There's a reply to that Twitter thread you referenced that is right up my alley:
While it was the floor-to-ceiling bars that prompted me to register and reply, what was equally striking to me was the renderings of a station with nothing above it and someone's else's tower beside it. This isn't unique to this station, of course, but it's illustrative.
As a Toronto expat, and long-time resident of Hong Kong where I get to enjoy arguably the best transit system in the world, those renderings encapsulate everything that is wrong about transit station development in Toronto.
Here in Hong Kong, it's almost a given that there would be a tower directly above the station. It would be planned and built, as well as likely owned and operated by the MTR (the local equivalent of the TTC, albeit for rail only).
They would have likely bought up the whole block (or been conceded by the government). The station would be underground, with multiple levels of revenue-earning additional commercial space and/or parking, with a podium and at least two towers, but likely three or four (if not one much larger one).
Some of that tower space might be for sale (ie, condos), but more likely it would be rental housing and/or office leasing, forming the bulk of the transit operator's perpetual non-transit income stream on the site (along with any parking income and/or the multilevel commercial leasing, as well as shop rentals and advertising units within the station itself).
While I'm very familiar with the TTC model and its perpetual woes, it still boggles my mind that Toronto continues to struggle to build rail transit in this way, with unsustainable costs and no effort to leverage the perpetual revenue streams that transit development should bring to the transit operator.
Before I left Toronto, I would have bristled at any suggestion that the TTC should be anything less than a full public entity and at anything that smacked of privatization. I think it's how we're conditioned to be, weened largely on bad American examples in the past.
But after experiencing some of the best transit in the world across many Asian countries, there's no doubt that the TTC and the way it's structured isn't remotely close to being the better way. We could do things so much better in Toronto if the status quo wasn't such a strong pull in Canadian governance.
And it's hardly privatization over here, or at least what Canadians might think of it as. Yes, the MTR is a publicly listed company here, which is really a key part of driving its culture and different ways of doing things. But the government retains 75% of the stock, so it's very much publicly driven.
If anyone's curious about the MTR, here's
a little widget from a local newspaper with some key facts (from 2017 but still pertinent in its grand lines).
Apologies for my little soapbox rant and I don't mean to hijack this thread about this particular station. I imagine this comparison to Asian transit operators has already been discussed elsewhere in this forum. But those renderings of this station with someone else's tower beside it, just really struck a chord.
Don't mean to be a bummer. I get back to Toronto regularly and am happy to see it finally getting more rail lines. But it's just sad, as it could be so much bigger and better.
