A tale of three cities

[p5connex]

The TTC salivates over your $2.75!

Let's really get with it now. How can anyone honestly believe that we will have a comprehensive regional transit system, with all the fixings of electrified heavy-rail, subway, and light rail? I just do not see it ever happening in my lifetime, especially given the present disdain our senior levels of government show towards public transit. Not to mention Toronto's antiquated political power struggles with the upper levels of government.

So with that said, I think we will have to live with the minor changes we should be so grateful for: a new bus shelter at Yonge and Wellsley; a retiled Dundas subway station; a couple new busses; and the grand finale for the year 2050 an new streetcar line from Kipling to Islington.

Oh by the way, all of the above took 20 years of planning, cost $1.8 billion in consulting fees, plus inflation of course and ultimately the TTC folded- its now run and sponsored by D'Angelo Brands.

p5

 

[Hipster Duck]

Oh by the way, all of the above took 20 years of planning, cost $1.8 billion in consulting fees, plus inflation of course and ultimately the TTC folded- its now run and sponsored by D'Angelo Brands.

ha ha!

think we will have to live with the minor changes we should be so grateful for: a new bus shelter at Yonge and Wellsley; a retiled Dundas subway station; a couple new busses; and the grand finale for the year 2050 an new streetcar line from Kipling to Islington.

1. The new bus shelter will be an Astral media branding exercise and they will neglect to install benches, a map or a sign that indicates what stop it is for two full years.

2. The retiled Dundas square station will either a) be some tacky shitepile constructed clumsily yet expensively by Jeviso construction, or, b) automatically be plastered over by larger-than-life images of lycra-wearing hipster douchebags in ads for Koodo mobile.

3. The new buses will be expensive hybrids which will then be directed toward 190-series rocket routes on highways while the non-hybrids will continue to ply downtown routes where hybrids would actually realize fuel savings.

4. The new streetcar line will reportedly cost $25M, against the TTC's "estimated" subway construction costs of $17 billion (including $500M for every station). The actual cost of the LRT line will then automatically balloon to $150M and take four years to build. After repaving the road, Toronto Hydro will automatically rip up the street to bury the hydro wires but not take down the poles. The streetcar trip, which was once estimated to save 10 minutes of travel time will save an actual 79 seconds. Signal priority systems will be built but never implemented. The streetcar will make three stops at an intersection: one at the red light, one to let passengers disembark and then one, 15 metres down the road, to let passengers to get on. On the day of its inauguration, Kinnear will call a wildcat strike leaving David Miller, Dalton McGuinty and Adam Giambrone stranded on a platform in the rain. Too bad that they deferred construction of the shelters for another 12 months.

 

[p5connex]

^^^Man, that sounds like you ripped the page straight out of a history textbook- Awesome!

On the one hand, I could definitely see the TTC getting advertisers to come in and plaster over entire stations with their, and I paraphrase you Hipster "larger-than-life images of lycra-wearing hipster douchebags in ads for Koodo mobile." Ahh, it is all so perfect.

Oh by the way, the TTC also planned and built a loop line at the airport to service the city and the airport. However, when they looked at the costs associated with the project, they balked and built a 360 metre circle underneath the airport with 2 stations - each 50 metres apart from one another. Little did they know that they may have balked at the $30 billion dollar price tag for the circle line, but they ended up paying it nonetheless. Even more ironic, was that this is what was originally envisioned by TTC master-planers..Ha the irony!

p5

 

[ShonTron]

2. The retiled Dundas square station will either a) be some tacky shitepile constructed clumsily yet expensively by Jeviso construction, or, b) automatically be plastered over by larger-than-life images of lycra-wearing hipster douchebags in ads for Koodo mobile.

....The streetcar will make three stops at an intersection: one at the red light, one to let passengers disembark and then one, 15 metres down the road, to let passengers to get on. On the day of its inauguration, Kinnear will call a wildcat strike leaving David Miller, Dalton McGuinty and Adam Giambrone stranded on a platform in the rain. Too bad that they deferred construction of the shelters for another 12 months.

Best two laughs of the day.

"lycra-wearing hipster douchebags in ads for Koodo mobile." - Brilliant!
The worst part was that these lycra-wearing hipsters were doing live advertising around the launch around the subway system - they were dancing in Queen's Park Station on my way home last month.

Unfortunately PBR was nowhere to be found.

 

[Dan416]

What Krugman fails to address - and this is understandable because few people outside of Toronto really understand the fiscal straitjacket that this city finds itself in - is that certain American cities have a transit budget that enables them to grow dramatically in the future. Compare the TTC's $1.2B budget (which includes a $200M shortfall) to WMATA's (Washington) allocated budget of $1.9B. WMATA has a comparable ridership to the TTC. LACMTA (LA Metro) also has a nearly $2B budget - 1.2B for bus service and expansion and $750M for its rail systems. Los Angeles, incidentally, is paradoxically doing far more to address ridership needs in an auto-centric city than Toronto is doing in a supposedly "transit friendly" urban environment. Hell, even Phoenix's Valley Metro gets a $30M check from the Feds every year that the TTC would salivate over.

All the feds need to do is grant the TTC a few billion and we'll magically get all the subways we wanted, not the LRT lines that Steve Munro said we had to get because we couldn't afford subways.

 

[urbanfan89]

^

As long as some douchebag from Alberta is in Ottawa, we'll always have a transit system that Belarus will be ashamed of. We have to:

1) hope that Dion somehow wins the next election and delivers
2) create an al-T-Dot terrorist group and use threats
3) wait for peak oil to set in more, and finally force them to deliver

Not a good choice we have.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

We can't blame Harper for some of the stupid decisions this city's making, like renovating and extending the RT at a greater cost than extending the Danforth line to STC, an extension that more people would use. McGuinty threw promises at whatever was asked for, and though Metrolinx might ride into town and change things, Transfer City could be half done by then.

 

[pman]

quibble

ha ha!



1. The new bus shelter will be an Astral media branding exercise and they will neglect to install benches, a map or a sign that indicates what stop it is for two full years.

2. The retiled Dundas square station will either a) be some tacky shitepile constructed clumsily yet expensively by Jeviso construction, or, b) automatically be plastered over by larger-than-life images of lycra-wearing hipster douchebags in ads for Koodo mobile.

3. The new buses will be expensive hybrids which will then be directed toward 190-series rocket routes on highways while the non-hybrids will continue to ply downtown routes where hybrids would actually realize fuel savings.

4. The new streetcar line will reportedly cost $25M, against the TTC's "estimated" subway construction costs of $17 billion (including $500M for every station). The actual cost of the LRT line will then automatically balloon to $150M and take four years to build. After repaving the road, Toronto Hydro will automatically rip up the street to bury the hydro wires but not take down the poles. The streetcar trip, which was once estimated to save 10 minutes of travel time will save an actual 79 seconds. Signal priority systems will be built but never implemented. The streetcar will make three stops at an intersection: one at the red light, one to let passengers disembark and then one, 15 metres down the road, to let passengers to get on. On the day of its inauguration, Kinnear will call a wildcat strike leaving David Miller, Dalton McGuinty and Adam Giambrone stranded on a platform in the rain. Too bad that they deferred construction of the shelters for another 12 months.

The new pavement will be immediately ripped up, but by Toronto Water or Enbridge, not Toronto Hydro. Toronto Hyrdo's idea of a rebuild is installing even more overhead wires strung on frontier-town wooden poles. They also like hoisting garbage can-sized containers into the air. But I agree Hydro won't take down the old poles.

 

[ssiguy2]

Vancouver's Translink is far more integrated and user friendly than transit in the GTA..............just one system with 3 different fares plus WCE trains. Also when you buy a WCE train ticket it is good for travel to anywhere in Metro.
If you are going to the WCE the ticket you bought for the bus/SkyTrain is directly deducted from the price of the WCE ticket.
3 zones depending on how far you are going with just a one zone fare on weekends. Only when crossing a fare boundary do you pay more. It's very easy.
I never thought I'd say it by Vancouver's transit system is nearly on a par with Toronto's which would have been a laughable comment just 10 years ago.

 

[GTS]

Vancouver is a really good system, but no system is perfect, the interregional bus terminal on the other side of Main St. Skytrain Station needed a better walkway. prefferable sheltered, between this interregional bus terminal on the east side of Main and the Main St. Skytrain St in the west side of Main. Toronto is planning (some of its plans) on having a truly multi-modal Station at Union. One of the plans is moving the Coach Canada/Greyhound Bus Station down from up at Bay and Dundas into the planned renovated Union Station. Having a link like this at one transit hub would really help transit and us commuter greatly.

I left Vancouver about 8 yrs ago and the West Coast Express Train only travelled in the AM from the suburbs in the east to downtown and in the PM it travelled from the downtown Waterfront Station to the suburbs east of the city. Any plans on changing that to all day 2-way service. Hamilton is one-way rush hour service but there are plans to make it all day two-way service to the downtown Hamilton Station on James St. to Union Station here in Toronto. Such a move will help both Toronto's transit system and Hamilton's as it too grows.