Toronto Ontario Line 3 | ?m | ?s

[MisterF]

As much as we all support more transit, we shouldn't exaggerate things. If we look to Wikipedia's tables Toronto has the 34th longest subway system in the world. Toronto is the 48th largest city in the world. Toronto thus has slightly more kilometres of subway per person than average.

Maybe I should have made it clear that I was comparing Toronto to cities that are comparable to our wealth. Comparing to cities in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and much of Asia is pointless. But when you compare to most rich countries, Toronto's poor downtown coverage becomes clear.

But it's not just a case of comparing maps to other cities. If you've ever been on the Yonge line or any of the streetcars in rush hour it's obvious that downtown is where subway expansion is needed most.

 

[Chuck]

ROTFLMAO ... how do subtract contingency? Contingency is there to deal with what you couldn't budget for.

If you budget for contingency, it ends up being spent - this is Toronto, after all, which lately has had no policies of saving costs in any way and for any reason. Don't budget for as much and hundreds of millions of dollars can be saved. Simple.

Of these two viewpoints, I would have to agree with the former. I work in construction, and have found that whether the job is public or private, and whether contingencies are present in the budget or not, there will almost always be unavoidable extra costs to the contract. Real problems arise when reasonable contingencies are not factored into a construction budge. This mistake can either cause the project to grind to a halt, be completed at lower standards, or destroy long term capital plans.

My bone to pick with the TTC has to do with the scale of subway stations that it seems to require. I'd like to see the TTC do away with oversized underground bus terminals and international design competitions for suburban subway stations. Intermediate concourse levels should also be removed, so you either pay your fare at street level (Summerhill Station), or track level like many stations in New York. Implementing these changes could trim construction budgets by hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

[Whoaccio]

I have said it before and will say it again, the RAV line in Vancouver was built at a total cost of about 105m/km, less from the public sector's perspective. It goes through downtown, under False Creek, over the Fraser River and is largely tunneled. It wasn't built with slave labor in Dubai or in the 1920s when it didn't matter if a few people lost arms during construction. I can believe that, sure, it may be worth building a slightly higher capacity system in Toronto (6 cars vs. 4 cars in Van.) or maybe with better busterminals. What I can't believe is that 400m dollars to build a subway through nowhere is a reasonable cost.

It's not so much a case, I believe, that these costs are wrong or fabricated. Just that the entire project is overbuilt for its purposes. So, if our subways trains are too wide to fit in one tunnel, why the hell aren't we planning for smaller trains? If it costs x to bore a tunnel, why aren't we cut'n'covering/trenching/viaducting? If it costs so much to build larger stations, why aren't we building smaller trains that run closer together/faster? If adds 100m to build cavernous underground bus terminals, why don't we just not do that? It may be wrong to expect all of these things (esp. when building extensions as opposed to new lines) but it disheartening to see seemingly no effort whatsoever going into looking at how rapid transit can be made cheaper.

 

[Second_in_pie]

I have said it before and will say it again, the RAV line in Vancouver was built at a total cost of about 105m/km, less from the public sector's perspective. It goes through downtown, under False Creek, over the Fraser River and is largely tunneled. It wasn't built with slave labor in Dubai or in the 1920s when it didn't matter if a few people lost arms during construction. I can believe that, sure, it may be worth building a slightly higher capacity system in Toronto (6 cars vs. 4 cars in Van.) or maybe with better busterminals. What I can't believe is that 400m dollars to build a subway through nowhere is a reasonable cost.

It's not so much a case, I believe, that these costs are wrong or fabricated. Just that the entire project is overbuilt for its purposes. So, if our subways trains are too wide to fit in one tunnel, why the hell aren't we planning for smaller trains? If it costs x to bore a tunnel, why aren't we cut'n'covering/trenching/viaducting? If it costs so much to build larger stations, why aren't we building smaller trains that run closer together/faster? If adds 100m to build cavernous underground bus terminals, why don't we just not do that? It may be wrong to expect all of these things (esp. when building extensions as opposed to new lines) but it disheartening to see seemingly no effort whatsoever going into looking at how rapid transit can be made cheaper.

Oh my god. Yes, Yes, Yes!

Actually, using smaller subway cars would be interesting. Maybe with something like a Sheppard Extension if they want to bore the rest of the line (I would think this is the best option) they could just do smaller tunnels and use smaller subway cars, like Piccadilly Trains in the London Underground.

It's true. All the TTC's subway in the past 20 years at least has been horribly overbuilt. Massive cathedral stations with huge, unneeded bus bays and massive mezzanines. I accept that some subway stations could have mezzanines, but all of them don't have to! Unimportant or lower-volume stations should have no mezzanine at all, and just ticket booths before the platform at the end of the stairs/escelator. That alone would save a lot of money.

Trenching and Viaducting would both work very well on some potential subway routes, especially Eglinton, where like 2/3 of the line could be built trenching and viaducting, along with some cut and cover. Building smartly might very well half the TTC's construction costs.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Mayan ruins in Toronto? Your geography is as poor as your engineering. Any contingency on a project in the last 5 years would have been used simply because of the unusually high 10% inflation rate that has occured in the construction sector.

I have absolutely no comprehension why you want to create havoc by underfunding a project. Rather than keep on making the same ignorant statements, that only serve to devalue anything sensible you might say, perhaps you should educate yourself on how these projects are done.

Ninja turtles should have been found when studying local threatened species during the Spadina EA and probably won't pose a problem but Mayan ruins are trickier to uncover...that's what the $380M engineering and geotechnical budget is for.

You're dense so I'll say this simply. How much contingency has been added to the Yonge extension or the Transit City projects? How much contingency is built into the Spadina budget before the extra 26% was added? Do you have a shred of knowledge about what actually ends up getting spent on two projects when they have very different contingency allowances?

Whatever padding exists in other projects is not listed as a separate budget item, so the 'take the cost of one project and multiply it by Xkm to estimate other projects' is rarely a useful way to go about this...Spadina includes a 26% contingency that may not be present in other projects, Sheppard included two terminus stations in only 6km, Yonge has stuff like Steeles station with its three ramps requiring tens of millions of dollars of property acquisitions. If people are going to repeatedly post dozens of pages of posts comparing the costs of one project to another, they should make some small effort to shed the potential anomalies and compare factual and realistic things to one another. So, yes, subtract what may not be present in every project...if 26% contingency (edit - or, double inflation) is not standard, don't include 26%, if the DRL won't have stations with 25 bus bays, don't include them, etc. It makes a huge difference, particularly when we have politicians running around screaming about how expensive subways are...they're using these inaccurate estimates instead of something more reasonable.

Of these two viewpoints, I would have to agree with the former. I work in construction, and have found that whether the job is public or private, and whether contingencies are present in the budget or not, there will almost always be unavoidable extra costs to the contract. Real problems arise when reasonable contingencies are not factored into a construction budge. This mistake can either cause the project to grind to a halt, be completed at lower standards, or destroy long term capital plans.

My bone to pick with the TTC has to do with the scale of subway stations that it seems to require. I'd like to see the TTC do away with oversized underground bus terminals and international design competitions for suburban subway stations. Intermediate concourse levels should also be removed, so you either pay your fare at street level (Summerhill Station), or track level like many stations in New York. Implementing these changes could trim construction budgets by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Again, this assumes that zero padding of any sort has already been built into the Spadina budget before the blanket extra 26%. There's room to cut from the Spadina budget before a separate and massive contingency component, just as there will be with the Yonge extension and as there was with Sheppard, but there isn't an ounce of incentive to keep the scale reasonable when at the outset they're prepared to spend an extra half billion dollars.

Note that you and drum quoted me saying "don't budget for as much contingency," not "don't budget for any." I said slash Spadina's separate contingency when comparing various project estimates because we don't know how much contingency has been added to each of them. The Yonge subway extension folks, for instance, are hoping for miracles so that whatever contingency has been added there (and does anyone know what that amount is?) won't need to be spent - they're not going to be a bit proactive and, say, reduce the size of the ridiculously overbuilt Steeles station.

 

[Woodbridge_Heights]

Maybe I should have made it clear that I was comparing Toronto to cities that are comparable to our wealth. Comparing to cities in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and much of Asia is pointless. But when you compare to most rich countries, Toronto's poor downtown coverage becomes clear.

But it's not just a case of comparing maps to other cities. If you've ever been on the Yonge line or any of the streetcars in rush hour it's obvious that downtown is where subway expansion is needed most.

Yes clearly we've spent the last 40 to 50 years focused on subway expansion to the suburbs when it's obvious that downtown lacks the kind of capacity needed to serve it.

I mentioned it years ago on Steve Munro's blog. If, instead of continued subway expansion into the suburbs we had re purposed the then saved streetcars to serve the busier suburban routes, and then used that amount of subway constructoin to build subways downtown. We'd probably have the Queen subway and/or a DRL

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Yes clearly we've spent the last 40 to 50 years focused on subway expansion to the suburbs when it's obvious that downtown lacks the kind of capacity needed to serve it.

I mentioned it years ago on Steve Munro's blog. If, instead of continued subway expansion into the suburbs we had re purposed the then saved streetcars to serve the busier suburban routes, and then used that amount of subway constructoin to build subways downtown. We'd probably have the Queen subway and/or a DRL

We need both - we need more service downtown like the DRL and we need more service in the suburbs like the Yonge extension. The DRL was and is a response to suburban subway expansion...there's absolutely no way the subway network downtown would be overcrowded if this suburban subway expansion never occurred. That's what happens when the vast majority of the city's residents live in the suburbs and when the downtown core is such a huge trip generator.

 

[nfitz]

I have said it before and will say it again, the RAV line in Vancouver was built at a total cost of about 105m/km, less from the public sector's perspective. It goes through downtown, under False Creek, over the Fraser River and is largely tunneled.

The numbers I have are a total length of 18.4 km with 9.1 km of it tunnelled. So it's not fair to say it's largely tunnelled, when more of it is not tunnelled than tunnelled. Also to save money, they deferred two of the stations, and controversially used cut-and-cover down most of Cambie, rather than using tunnelling machines; TTC stopped that practice in the late 1960s because of the disruption it caused.

There are significant savings because the stations are much shorter than in Toronto; only about 1/3 the length of a Toronto subway station.

To compare properly, you need the cost breakdown. If you look at the Spadina extension budget you'll see that the tunnels are only $55.7 million/km. The stations in comparison are $53.5 million/km. Stations and tunnel are $109.1 million/km. Probably fair to include track, utilities, power, and signalling, which is another 20.8 million/km.

How does this breakdown compare to Vancouver then? What does their price include, what doesn't it include? How does the tunnelled section compared to the elevated section, compared to the bridge?

 

[nfitz]

Ninja turtles should have been found when studying local threatened species during the Spadina EA and probably won't pose a problem but Mayan ruins are trickier to uncover...that's what the $380M engineering and geotechnical budget is for.

???? The engineering budget is primarily to design the subway and manage the construction? Are you suggesting perhaps that they simply start a tunnel boring machine at one end, and go for it, with no concern about what might happen? I'm sure some money could be saved in that area if they went PPP, as they wouldn't have as many cooks ... but at the same time, they have the huge profit margins then.

How much contingency has been added to the Yonge extension or the Transit City projects? How much contingency is built into the Spadina budget before the extra 26% was added? Do you have a shred of knowledge about what actually ends up getting spent on two projects when they have very different contingency allowances?

I'm don't have either budgets at hand. Not sure what the big deal is ... if the contingency is too large, it will come in under budget, like Shepherd. But if it's too small ... well didn't we learn that lesson on the recent Line 2 extension in Montreal?

I don't disagree that some of the stations are somewhat overdone. On the other hand, most of the existing stations are underdone; I was in Pape the other day, and with a simple escalator out of service, there was huge bottleneck of people climbing up and down the short flight of stairs to the track. Hopefully the upcoming renovation work there will widen the staircases, etc.

 

[Second_in_pie]

The numbers I have are a total length of 18.4 km with 9.1 km of it tunnelled. So it's not fair to say it's largely tunnelled, when more of it is not tunnelled than tunnelled. Also to save money, they deferred two of the stations, and controversially used cut-and-cover down most of Cambie, rather than using tunnelling machines; TTC stopped that practice in the late 1960s because of the disruption it caused.

There are significant savings because the stations are much shorter than in Toronto; only about 1/3 the length of a Toronto subway station.

But that does not mean that the TTC couldn't save a lot of money by making more efficient stations.

EDIT:

I don't disagree that some of the stations are somewhat overdone. On the other hand, most of the existing stations are underdone; I was in Pape the other day, and with a simple escalator out of service, there was huge bottleneck of people climbing up and down the short flight of stairs to the track. Hopefully the upcoming renovation work there will widen the staircases, etc.

You're talking about the TTC and escalators here, you can't blame station design on that. On a more serious note, I argue to say that there are very few reasonable or underdone stations in the TTC's network. Most of them are much larger and grander than they need to be.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

There are significant savings because the stations are much shorter than in Toronto; only about 1/3 the length of a Toronto subway station.

These savings are not necessarily as significant as they seem. Shorter stations means longer tunnels in between, an escalator or an elevator costs the same no matter how long the platform is, as do token machines or washrooms or whatever else, etc.

 

[nfitz]

But that does not mean that the TTC couldn't save a lot of money by making more efficient stations.

Ironically I think the answer is actually in:

These savings are not necessarily as significant as they seem. Shorter stations means longer tunnels in between, an escalator or an elevator costs the same no matter how long the platform is, as do token machines or washrooms or whatever else, etc.

There are some savings that could be had, sure. But in the big picture, I'm not sure overspending $20-million on a station we've got to live with for a hundred years or so is a bad thing. I think there are many BD and Yonge line stations that in hindsight could have done with more infrastructure.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

???? The engineering budget is primarily to design the subway and manage the construction? Are you suggesting perhaps that they simply start a tunnel boring machine at one end, and go for it, with no concern about what might happen? I'm sure some money could be saved in that area if they went PPP, as they wouldn't have as many cooks ... but at the same time, they have the huge profit margins then.

I'm don't have either budgets at hand. Not sure what the big deal is ... if the contingency is too large, it will come in under budget, like Shepherd. But if it's too small ... well didn't we learn that lesson on the recent Line 2 extension in Montreal?

I don't disagree that some of the stations are somewhat overdone. On the other hand, most of the existing stations are underdone; I was in Pape the other day, and with a simple escalator out of service, there was huge bottleneck of people climbing up and down the short flight of stairs to the track. Hopefully the upcoming renovation work there will widen the staircases, etc.

I'm suggesting you have no sense of humour. Try more question marks next time, they're funny.

If Sheppard's contingency was too large they would not have cut corners like the tiles (and if the tiles were left off due to time constraints, a larger contingency would have enabled more to spent in less time to get things done on time). Sheppard is overbuilt and Spadina and Yonge appear headed for something grotesquely elephantine. Steeles station alone could end up costing over $300M, much of it wasted on bus bays that will never be used and buying properties to build completely redundant access ramps to the tunnels. The larger the contingency is, the smaller the likelihood anything will be done to keep costs under control.

When projects have different contingencies, "over budget" has little to no meaning.

 

[Second_in_pie]

There are some savings that could be had, sure. But in the big picture, I'm not sure overspending $20-million on a station we've got to live with for a hundred years or so is a bad thing. I think there are many BD and Yonge line stations that in hindsight could have done with more infrastructure.

If, when you say "more infrastructure," you mean larger mezzanines and bigger gateway newstands, I'll have to argue against you on that. If you mean perhaps bigger staircases (or better build escalators) to move more people or elevators to make the station handicap-accesible, then I agree. However, those big, unnecessary mezzanines seem to cost a fair bit more than a bigger staircase would. I'm no engineer though.

Also, a very good explanation as to why our stations seem to in fact be lacking infrastructure is that we are in fact lacking subways! Whether you want to admit it or not, the ridership and crowdedness of the B-D and YUS would be almost gone if we just had one or two more N-S and E-W subways for people to use.

 

[Voltz]

These savings are not necessarily as significant as they seem. Shorter stations means longer tunnels in between, an escalator or an elevator costs the same no matter how long the platform is, as do token machines or washrooms or whatever else, etc.

Are you seriously suggesting that a metre of tunnel is close to the cost of a metre of station? Even if that is true then why where the Canada line stations built so short? I am guessing it was because of money.

The cost difference is between a underground station that is 3 times longer than another (as well as wider) is significant, they have to use more than thrice the amount of concrete ($$$$$$) and steel ($$$$$) and labour ($$$$$) and various other materials, the cost of which has shot up significantly over the past several years. The price of a escalator is relatively nothing.

Why does everyone seem to think that we can just keep building Wellesley sized stations? We can't because modern fire and safety codes do not allow that to happen. Stations are required to safely handle the maximum number of people that could ever come through.