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GO Transit: Construction Projects (Metrolinx, various)

I've been scanning the news-stories and reports, and it's a confusing picture, not least as to who "owns them" and who "pays for them". (and how, and how much). Owning and paying for them, evidently, is not the same thing.

Until I can find better reference, this will have to suffice for now:

John Tory's SmartTrack going ahead with six new stops
The stations will be added as part of Metrolinx’s $13.5-billion initiative to implement regional express rail service.

By Ben SpurrTransportation Reporter (TorStar)
Tues., June 21, 2016

[...]
All the SmartTrack stations would be built as part of provincial transit agency Metrolinx’s $13.5-billion initiative to implement regional express rail, or RER, along five GO rail corridors in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. The project will involve electrifying the rail lines to allow more frequent, two-way service.

In a report released Tuesday, Metrolinx proposed building 12 new stations as part of the RER initiative over the next 10 years. Eight would be in Toronto, including the six claimed as part of SmartTrack, and two more on the Barrie line: at Bloor St. West and Lansdowne Ave., and at Spadina Ave. and Front St.

All the new stations will be provincially owned, and it’s not clear how service to the stations deemed to be part of SmartTrack would differ from service to other stations under RER.

Tory said “the service levels are quite likely to be different,” but the Metrolinx report envisaged SmartTrack stations being served by trains running at GO RER frequencies, or every six to 10 minutes during peak periods, with travel times slightly increased for long- and medium-distance trips.

“There is still work that’s still ongoing between Metrolinx and the city with respect to exactly what the service concepts will look like,” said provincial Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca.

Transit expert Steve Munro said there is now little difference between SmartTrack and GO’s RER plan. “It’s quite clear that SmartTrack and RER are kind of merging with each other. This has been obvious for months,” he said.

Tory shot down suggestions that SmartTrack was indistinguishable from RER, however, and said his efforts had secured stations Metrolinx wouldn’t have otherwise approved.

“If SmartTrack wasn’t a reality, why did I have to go and get the money for it? Why did I have to have extensive discussions with Mr. Del Duca and (Metrolinx president Bruce McCuaig) and others about where we would get stations?” he asked. “And it was quite a long discussion, and we didn’t get absolutely everything that we might have wanted, but we sure got a lot for the people of Toronto. This is a very real project; regional express rail is very real.”

New details on the cost of SmartTrack were also released Tuesday. The province has agreed to pay for $3.7 billion in infrastructure related to RER that is considered “foundational” to Tory’s plan.

But incremental costs — including construction of the six new stations, which Metrolinx estimated at between $700 million and $1.1 billion, as well as the Eglinton West LRT line, estimated at between $1.5 billion and $2.1 billion — would be paid by the city, the federal government and other sources of funding such as development charges. The city would also have to pick up the tab for operating the Eglinton West LRT line.

During last year’s federal election campaign, then-Liberal leader Justin Trudeau pledged to contribute $2.6 billion to SmartTrack. A spokesman for federal Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi told the Star in an email: “We remain committed to the funding announced for this project during the campaign.”

For SmartTrack to proceed, Metrolinx said the city needs to commit all necessary funding by Nov. 30.

Although Metrolinx and the city have reached an agreement on some of the stations for SmartTrack, the two parties have not yet agreed on what fares to charge for SmartTrack service.

During his campaign, Tory promised that Torontonians would be able to ride SmartTrack for the same price as the TTC, and keeping the ticket price low is seen as crucial to enticing riders off of packed subway lines and onto surface rail.
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https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...ocations-of-four-new-toronto-go-stations.html

Edit to Clarify: [For SmartTrack to proceed, Metrolinx said the city needs to commit all necessary funding by Nov. 30.]
I'd stated "next month" in a prior post. The point still stands though, the City has yet to facilitate that funding, let alone find it, and Del Duca is not going to 'hold the bag', and warning the City he isn't.
 
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AlvinofDiaspar said:
That's the official take - what about the unofficial one? Background discussions don't necessarily percolate to the public attention until the decisions have been made behind the scene - especially considering that ST is basically derived from the SRRA report: https://static.squarespace.com/stat...SRRA+-+Business+Case+Regional+Relief+Line.pdf

And best yet - guess who the major players, including the principal figures behind that report are:

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/11/17/the_evolution_of_smarttrack.html

These are people who are connected to the wazoos.

AoD
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lol! I was about to respond to your initial response before you added the edit, but killin' meself laughing here as per "wazoos". The more I dug on the issue, the less factual anything became. Smoke and Mirrors isn't a beauty salon. And pray tell, who was the "wazoos"?

Edit to adit the shaft of the mine: (Or in German, Mein Shafft): From Alvin's link:
[...]SmartTrack was also incubated by people ranging from former Toronto chief planner Paul Bedford, Eric Miller, director of U of T’s Transportation Research Institute; urbanist Anne Golden (who, like Dobson now sits on the board of Metrolinx) the Canadian Urban Institute’s Glenn Miller, says Duffy, who stresses that Miller and Dobson did not collaborate on the campaign.[...]
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The original RER concept documents presented to the ML Board in 2014 (I'm too lazy to paste in a link, it's on the ML web side) contain exactly one line about new stations:

Expansion of existing stations and the introduction of infill stations
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It is quite accurate to say that it was John Tory who became a primary advocate of the premise (which he didn't invent, but which, to that point, GO had pointedly refused to acknowledge) that there should be more GO stations within the 416 to balance GO's contribution to regional vs intra-Toronto transit needs. Sadly, he baked the flimsy ST concept around this nugget - but it's fair to say that the specific discussion about new stations within the 416 only took shape after he was elected and claimed a mandate to run with the ST thing. The actual selections are, indeed, a compromise between the original ST (as documented on the back of the infamous pre-election napkin) and the more formal RER and Big Move planning.

- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
The original RER concept documents presented to the ML Board in 2014 (I'm too lazy to paste in a link, it's on the ML web side) contain exactly one line about new stations:

It is quite accurate to say that it was John Tory who became a primary advocate of the premise (which he didn't invent, but which, to that point, GO had pointedly refused to acknowledge) that there should be more GO stations within the 416 to balance GO's contribution to regional vs intra-Toronto transit needs. Sadly, he baked the flimsy ST concept around this nugget - but it's fair to say that the specific discussion about new stations within the 416 only took shape after he was elected and claimed a mandate to run with the ST thing. The actual selections are, indeed, a compromise between the original ST (as documented on the back of the infamous pre-election napkin) and the more formal RER and Big Move planning.

- Paul
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Personally I take very little stock on ML board materials - they tend to be sanitized and don't really speak to the political dynamic. I would suspect that it's a fait accompli by the time you hear anything from the board - the background discussion between the powers that be would have happened a lot time ago.

AoD
 
robmausser said:
Show me a single report from Metrolinx PRIOR to Smarttrack that shows a Liberty Village, St.Clair, Lawrence, Unilever, Gerrard, and Finch stations.
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Liberty Village, St. Clair and a location very close to the one proposed at Unilever have all be proposed since the early-to-late 1980s - sometimes in internal GO documentation, and sometimes in stuff that's been publicly released (such as older electrification reports).

So while some of the locations were more than likely prompted by the popularity of SmartTrack, don't think that GO has only been thinking about this kind of thing for the past year or two.

Dan
Toronto, Ont.
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
The limits with that approach (i.e. lowest hanging fruit) is that it inevitably leave the high complexity/cost but high impact (if not downright enabling) works delayed/undone. Plus incremental projects often gets chosen and substituted as "progress" given the needs of the electoral cycle as well. This gets us into the trap that is current transit malaise.

AoD
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But you can then point to solid progress elsewhere and your team develops confidence and good teamwork habits on simpler, smaller projects so that when the going gets truly tough, you have a team who can count on each other to deliver the various parts.
 
TransitBart said:
But you can then point to solid progress elsewhere and your team develops confidence and good teamwork habits on simpler, smaller projects so that when the going gets truly tough, you have a team who can count on each other to deliver the various parts.
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It's not a complete either/or of course - but I am just putting it out there that we have an emphasis on "quick wins" in some quarters that is to the detriment of generational projects that are needed.

AoD
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
It's not a complete either/or of course - but I am just putting it out there that we have an emphasis on "quick wins" in some quarters that is to the detriment of generational projects that are needed.

AoD
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Alternatively, if the LSW commuters were gliding along at 180km/h in a EMU and the Barrie line commuters for example could see that that was the way to go, then it may energize more commuters to want what someone else has. Then again, maybe we are just spreading the pain around so that no group can say "what about us?"
 
TransitBart said:
Then again, maybe we are just spreading the pain around so that no group can say "what about us?"
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Yes, but I suspect it's even worse than that. There are legitimate long-lead time tasks in each of the routes' path. Owning up to these would require the political courage to say "you won't get service until we complete x". And the x's may be the most expensive items that aren't fundable at the moment. So the truth is, a delay of x years until funding plus y years for building. That is directly opposed to the desired message of "moving forward"

The problem with the low-hanging-fruit approach in this case is, it creates the illusion of progress and activity where there isn't really any. The longer the critical-path items remain hidden, the real improvement won't happen. So long as Wynne and Del Duca see their jobs as simply producing photo ops, and not actual transportation, that will continue.

We desperately need a Steve Munro equivalent to dedicate their life to critical analysis, blog writing and advocacy around Metrolinx. It's way beyond the time and energy those of us in the bleachers have available. Neither the media nor the Loyal Opposition are truly holding ML's feet to the fire.

- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
Yes, but I suspect it's even worse than that. There are legitimate long-lead time tasks in each of the routes' path. Owning up to these would require the political courage to say "you won't get service until we complete x". And the x's may be the most expensive items that aren't fundable at the moment. So the truth is, a delay of x years until funding plus y years for building. That is directly opposed to the desired message of "moving forward"

The problem with the low-hanging-fruit approach in this case is, it creates the illusion of progress and activity where there isn't really any. The longer the critical-path items remain hidden, the real improvement won't happen. So long as Wynne and Del Duca see their jobs as simply producing photo ops, and not actual transportation, that will continue.
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Worse, short term approaches could very well lead to design choices that limits the big moves (tm). Just think the Union trainshed mess - nevermind that it's not even done - I am supremely skeptical as to how well it'd handle the future load. In the meantime, so much has been invested in it that makes about faces unthinkable (and you'd stuck with messing around the margins for solutions).

crs1026 said:
We desperately need a Steve Munro equivalent to dedicate their life to critical analysis, blog writing and advocacy around Metrolinx. It's way beyond the time and energy those of us in the bleachers have available. Neither the media nor the Loyal Opposition are truly holding ML's feet to the fire.
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Considering the quality of the discourse in mainstream media (Toronto Sun blah blah blah) on the transit file, and the vested interests of the opposition parties, holding fire is something neither player can be considered good at - and opposition parties in particular is interested in making the government look bad in the leadup to elections first and foremost, and speaking in the most nebulous terms regarding what their alternative solution would be.

What you need is an external third party (preferably operator) with demonstrated excellence that can critique/peer review the plans - and not hold back in the criticisms (political expediency be damned). Almost like an Auditor General for transit planning and implementation that conduct yearly review and progress reports on everything.

AoD
 
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The most troubling aspect of this though is that even in these forums, some take every announcement as proof of the project happening, when in practice, in many cases, it's anything but. People are gullible, and the politicos play on that. Not a *single word since* on the "partnership" with CN for the "freight by-pass as per the K/W corridor. I read that article, and thought: "Well, duh". How can one not be cynical? (gist) "We've got everything in place and planned, except the cash". Hey, I'm building a rocket ship to Jupiter. Honest. The money's coming.
 
crs1026 said:
Maybe the media is beginning to get it after all.... seems there is some advocacy out there looking at this critically:

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...tml?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

- Paul
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That report is a rehash of the 2014 report where some of my report was in, but walked away from the group. I attended a few meetings for this report, but decided not for me to the point various members got this report written by others.

Still under estimated the cost and time frame for putting a real transit network in place if the pols kept their fingers out of the planning.

Until you know for a fact that the money is in the bank, you only can build X with what money is in the bank until that other funds show up.

To do what everyone wants and do it right, its $8 Billion a year for the next 20 years that includes replacement, maintenances, debit service, funding local service. It also cover cost to build the HSR to Windsor 10 years out, but not a true one.
 
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