due to unions. Now of course unions are as present or more so in Europe, but the argument here was that our construction unions will often specify that we need X amount of workers to complete Y task, with the amount specified being in excess of the standard used in Europe or in other areas of the world. The third hypothesis was that basically the Canadian federal government tends to auto-approve any project at 1/3 the cost, while in the U.S., the D.O.T. takes a mores serious look at projects (more scrutiny over costs at the federal level). The fourth hypothesis really centred on the idea that the citizen's voice adds significant costs to our projects, something that's also prevalent in the U.S. Generally speaking, this includes the consultations that occur at every step of the project, demands like street reconstruction, alternative routes to protect X neighbourhood or Y amenity, etc., which cost $ in both absolute terms and indirectly in terms of delays. The professor leaned towards a view that our costs are driven by the combination of the factors and hypotheses stated above.
Hope ya find that interesting, it was probably one of the more engaging courses I took in university.
crs1026
Senior Member
Interesting points.
I can accept that our labour costs may objectively be higher than elsewhere, but I'm skeptical that it's because unions have enough power to create a featherbed. The craft divisions and union jurisdictions for work are pretty standard across North America. There are not that many work rules in the Collective Agreements that would differentiate Ontario from elsewhere. There may be premiums paid that aren't paid elsewhere for benefits etc, or for gross-up of things that are taxable, etc. But to simplify this to saying "costs are greater because of unions" is perhaps misleading. And, if our labour agreements are a problem, would we not be hearing more from private sector developers who use the same unions?
I would be a lot more concerned that "wrench time" is poor because our projects are badly managed and people stand around for logistical reasons.....the rebar folks have been scheduled to start on a certain day, but the previous step in the work is not complete, so when they show up they can't start, that kind of thing. I would also wonder if we staff and pace projects differently ..... I can think of highway projects in the US that seem to have very few workers on site, but those projects may take much longer to complete. There are lots of moving pieces in the comparison.
As to consultations - we should be doing more than we are, there is value added when the consultations point out things that ought to be done better or impacts that need to be avoided. But again the way we consult leads to "spin cycle" in planning. The cost of the Scarborough Line 2 subway extension, for instance, has expanded dramatically simply because the City took years to reach consensus on a plan. During that period, labour and material costs went up. The Eglinton subway that Mike Harris cancelled would have been built at a fraction of the cost of Crosstown.
Lastly, when we build more than we need, because of political influence, the cost gets inflated. I'm not worried that the Eglinton West Crosstown extension will come in a few hundred millions over what was budgeted because of some cost overrun - I'm more worried that we are building a subway where LRT could have been built for a billion dollars less.
- Paul
Undead
Senior Member
I've also heard that unions inflate labour costs by restricting hiring even when there are many people looking to join the trades. Plus exacerbated demand for trades labour because of the construction bubble. More stringent health and safety regs are also a contributing factor (not saying we need to loosen them).
sche
Active Member
I’m sorry, but if you had spent more than two seconds actually paying attention, you would have noted that the costs stated are for construction costs only, and that rolling stock has been excluded from costs whenever possible, and that there are special notes for any projects where rolling stock could not be excluded. All of this is clearly stated on the website. This is not some amateur database, these are actual university researchers.
Besides - when the difference between similarly complex projects in high cost and low cost countries is like 4x, 5x, or even 10x, small details like this are not even that important. Financing and rolling stock do not explain a several fold increase in costs.
Your inflation point is also moot. Even if you only look at projects in the last few years, the differences between countries are obvious and enormous. Furthermore, you could also see that inflation adjusted costs in much of Europe and Asia have not increased tremendously over time like they have in North America - to suggest that construction costs naturally increase at a rate multiple times higher than the inflation rate is absurd. Using “construction inflation” is essentially a circular argument, attempting to explain construction cost increases using construction cost increases.
Transit Costs has also done a lot of serious research into finding reasons for certain countries’ costs - among these reasons are having high quality in-house engineering expertise to design and spec projects without political interference, learning from places that produce good results, moving quickly, and encouraging competition, transparency, and accountability. Design specifications need to achieve a balance between overly exact specs (which make it impossible for contractors to find ways to save money) and overly vague design that places more risk on the contractor. There are many other things, but probably reading the actual case studies and reports at https://transitcosts.com/ is better.
In North America there is little to no in house engineering expertise for large transit projects anymore, and the expertise that does exist is far behind global leaders. While P3s are in some ways a way around this (well managed P3s have produced good results before), I highly doubt that an agency that delivers astronomically expensive projects through P3s would be capable of somehow producing good results through a different procurement process without significant reforms.
Northern Light
Superstar
Ok @sche and @nfitz lets turn the temperature down a tad.
Its okay for us to differ and offer competing points of data and interpretations thereof......but lets not let things get antagonistic.
On that note, I've just had a look at the data set that @sche linked to.
My first observation, having sorted the data by cost per km, is that Toronto is not in the top tier of project costs (though its certainly closer to the top than the middle or the bottom)
So I chose to stop at the first Toronto project to show up on the list.
By my reading Toronto's most expensive project is the 26th most expensive currently listed in the database.
Reading it by location/market, You get
1) New York
2) Hong Kong
3) Singapore
4) San Fran
5) London
6) Los Angeles
7) Aukland
8) Melbourne
9) Doha
10) Munich
11)Shanghai
12) Montreal
13) Cairo
14) Manila
15) Dhaka
16) Toronto
Ranked by first project appearing on the list for that area.
Truthfully, we're lower than I thought, not that that is entirely satisfactory.
Though, given differences in labour costs, how we are cheaper than Manila or Cairo baffles me.
****
Edit to add, for the purpose of considering the data above, I will add their explainer on their calculations:
Its okay for us to differ and offer competing points of data and interpretations thereof......but lets not let things get antagonistic.
On that note, I've just had a look at the data set that @sche linked to.
My first observation, having sorted the data by cost per km, is that Toronto is not in the top tier of project costs (though its certainly closer to the top than the middle or the bottom)
So I chose to stop at the first Toronto project to show up on the list.
By my reading Toronto's most expensive project is the 26th most expensive currently listed in the database.
Reading it by location/market, You get
1) New York
2) Hong Kong
3) Singapore
4) San Fran
5) London
6) Los Angeles
7) Aukland
8) Melbourne
9) Doha
10) Munich
11)Shanghai
12) Montreal
13) Cairo
14) Manila
15) Dhaka
16) Toronto
Ranked by first project appearing on the list for that area.
Truthfully, we're lower than I thought, not that that is entirely satisfactory.
Though, given differences in labour costs, how we are cheaper than Manila or Cairo baffles me.
****
Edit to add, for the purpose of considering the data above, I will add their explainer on their calculations:
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M II A II R II K
Senior Member
To make the bus terminal transfer easier one can board a westbound TTC bus and get off at Subway Crescent to get to the other terminal.