Danforth Line 2 Scarborough Subway Extension

[BurlOak]

I've always wonder why they stopped cut and cover or just don't use elevated lines, probably logistical issues.

https://transit.toronto.on.ca/subway/5102.shtml

Yonge Subway Construction started September 8, 1949.
The 7.4-kilometre long, 12 station, Yonge subway opened on March 30, 1954.
Total disruption time of 5.5 years. (and steel shortages due to the Korean war caused about a 1 year delay.

Eglinton LRT construction started on November 9, 2011 with TBM launch shaft.
9km, 15 underground stations expected to be opened in summer 2021.
Total disruption time of 10 years. The line is a bit longer, and more stations, but also the stations are shorter.

One would think with modern construction techniques we would be able to improve on construction speed compared to 60 years ago.

I still think that the biggest disruption is at stations - which are usually <1km apart. Having shallower stations probably means that cut-and-cover is less disruptive overall, but it just doesn't have the sex appeal of a modern TBM.

 

[44 North]

I wrote 180k PPD, not PPHPD, the former means Passengers Per Day, the latter being Passengers Per Hour Per Direction. In other words, daily ridership. A full Sheppard subway with a daily ridership of 180k PPD is not unreasonable.
I don't disagree that the existing line being 6 car compatible is overkill, I'm suggesting that at the time, it made sense for the leaders to build it as a 6 car subway train because of a bunch of factors: the subway was initially supposed to be 15 km long with ridership levels of around 180K, which is a somewhat similar rate to the BD subway. As a stub, it makes no sense for trains to be more than 4 cars, but as a high-ridership trunk corridor like the BD line with a future of growth, it is understandable.

I've always wonder why they stopped cut and cover or just don't use elevated lines, probably logistical issues.

Ah wasn't familiar with PPD as a term. Yeah I wouldn't rule out 180,000/day with a major Line 4 expansion some day. A bit high but could happen. However think if we ever are going to expand it'd be prudent to go with 4-car max. There are savings to be had. And not in some DoFo mur money in yur pocket, I mean just so it could a) actually be built, b) see more than a few km, c) doesn't needlessly siphon capital from other projects.

A gripe of mine is the hardset view that we must build things super large and super expensive. There are ways of doing it differently. Not in some obscure or overseas means. Literally right here in this city. E.g Line 3 and its original expansion/upgrade plan. 100m trains, operating from Kennedy/Eglinton to Progress/Sheppard (w/ allocation for future NE extension + poss new inline yard @ Bellamy). Some underground, some elevated, simple stations. That's how you build a network, that's how other cities have done it. Similar could've worked with Sheppard. Heck Line 3 and 4 could've been combined into a true inter-suburb subway. That's a network. But instead we got what we have now - a grossly overbuilt perma-truncation just so a couple blocks in North York are future-proofed for an epoch, and a former fridge salesman has bragging rights for such oversized infrastructure.

People go on about how other cities manage to build expansive networks, but oftentimes neglect to look at the details or ways they've achieved this. Leeway for diff types of rolling stock (some wide, some narrow, some long, some short), allowing transfers, parts built deep parts in the open. For a Western example Madrid gets praise for its large expansion, and surprisingly did that virtually all underground. But look at the station lengths: 60m, 90m, 115m. That's 'light' territory, but still 100% metro nonetheless. Similar can be found with systems in Asia, Europe, S.Am.

And if we do have supposed champions of hardcore future-proofing things in TO then they definitely make themselves scarce on other matters. South Jane LRT, south Don Mills LRT, the cattle car nightmare of Waterfront LRT approaching Union (10k pphpd on a single unit legacy LFLRV!), Spadina + Harbourfront being built with single unit LRV, the sad 504, RL termination at Osgoode, at-capacity gridlock for the surface network across the city. Where are those future-concerned bureaucrats whom called for a +30k pphpd capacity solution on Sheppard?

 

[BurlOak]

Ah wasn't familiar with PPD as a term. Yeah I wouldn't rule out 180,000/day with a major Line 4 expansion some day. A bit high but could happen. However think if we ever are going to expand it'd be prudent to go with 4-car max. There are savings to be had. And not in some DoFo mur money in yur pocket, I mean just so it could a) actually be built, b) see more than a few km, c) doesn't needlessly siphon capital from other projects.

A gripe of mine is the hardset view that we must build things super large and super expensive. There are ways of doing it differently. Not in some obscure or overseas means. Literally right here in this city. E.g Line 3 and its original expansion/upgrade plan. 100m trains, operating from Kennedy/Eglinton to Progress/Sheppard (w/ allocation for future NE extension + poss new inline yard @ Bellamy). Some underground, some elevated, simple stations. That's how you build a network, that's how other cities have done it. Similar could've worked with Sheppard. Heck Line 3 and 4 could've been combined into a true inter-suburb subway. That's a network. But instead we got what we have now - a grossly overbuilt perma-truncation just so a couple blocks in North York are future-proofed for an epoch, and a former fridge salesman has bragging rights for such oversized infrastructure.

People go on about how other cities manage to build expansive networks, but oftentimes neglect to look at the details or ways they've achieved this. Leeway for diff types of rolling stock (some wide, some narrow, some long, some short), allowing transfers, parts built deep parts in the open. For a Western example Madrid gets praise for its large expansion, and surprisingly did that virtually all underground. But look at the station lengths: 60m, 90m, 115m. That's 'light' territory, but still 100% metro nonetheless. Similar can be found with systems in Asia, Europe, S.Am.

And if we do have supposed champions of hardcore future-proofing things in TO then they definitely make themselves scarce on other matters. South Jane LRT, south Don Mills LRT, the cattle car nightmare of Waterfront LRT approaching Union (10k pphpd on a single unit legacy LFLRV!), Spadina + Harbourfront being built with single unit LRV, the sad 504, RL termination at Osgoode, at-capacity gridlock for the surface network across the city. Where are those future-concerned bureaucrats whom called for a +30k pphpd capacity solution on Sheppard?

To save money. Build stations for 4 cars, but build pocket tracks, crossovers, etc. for 7 cars. Make key (interchange) stations with 3 platforms and/or for full 6 or 7 car length.
3 platforms and/or longer platforms ensures that dwell time at interchanges won't be excessive.
Keep option open for longer trains, that have only some of the cars line up with some stations (i.e. west of Yonge, 1st four (of 6) cars line up with station, and east of Yonge last four cars line up with station). Yonge being an interchange would have a 6 car platform and/or a 3 platform arrangement (I think it actually has both).

 

[micheal_can]

https://transit.toronto.on.ca/subway/5102.shtml

Yonge Subway Construction started September 8, 1949.
The 7.4-kilometre long, 12 station, Yonge subway opened on March 30, 1954.
Total disruption time of 5.5 years. (and steel shortages due to the Korean war caused about a 1 year delay.

Eglinton LRT construction started on November 9, 2011 with TBM launch shaft.
9km, 15 underground stations expected to be opened in summer 2021.
Total disruption time of 10 years. The line is a bit longer, and more stations, but also the stations are shorter.

One would think with modern construction techniques we would be able to improve on construction speed compared to 60 years ago.

I still think that the biggest disruption is at stations - which are usually <1km apart. Having shallower stations probably means that cut-and-cover is less disruptive overall, but it just doesn't have the sex appeal of a modern TBM.

Maybe this has more to do with safety than much else. If you died at a construction site, they might just lay the concrete over you and be done with it.

 

[robmausser]

https://transit.toronto.on.ca/subway/5102.shtml

Yonge Subway Construction started September 8, 1949.
The 7.4-kilometre long, 12 station, Yonge subway opened on March 30, 1954.
Total disruption time of 5.5 years. (and steel shortages due to the Korean war caused about a 1 year delay.

Eglinton LRT construction started on November 9, 2011 with TBM launch shaft.
9km, 15 underground stations expected to be opened in summer 2021.
Total disruption time of 10 years. The line is a bit longer, and more stations, but also the stations are shorter.

One would think with modern construction techniques we would be able to improve on construction speed compared to 60 years ago.

I still think that the biggest disruption is at stations - which are usually <1km apart. Having shallower stations probably means that cut-and-cover is less disruptive overall, but it just doesn't have the sex appeal of a modern TBM.

It has nothing to do with construction techniques and everything to do with technology complexity, safety and unions.

The Eglinton LRT will be much more technically complex than the 1954 Subway. The 1954 subway has improved its technology over the years to modern specs (for the most part, some is still in progress, like ATC) but that of course doesnt get included in the initial opening date. Things like PRESTO and computer technology in the stations, etc, greatly increases complexity.

Safety and unions go hand in hand with requiring much more red tape and procedures to ensure workers are safe that cause delays.

Things like utilities relocates above ground increase time, not as many services were buried in the 1950's.

Finally theres much more public consultations and we have to do things like land assessments and mitigation and Native American burial assessments at every area we dig. If any Native American artifacts are found all work stops and they need to bring in experts to remove the artifacts etc.

Also please dont forget that the entire section between Bloor to Eglinton was in a trench, not tunneled. The St.Clair portion was only covered with concrete in the 70's.

That portion, houses were literally expropriated and demolished. Workers had next to no rights, people died on the job it was typical. Things were demolished and dug with no regard to past historical artifacts. Garbage from worksites was backfilled into the pits that were dug.

We dont do any of these things today, it increases work time, but for good reason.

Do you ever wonder what that sludge leaking from the ceiling of College Station is? its environmental waste that was simply buried there. Lets not do that for our future subway lines and build them right.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/03/24/ttc-closure-college-station_n_6933444.html

 

[syn]

It's also not a fair comparison showing one random intersection on Sheppard and the busiest intersection in Toronto. These are all areas on or near Sheppard served by the subway:

And here are a bunch of locations on or near Yonge that serve that subway:

Yonge at its worst is admittedly overall better than Sheppard at its worst, but it shows that a lot of context is missing with just one view of one intersection. It also misses the fact that Sheppard has had a decade and a half to develop. Yonge? Half a century.

The photos I posted weren't black & white for artistic effect - they were taken nearly a century ago.

That's the point.

Yonge Street almost 100 years ago and several decades before the subway opened was already far more suitable for a subway than Sheppard is today.

Worst the system has? For a stand alone subway line, maybe, but both the Spadina Subway, and the spadina extension perform worse on the Ridership/km metric than Sheppard does.

Bessarion? Fine, that was a bad station that was too early for its time. Bayview? Pretty average. Leslie? A bit lower than average, but it has been increasing. Don mills? Pretty good. Sheppard Yonge? Very good.

Bessarion has the worst ridership in the system, by far.

There are only seven stations with worse ridership than Bayview - two of them are on the Sheppard Line. How is that "pretty average"?

There are only three subway stations in the entire system with lower ridership than Leslie (one being a neighbouring station, Bessarion). How is that "a bit lower than average"?

Dufferin is also pretty much downtown, where it has employment density to consider. You don't have that at Don Mills, its ridership is based entirely on those living nearby and the catchment it gets from local bus routes. These bus route numbers become redundant when you consider the fact that the 29 serves dufferin station.

Yes, employment density. What you don't have at Don Mills, and a critical ingredient in determining whether a corridor warrants a subway.

You can't cite the 29 Dufferin and then ignore the bus routes serving Don Mills. For a terminal station near a highway served by major bus routes, 32,000 isn't at all impressive.

Except for the fact that old Toronto is not downtown, it is considered the suburbs. It's where people live, not where people work.

There is a very, very significant difference between old Streetcar suburbs like Roncesvalles and, say, a subdivision in Scarborough or the suburban environment of the Sheppard Line. That's one of the key reasons transit usage is high in those Old Toronto areas.

I personally would never do something that stupid (during rush hour anyways). The subway is faster and has a bit more room. There's also the fact that you can be waiting 5-10 minutes for a streetcar (especially with long lines) instead of 1-2 for a subway, and that you don't have to deal with traffic lights and the extra stops. To each their own I guess. I can make the walk in 5, and there's almost always a queen streetcar there I can take to spadina.

I hope you can see the irony of suggesting an extra transfer when one of the major arguments for the SSE is eliminating a transfer.

I'm arguing that a subway on spadina would make little to no difference to the streetcar ridership. The ridership is high on that route because people are traveling locally or to one specific station to get to the subway. In this case, waiting less time for a streetcar at a more local stop makes complete sense. It's most certainly faster than walking to the nearest stop (which if a subway was built on Spadina, would probably be at College, Queen/King, and maybe Queens Quay), going down 10 flights of stairs, waiting for a subway, getting to spadina, walking up 7 flights of stairs, and transferring. A subway is not suited for Spadina for this reason. A subway is, however, suited for Queen or King and Dundas. Just because one route has a lot of ridership doesn't mean a different technology would be better for the corridor.

Exactly how people travel on the Yonge Line.

You previously argued that waiting 5-10 minutes doesn't make any sense when you could take the subway - exactly why a subway on Spadina would make a lot more sense than it does on Sheppard.

For some more context, the Sheppard East Subway Corridor had 15,870 jobs in 2017. The Well, a single project that borders Spadina, will add 6,800 jobs and 1,800 residential units. One project on Spadina will add 42% of the jobs on the entire Sheppard East corridor. It also represents 29% of the current job total in Scarborough Centre.

We need to start building transit that makes sense.

 

[Rainforest]

We are building transit where it makes sense. We are just not building it fast enough.

 

[Bureaucromancer]

We are building transit where it makes sense. We are just not building it fast enough.

No argument here. I'm all for debt financing the lot and building as fast as contractors can accommodate (let's say everything on Metrolinx' books now and the next wave or two after), but that suggestion seems to always get things thrown in my direction with screeching that we're broke. Despite lenders being fine with both the city and province.

 

[kEiThZ]

We are building transit where it makes sense. We are just not building it fast enough.

No argument here. I'm all for debt financing the lot and building as fast as contractors can accommodate (let's say everything on Metrolinx' books now and the next wave or two after), but that suggestion seems to always get things thrown in my direction with screeching that we're broke. Despite lenders being fine with both the city and province.

These idiotic fights are also largely the result of artificial scarcity. We live in a city which doesn't want to raise taxes, in a province and country absolutely obsessed with milking cities to fund public works elsewhere, building transit gets difficult.

If all three levels of government were putting up at least a billion per year in construction dollars, for transit in the GTA, would anybody be all that concerned about the Scarborough subway? No. And lest anybody think that amount is crazy. $1 billion per year is less than 0.3% of the region's GDP. Or about $12 per month, per resident. We don't even spend that much. It's a huge part of why we insist on subways having ridership levels substantially higher than half of New York's subway lines.

 

[JSF-1]

There is also the problem that we live in a city where many parts of it simply were not designed to be served by public transit. Unfortunately given the relatively young age of Toronto's burbs they all fell into the "Automotive Suburb" trap and we know today that it is terrible urban planning philosophy that just creates problems and then compounds them. On the other hand the core predates all of that so was designed and built with public transit and urban livability in mind.

 

[OneCity]

There is also the problem that we live in a city where many parts of it simply were not designed to be served by public transit. Unfortunately given the relatively young age of Toronto's burbs they all fell into the "Automotive Suburb" trap and we know today that it is terrible urban planning philosophy that just creates problems and then compounds them. On the other hand the core predates all of that so was designed and built with public transit and urban livability in mind.

Not designed for public transit?

Our inner suburbs have one of the best public transit bus networks in the world and tons of room to build upon. We have a trap of Core minded politicians who cant understand the simple details of inner suburban growth and why residents don't need mixed traffic streetcar style LRT.

BRT, RER and better connections for a future urban growth around the Centre is all that was required. Transit City would have achieved very little that buses/BRT couldn't, it added more transfers, and removed automobile lanes on main arteries only adding to congestion. Livability is more than wonderful out here, and will be far better for commuters once RER/subways/BRT are built.

 

[Rainforest]

There is also the problem that we live in a city where many parts of it simply were not designed to be served by public transit.

There is no such thing. Some people tend to believe that if minor/residential streets aren't suitable for running a bus, then the inhabitants will not be willing to walk to the closest arterial and take a bus there. That's not how it works. The residents do take the bus even if the stop is within 10 or 15 min walk from their house.

I know that first-hand.

 

[kEiThZ]

There is also the problem that we live in a city where many parts of it simply were not designed to be served by public transit. Unfortunately given the relatively young age of Toronto's burbs they all fell into the "Automotive Suburb" trap and we know today that it is terrible urban planning philosophy that just creates problems and then compounds them. On the other hand the core predates all of that so was designed and built with public transit and urban livability in mind.

This is ignorant defeatist bullshit that just seeks to justify underinvestment. Canada is not the US. And while Toronto is not a European city, it is denser and more transit friendly than just about any city in Canada or the US, save for New York City. And has the transit modal share to show for it. People here act like unless a place looks like Manhattan that higher ordered transit investment is unjustified. By this logic, most of Europe wouldn't have higher order transit either.

This for example is a station on the massive Crossrail line in London, UK:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.613...4!1sRP1oUtc8W_2f1k268CcTvA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

And this is literally outside the terminus of that line:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.631...4!1sEKxc8I7z5wHN3Qd5lKagpw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

So let's stop with this nonsense that most of Toronto is somehow some suburban wasteland that can't support transit. There's zero reason why Toronto can't invest more on rail, even in the suburbs. The ridership is there to justify it. The only limit is a willingness to raise taxes to pay for transit.

I repeat, the only reason we have this idiotic fights, and why we have deluded nonsense about how some parts of the city can't support transit, is because of artificial scarcity we have created.

 

[JSF-1]

The only limit is a willingness to raise taxes to pay for transit.

And the politcial desire to actually tell the residence of Toronto they can't have there cake and eat it. Here's an example, we used to have a railway spur that ran from about Warden Station to a short distance away from what is today STC. You know what the urban planning geniuses of the 50's did? They tore it up and sold it off for low density suburban car-centric development. Imagine what we could do if the corridor still existed? Sure we could bring it back and Scarborough would be better off but you find me a politician down at City Hall who would have the gal to level neighborhoods to bring it back. It's not just about raising taxes, its also about having the ability to make the tough decisions. I mean hell we literally had to change the design of STC station on the SSE because people didn't like the idea of expropriations, and the politicians buckled leading to a more expensive and inferior layout for the station. Don't even get me started on the old Scarboro Interuban which we also decided we no longer needed. We love to talk about bringing transit to eastern Scarborough, even though we used to have a mechanism to achieve it.

Hell Ill also throw shade at the Province and GO since there has only been 1 premier who talked about GO building its own lines. GO doesn't need to be just restricted to tracks it inherits from other companies, it can construct its own lines, so I am lost as to why we haven't. RER is long overdue but I also think so is GO building its own lines and filling in gaps that other systems can't.

 

[micheal_can]

There is also the problem that we live in a city where many parts of it simply were not designed to be served by public transit. Unfortunately given the relatively young age of Toronto's burbs they all fell into the "Automotive Suburb" trap and we know today that it is terrible urban planning philosophy that just creates problems and then compounds them. On the other hand the core predates all of that so was designed and built with public transit and urban livability in mind.

You know, they do make things called bulldozers which, when employed properly can fix that.

There was a time where the inner core was single family homes too.