It's a "brilliant vision" in the same sense that SmartTrack was a
brilliant vision: if we lived in Fantasy Land, where all political, budgetary and engineering constraints could be ignored, I'm sure SmartTrack and this
Schabas plan work be outright revolutionary.
Here in the real world, if this proposal ever gained political traction, the first roadblock would obviously be that his plan would literally break the Yonge Line. The fix for this, as you acknowledge, is the Relief Line North. Obviously this is not a small fix; suddenly his affordable, common sense plan is going to cost at least $15 Billion, making it the single largest public transit investment in the history of our region.
If by some miracle this $15 Billion+ plan got political approval, we'd then need to deal with the fact that this plan would take around 20 years to build, when our government has great difficulty even committing to a four-year plan. The chances that we'd actually see all phases of the plan completed are low.
And the biggest flaw is that once you introduce the Relief Line North, you've fundamentally changed the network to the point where the need for
any rapid transit on Sheppard becomes questionable. Alternative proposals would come up, such as building BRT along Sheppard, and I'm not confident that the Schabas plan would compare favourable to the alternatives. Consider the BRT alternative:
1. A BRT would have stops every 500 metres or so, dramatically reducing station access time relative to the Schabas plan, which would have stops every 700 metres to 1 km
2. A BRT would actually run along Sheppard itself. The Schabas plan would run along the 401 for a large portion of its route, meaning that the time spent accessing those stations would be dismal compared the BRT's station access time. This is the exact same mistake we made when building the Spadina Subway along Allen Road, rather than under Dundas. The result was dismal ridership, even though Dufferin was a stone's throw away
3. Yes, the Schabas ICTS line would unquestionably have faster travel speeds, however passengers need to travel a significant distance along the Sheppard ICTS line to "make up" for the time lost due to the Schabas' increased station access time relative to the BRT. Given that the DRL North would chop 5 kms off the ICTS trip along Sheppard, there is a pretty good chance that the ICTS proposal will indeed be slower than the DRL North + Sheppard BRT alternative.
So. no, I do not consider this to be a good plan at all. The financial and political capital to get his plan
and the DRL North built would be immense, and I just do not see it as realistic. Even if it were funded, the chances of us actually sticking to the plan long enough to see it built is basically zero. And as I mentioned previously, the addition of the Relief Line North into the plan puts into question the need for any rapid transit along Sheppard in the first place.
