Sheppard Subway to be Mothballed?

[Prometheus The Supremo]

routes at risk..

http://www.toronto.ca/ttc/myttc.html#serviceatrisk

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Leave Sheppard alone and shut down the RT...Sheppard carries more riders now and Scarborough buses can simply continue on to Kennedy station, whereas Sheppard riders will be more left out in the cold. Midland and Brimley are virtually traffic free and can handle many more buses, but Sheppard East is, and has always been, a zoo.

 

[wyliepoon]

^ Good call. I'm a big fan of the 131E between Scarborough Centre and Kennedy, and I'd like to see some of the other busy north Scarborough bus routes do the same (such as my McCowan North bus). Kennedy can easily handle a lot more buses by converting one or more of its surrounding parking lots into bus platforms.

 

[gboykovekin]

TTC employees were handing out surveys during the afternoon rushhour...interesting

 

[CDL.TO]

Damn the TTC's amateur in-house marketing and design. With proper design, the reality of this situation could be presented far more hard-hitting. Instead, the user is left navigating a mixture of different webpages and PDF documents, none of which are designed to arouse emotion. We are being told that this is a crisis but it is being presented as an academic study. Hell, community groups fighting bus or streetcar lanes on their local street can produce more engaging websites and print materials than this.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

^ Good call. I'm a big fan of the 131E between Scarborough Centre and Kennedy, and I'd like to see some of the other busy north Scarborough bus routes do the same (such as my McCowan North bus). Kennedy can easily handle a lot more buses by converting one or more of its surrounding parking lots into bus platforms.

True dat, and most bus routes would not even need to be significantly altered. Midland station is very easily replaced by having people stay on the 57 for another 10 minutes - it'll save them a transfer, anyway. The 21's A branch can be removed, running every bus all the way to Kennedy...it'll get a bit more crowded but very few people ride it south of STC, so it'll work.

The 54 could get a new branch that runs down to Kennedy while the regular 54 would be able to run straight along Lawrence without interruption. No one uses Ellesmere station except a few park'n'riders and kiss'n'riders, who can all go elsewhere. McCowan buses could just run up Danforth, I guess...maybe a rocket/express could be added?

The Malvern routes would be trickier, but some can run along the 401 to make up some time. If they'd hurry up and connect McNicoll to Oasis/Morningside, already, 133C patrons get ride the 42, thus eliminating 50% of the "reasoning" behind spending perhaps a billion dollars on extending the RT (the other 50% is attributed to helping poor, underprivileged Malvernites).

And, of course, the Stouffville line could get a few more trains per day so that it's not totally useless to the neighbourhoods it passes through...

 

[allabootmatt]

I just filled out the survey. Indicated that I would pay higher fares, but in the "comments" suggested that they look at contracting out non-core functions. So I guess I just guaranteed that my survey will be ignored.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

i tried to take the survey but didn't because it didn't really apply to me because there are no options for wheeltrans users.

there are no positive options either. it's like, would you rather be kicked in the balls?, the ass? or the face?

the cutting of some of those routes will possibly effect my ability to use the regular TTC when it will become totally accessible or accessible enough to make it usable for me.

so now i have a bus route nearby that has pretty good service, but it's not accessible. in the future, the route may not exist or have reduced service, with an increased fare, preventing me from using a future accessible TTC system.

so i wait and wait every day for the future to bring access, in the end only to be denied access.

 

[allabootmatt]

Here's the good news: the odds of land-transfer and vehicle-registration not passing at this point are miniscule, if as appears likely the alternative really is massive service cuts like those elaborated. These measures will have the desired effect of scaring waffling councillors into voting 'yes,' and only another vote or two are required. You'd be hard-pressed to find 23 councillors who would really vote for service-level apocalypse.

I'm also hopeful that Miller, calmed down by a vacation, will take the opportunity to very directly and factually explain what's going on and why that is to the people of the city, and challenge his opponents to come up with a better idea.

The other good news is that, a few dead-enders like Rob Ford aside, the consensus on council is for more money somehow--either through uploading or new taxes. There's no conservative rump suggesting a half-billion dollar budget cut. So, with no or little uploading, it should be easy to get the taxes through.

With that said, I'm really pissed off by the TTC over this. While obviously the funding levels are not and haven't been high enough, this has been a ten-year crisis, with plenty of time to come up with some creative thinking to soften the blow. What happened to the ballyhooed TTC plans to lease air-rights to its surface-level station properties, which happen to sit on some of the most valuable land in the country? Last I checked the Eglinton bus terminal was still fenced off, St Clair still a one-story shed, etc. etc. And why has contracting out some TTC functions been treated as heresy? Surely there are things within the organization that could be done cheaper. There's no magic bullet here, but things could have been done better.

As the election and budget vote near I am planning on doing a mass email to a long list of my Toronto friends urging them to vote for a candidate who will do something for the city, and to write their councillors about revenue tools. It's not much, but I am desperate to do something and have been rather unsatisfied with responses to letters I've sent to my MPP and the Premier.

 

[CapitalSeven]

Interesting to hear relatively convincing arguments that the Scarborough RT could be closed down with little impact. Several voices from Scarborough were crying last year that a subway replacement was "needed," but the numbers show that even the RT (revamped) wouldn't hit capacity for decades.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

Interesting to hear relatively convincing arguments that the Scarborough RT could be closed down with little impact. Several voices from Scarborough were crying last year that a subway replacement was "needed," but the numbers show that even the RT (revamped) wouldn't hit capacity for decades.

i think the subway calls were mostly due to the RT coming to the end of its shelf life.

 

[rbt]

Leave Sheppard alone and shut down the RT...Sheppard carries more riders now and Scarborough buses can simply continue on to Kennedy station, whereas Sheppard riders will be more left out in the cold. Midland and Brimley are virtually traffic free and can handle many more buses, but Sheppard East is, and has always been, a zoo.

You miss the entire point of bringing up Sheppard.

All of the major real-estate players who invested time and energy against the Land Transfer Tax stand to lose substantially if Sheppard is closed because they all use it as a major marketing point for their 10+ building complexes being sold along Sheppard.

Threatening to close Sheppard is all about ensuring the developers/brokers who dodged the Land Transfer Tax will get a strong slap on the wrist. Reminds them that they depend on city services to sell condominiums.

 

[unimaginative2]

Interesting to hear relatively convincing arguments that the Scarborough RT could be closed down with little impact. Several voices from Scarborough were crying last year that a subway replacement was "needed," but the numbers show that even the RT (revamped) wouldn't hit capacity for decades.

Toronto seems to be the only city in the world with this bizarre sense that a line needs to be "at capacity" in order to be successful. No subway line in the world is at crush load at its terminal station. In fact, if one were to be in such a situation it would be providing a very poor service. Transit routes can be successful even if they are not at crush load. If the subway were extended to Scarborough Centre, it would obviously not be overloaded right from the first stop. That's not a bad thing.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Interesting to hear relatively convincing arguments that the Scarborough RT could be closed down with little impact. Several voices from Scarborough were crying last year that a subway replacement was "needed," but the numbers show that even the RT (revamped) wouldn't hit capacity for decades.

This discussion will only get silly unless there's context added. A Danforth extension is not needed more than any of a half dozen other big projects, but since the RT's dying, there's reasons why it might make sense to bump it up the list (the old list, now that TransitCity's made a new one). The city still has plans to rebuild and extend the RT and the cost of doing this will likely be in the same ballpark as a subway extension (note: this is where roch5220 will typically post about how wrong my math is and we'll quibble over a few hundred million), and it will benefit less people than a subway extension. The RT's technology is not inherently bad, but I support anything that undermines wasting a fortune on saving and extending the RT. The fact that gentle tweaking of the bus network could do a decent job replacing the RT for so many people speaks mainly to how functional the TTC's suburban bus routes are and how awful the RT is as a transit service...a significant percentage of the RT's riders can be accommodated on parallel bus routes that run on roads with no traffic.

Threatening to close Sheppard is all about ensuring the developers/brokers who dodged the Land Transfer Tax will get a strong slap on the wrist. Reminds them that they depend on city services to sell condominiums.

[conspiracy]
Nope. Threatening to close Sheppard is all about destroying the subway network and encouraging the growth of a web of streetcar lines.
[/end conspiracy]

 

[rpgr]

Still, land transfer taxes I think are stupid. Vehicle registration taxes I think are OK but still...

The best though I think would probably be either a 1% sales tax on all but food or property taxes or a corporate tax. Thing is, the tax needs to be dumped on a much more even scale than punishing people from moving into the city. Your trying to build infrastructure, not push people away into further suburbia which a land transfer tax would do. If people start living on the fringes of Toronto even more, we all know from current experience that the city gets less money but spends more as those people commute into Toronto. It just does not make any sense.