Metrolinx strategy for funding and building Transit City and Viva

[leopetr]

PDF | On Track: Moving Transit Forward in the GTHA
J. Robert S. Prichard, President and Chief Executive Officer, Metrolinx
Presentation to Toronto Board of Trade
May 17, 2010

I'm excerpting slides 8, 9, 22, 23, and 26 as the most interesting.

Source: Transit Toronto

 

[hbl33]

SO, Metrolinx is about to relent for the project to get started?

McGuilty's on life support until the upcoming election.

 

[Mapleson]

The transcripts were pretty interesting. Basically, Finch LRT and Scarbourough RT are start in 2015 and finish in 2020 with the bits above chopped off everything. It seems pretty well thought out as to what is happening and why.

 

[Juan_Lennon416]

This is liberalville and I won't be surprised if McGuinty and the Liberals are re-elected. Too many people in this city cannot shake off the ghosts of Harris and Rae.

 

[doady]

So the part of the Eglinton LRT with by far the most regional significance gets postponed, and a plan that overall was already heavily lopsided in favour of the less-populated east end becomes even more lopsided.

Metrolinx sure knows how to prioritize.

 

[TOareaFan]

Add a GO stop at, roughly, Black Creek and Eglinton....make, both, the Georgetown GO and the Airport express thing stop there and you have a pretty good connector to the Airport from Eglinton.....establishing what the fare from there would be might be trick but if what we are saying is that the cost cuts mean Eglinton can't go to the airport, at least connect it to something that does (something that is being built anyway)....added benefit of connecting GO to a higher density area and potentially driving more people onto the GO service.

 

[gweed123]

How anyone could actually support this is beyond me... You favour extending the Eglinton LRT to Kennedy instead of the airport? What a joke. Thank you Metrolinx, for making our SOS plan look even more attractive...

 

[gweed123]

For the same $8.15 billion, here's what we could do instead. We've priced it out, and it would come to $8.090 billion.

 

[gweed123]

Oops, that's Phase 2 (for an extra $6.704 billion, or the remainder of the original $15 billion from TC). Here's Phase 1, for the $8.15 billion:

 

[lead82]

this is a very uplifting document from metrolinx. I hope that the incoming mayor doesnt go and cancel this plan as that would just be incredibly stupid. Lets start building already.

 

[leopetr]

You favour extending the Eglinton LRT to Kennedy instead of the airport?

Yes. Extending Eglinton LRT to Kennedy lets us interline it with Scarborough RT, running the same transfer-less vehicle from Sheppard to Scarborough Town Center to Yonge to Spadina Line to Jane.

 

[SimonP]

This is a victory for Toronto and Transit City. It sounds like the Liberals realized the level of anger in Toronto over the cuts. The McGuinty Liberals didn't reverse themselves completely, but this is a lot better than where it looked like we would be after the budget. It called for an undefined delay that was a likely death sentence for everything other than Sheppard East. Now Eglinton seems certain to go ahead, and Finch West and the RT quite likely. Jane and Don Mills are still unlikely to be built in our life time, but no one ever thought those ones would really get funded.

 

[Dan416]

Transit City really is a mess. Just because they thought out where to cut doesn't mean the plan was good to start with. And cutting a bad plan doesn't make it better when you cut in the wrong places. SaveOurSubways plan is much better.

 

[nfitz]

SaveOurSubways plan is much better.

The SOS plan is much worse. It fails to serve many parts of the cities, focuses far too much money on servicing Scarborough Centre, and provides a ridiculous amount of capacity to the extreme parts of Eglinton which have even lower forecasted ridership than the Sheppard subway. The guys who wrote it couldn't even sort out the grammar in the document - and we are supposed to believe that they could do the difficult stuff correctly?

 

[GraphicMatt]

The Metrolinx presentation really does read like the province was rattled by the Save Transit City outcry. I'm still not happy about the cuts, but I'm less cynical now. I believe these lines will be built.