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2018 Provincial Election Transit Promises

narduch said:
Did the Liberals even mention transit in yesterday's throne speech?

The shift to spending on social programs should worry transit boosters who also support the Liberals. Do you really think they can fund both increased social spending and transit?
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They didn’t mention it, but with the infrastructure deal just inked that’s understandable. The Speech from the Throne was oriented around new goodies that they are putting on the table for the election. It wasn’t the venue to restate the “same old”.

I agree that these new promises on top of past spending commitments creates an untenable pressure on deficits that even the Liberals can’t tolerate. There were signs that the Liberals were already backing away from transit things. The only thing that has kept RER on the table is that the biggest capital spend is post 2020, so there has not been any need to pick up the tab yet. That’s what is so damn sleasy about Wynne - promises the moon and stars but only delivers 10% of it.
I despise Ford’s value system and much of what he stands for, but maybe it’s better to have a self declared opponent that stands in the open rather than a self proclaimed friend who never shows up when needed.

- Paul
 
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syn said:
You're right. But that's not really the point.

The point is that the Sheppard Line has always been underused.

The ridership does not justify a subway, and it won't for generations. It barely eclipses the Spadina Streetcar.
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Cobra said:
Compared to line 1 and 2? yes

Compared to some NYC and Chicago Lines? No

During rush hours? No
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The Sheppard Line is moving 4,000 pphpd at rush hours. If that is under-utilized, then I don't know what is. Line 1 and Line 2 both move in excess of 25,000 pphpd. The SRT Line 3 even moves more. Heck, even the sluggish King Streetcar moves about 75% of the peak hour volume as the Sheppard Line. The peak hour ridership levels of a subway line shouldn't be anywhere near the ridership of a streetcar or bus line.
 
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The way I see it, the only way to sufficiently and permanently vanquish the Bloor/Yonge bottleneck is to to divert Line 1 north of Eglinton onto an express line with minimal stops underneath Bay Street before it terminates at Union (with the possibility of being extended to the Portlands at some point in the far future) Those who require lower line 1 local stops can transfer at Eglinton (or possibly Davisville).

It would hugely expensive, and the engineering might be tricky but, seriously, what's the alternative? Lower line 1 was lacks the space and circulation to function as the spine of a network for +5 million people.
 
wopchop said:
Exactly this. Transit expansion IMO is essentially dead now. I don't have much faith that anything will survive the election. Hell, most of it was unaffordable anyway, but I think that we sort of deluded ourselves into believing that we could continue to spend billions upon billions with our current deficit and as our credit rating is continuing to be downgraded. Makes me really sad that all of this great stuff likely will not come to fruition.
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Oh please. Transit expansions is not that expensive and is among the most justifiable of investments. Sadly though, the public prefers social program goodies today, over transit investment that benefits them a decade from now.
 
wopchop said:
Exactly this. Transit expansion IMO is essentially dead now. I don't have much faith that anything will survive the election. Hell, most of it was unaffordable anyway, but I think that we sort of deluded ourselves into believing that we could continue to spend billions upon billions with our current deficit and as our credit rating is continuing to be downgraded. Makes me really sad that all of this great stuff likely will not come to fruition.
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For all this talk about Doug Ford and transit, I honestly can't recall hearing the guy mention transit at any point recently.
 
crs1026 said:
I am somewhat hopeful that he will refrain from undoing this one deal. He only has so much leverage in his relationship with Ottawa. However, his ability to bluster and bully is such that he may suggest some substitutions. I doubt that in the end he would turn back the money altogether.
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That $9B in funding isn't actually all that large. TTC can eat $3.5B of it just with SOGR work (line 2 rolling stock + signalling), and very basic expansion (60 to 100 more LRVs, a few buses, bus storage yard, LRV storage yard overhaul, etc.).


Top up SCC subway funds, implement an absolute basic Smart Track (just the GO stations; no LRT), and the DRL still needs a bit of help (presumably whatever the city will commit will close this gap).
 
TheTigerMaster said:
The Sheppard Line is moving 4,000 pphpd at rush hours. If that is under-utilized, then I don't know what is. Line 1 and Line 2 both move in excess of 25,000 pphpd. The SRT Line 3 even moves more. Heck, even the sluggish King Streetcar moves about 75% of the peak hour volume as the Sheppard Line. The peak hour ridership levels of a subway line shouldn't be anywhere near the ridership of a streetcar or bus line.
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The trains are full at rush hour. Now, as I always pointed out in the past, Sheppard is horribly mismanaged by the TTC.

It should be
  • Every 5 minutes during rush hour
  • Every 10 minutes outside rush hour (Saturday could be somewhere in between or adjusted)
  • Shutdown after 11h30pm, not freakin 2am in the morning. The 85 bus with no traffic is very fast.
This reduce costs.

The Montreal Blue line was managed somewhat like that:
  • Used to close at 11h30pm
  • Frequent service rush hour
  • every 10 minutes off peak
  • 3 train sets off peak, 6 train set rush hours.
The blue line was adjusted as the ridership grew. I don't understand why the TTC isn't managing the Sheppard Line that way. Hey, I like having my train every 5 minutes all the time but the 85 bus is quite surprisingly fast when there's no traffic
 
^ and believe or not , that's a GOOD thing. The reality is that Ford hasn't mentioned anything about any policies because that would require him and his nervous Tory strategists to actually have a platform and they don't. The Brown moderate policy book is now useful only for camp fires as the entire policy book is going to have to be reviewed due to all the tax revenue he is going to forgo. If cutting transit was a vote winner he would have talked about it by now but he hasn't because he knows cutting transit expansion will cost him dearly in the 416 & 905 to say nothing of Ottawa's LRT westward expansion, London's BRT, GO to Cambridge, Peterborough, and Niagara, and Hamilton's LRT. Ontario is a far different place than it was during Harris's time and his policies have to reflect that. People in the GTA and all big Ontario cities no longer view transit as a "nice to have" but rather an essential service where expansion is drastically needed.

Frankly I think you guys need to take a downer. Getting a councillor seat in a part of Toronto and trying to become a Premier of such a large and diverse province are 2 very different things. His number look fairly solid now but that is due to the media centered on him after a party conference and his natural tendency to seek out media attention but reality will soon sink in. All his talked about so far is all the taxes and red tap he is going to cut but that's the easy part. The hard part of telling the citizens what services he will have to cut to pay for it and yet balance the budget is the hard part and when he has to start telling Ontarians the price they will pay for his tax cuts, then you can watch his support fall.
 
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Streety McCarface said:
There's nothing wrong with that, but the idea of building transit that will be full from day one is a backwards ideology because it will become inadequate within short time periods. There's no doubt that the DRL should have been built before the Sheppard Subway because capacity requirements were needed even back then. Should the Sheppard corridor be built with a subway after the DRL? I would argue so. This is because the corridor has a fairly high ridership and is speculated to have much-anticipated growth, and connects to many busy surface routes. The surround areas of Sheppard are already built up, and with densification coming to the city, it only makes sense to plan for the future. Eglinton is another corridor that satisfies this need for higher order transit in the long term. We have a bunch of corridors that serve 20-30K+ people per day or more and will see little to no projected growth; corridors like Finch, Steeles, Jane, Lansdowne, Kipling, Wilson/York Mills, Eglinton east, etc. These are corridors where LRT should be built because the buses that currently serve them are completely inadequate now, and with any small fluctuation in transit usage, will continue to be inadequate for years to come.
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Please provide examples of transit infrastructure built in Toronto that have become inadequate in a short time period.
 
Streety McCarface said:
The question is whether people will be willing to shift their commutes to use the DRL over the Yonge line is what might lead the DRL to fail. It will most certainly gain high ridership, however, it may not fully clear up space at bloor yonge and the yonge line. The TTC has to plan to include better surface connections at all stations on the DRL or it will fail to shift people from the yonge line to the DRL.
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You have to ask yourself what is the goal here - just reliving Line 1; or serve as an additional route downtown that will capture and divert a portion of the existing users, free up the capacity for new users, provide some degree of network redundancy and improve connectivity? I'd say the first option alone is an inferior rationale for building transit.

As to your fear - so long as DRL make meaningful interchanges with the existing and proposed lines there is no way it isn't competitive.

AoD
 
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TheTigerMaster said:
The Sheppard Line is moving 4,000 pphpd at rush hours. If that is under-utilized, then I don't know what is. Line 1 and Line 2 both move in excess of 25,000 pphpd. The SRT Line 3 even moves more. Heck, even the sluggish King Streetcar moves about 75% of the peak hour volume as the Sheppard Line. The peak hour ridership levels of a subway line shouldn't be anywhere near the ridership of a streetcar or bus line.
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Cobra said:
The trains are full at rush hour. Now, as I always pointed out in the past, Sheppard is horribly mismanaged by the TTC.
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“Trains are full at rush hour” is a completely meaningless statement. You could have a line that moves 900 pphpd with one train per hour and claim that “trains are full at rush hour”.

In the case of Sheppard Line, the trains are 33% smaller than elsewhere on the system, and trains come less than half as frequent. It’s no wonder that the trains are full at rush hour.

Anyways we have actual ridership data. The line moves 4,000 pphpd at peak. There is no reason to be using the fullness of trains as a proxy for actual ridership data, unless we’re trying to be misleading.
 
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