The LRT should be successful with existing development capacity. It’s designed with the existing development in mind, and if more residential development occurs, then that’s even better. It would provide people a nice way to move around the existing neighbourhoods and slow down traffic just enough to give local commerce a chance. A subway would need like a 100-fold increase in density along the routes to be anywhere near cost-recovery once in operation. Even now, I think only the Union to Bloor stretch of the Yonge line and Bloor to Spadina breaks even or some mess like that, and that’s entirely because of employment intensity, and not residential intensity. I’m not sure we even have enough density along the existing subway line to support cost recovery. Good luck with getting communities and councillors to agree with high rises going up in their backyard with all sorts of minority folk moving in. The councillors can’t even commit to giving the LRT right of way on the roads, and they’re going to be okay with having Eglinton, Jane, etc lined with point towers?
At least Rob Ford is upfront about gutting Transity City because he just doesn’t want to spend the money, and we’ll build 1km of track a year. 1km distance in Toronto is nothing, especially out in the suburbs. You’d be between cul-de-sacs with 1km of track. Good luck getting to the next major intersection out in Etobicoke or Scarborough.
Huh?
That's a really strange thing to claim. If anything, Transit City will increase pressure on the subway network, especially if Don Mills is built as planned. LRT in median roadways on suburban streets will not suddenly cause a rush of developers to abandon the downtown market leading to a sudden reversal of ridership trends. I don't think low-concept LRTs (with the notable exception of Eglinton) will make enough of a dent in gridlock. Other priorities, not gridlock, were used to justify TC - like local land use changes, serving those "priority neighbourhoods", and merely improving transit usage and capacity for short to medium distance trips in the inner suburbs.
The biggest pressure is on the Yonge Subway itself. Even getting some riders off of Bloor (if we assume ridership growth won't negate any "relief") won't fix the clear and present need for capacity that tinkering around with ATC and more station renovations won't fix.
Pretty sure it wouldn't be a big waste of money. Unless you are suggesting that the downtown core will decline, lose businesses and residents to outlying areas, then demand is not going to go down for travel to and from the area. Given that right now the Yonge line and Y&B station are at or over capacity at peaks times, some form of relief is necessary, especially before you go dumping more passengers via feeder lines or Yonge extensions.
I think the goal should be to even out demand on the transit system. They get over capacity at peak times because TTC can’t afford to automate, and everyone goes to union to get to their suburban bedrooms. Otherwise, the TTC runs under-capacity most of the time.
I thought the cost for the Sheppard line was close to a half billion a station or something, wasn’t it? And that was a decade ago in an area of the city that was very much underbuilt and whatever expropriations had to be done happened for super cheap. I’d suspect that’s no longer true with the new routes along more established communities. Plus, labour and fuel costs are much much higher. $225 mill per station seems like an optimistically lowball estimate to me. Plus there’s the practicality of having subway train go back and forth between two stations all day. They’d have to build out from the existing lines which already have excess capacity outside of peak hours. So it’d be like 10 years before the line got anywhere close to the high density nodes in the Toronto suburbs at the rate of a couple kilometres a year. And you’d have to have continuous Environmental Assessments as you built out or changed your mind. All it would take is a lawsuit from a ratepayer group like at St Clair to tack on a few years of delay. It’d be better to commit to the LRT I think. At least that way you secure the right of way, and if you approve enough housing and commercial density along the route, you can tunnel. A good chunk of the Eglinton and Sheppard LRTs are running underground anyway...
Subways are nice and all, but I don’t think Toronto council would ever approve the kind of densities you need to make it recover operating costs. That’s what everyone is going gangbusters about this time, we can’t afford the LRT! We probably couldn’t afford the subway once it got built since no one is going to have the balls to tell their voters why more density is a good thing. I think it took about 5 years before the developers finally went to the OMB on a high rise application out in Etobicoke. They wanted to put up high rise condos by the 427. Local ratepayers group from the other side of the highway created a shit storm through their councillor and bogged the whole thing down. Then they went to OMB. And I think there was a bankruptcy along the way, and someone other developer came in and built adjacent to the site once the OMB case got settled.
That’s for one condo with ample parking in an industrial big box wasteland by the highway, nowhere near the existing single-detached community on the other side of the highway.
Also I don’t know why the private sector would get involved (a la Rob Ford) if they couldn’t at least recover their costs... If the city sells assets, I think they’ve got more pressing social issues to deal with than a subway to the airport, which should be 100% federal spending since its their airport. I don’t know why Rossi wants to run a subway to the airport. York and Vaughan should be paying their fair share for running the subway up into York. I don’t get why Toronto is paying for that particular expansion.
