Toronto Spadina Subway Extension Emergency Exits | ?m | 1s | TTC | IBI Group

diminutive said:
Though, retrospectively, that was surely the right decision to cancel Eglinton. The Eglinton West subway was a poorly thought out idea, which seemed more a product of giving something to York and Etobicoke than transit planning. There's no way demand justified a subway. Given ridership subsequently collapsed, the TTC would have been stuck with the operational burden of yet another under used subway which would have drained money from everything else.
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Yes. Thankfully, we've put that terrible era behind us and more recent projects (like, say, the Scarborough Subway or even Transit City) were well-thought out and subject to rigorous case benefit analyses....

Like pretty much everything that's been built in the GTA over the past generation I don't doubt it would have been imperfect but I think it's hard to argue that the city or region is better off without it, especially now that the LRT is now being built anyway. Sheppard, for example, may be a truncated, semi-successful line that ends in the middle of nowhere, but it's still better than nothing.
 
diminutive said:
Though, retrospectively, that was surely the right decision to cancel Eglinton. The Eglinton West subway was a poorly thought out idea, which seemed more a product of giving something to York and Etobicoke than transit planning. There's no way demand justified a subway. Given ridership subsequently collapsed, the TTC would have been stuck with the operational burden of yet another under used subway which would have drained money from everything else.
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Most days, I grumble about how shortsighted we were back in the late 1980s/early 1990s when we basically sat on our hands and didn't build rapid transit. How great would it have been to ride something like Network 2011?

At the same time, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the planners of the day, because the future for transit ridership and even for Toronto, itself, seemed bleak. Toronto was undergoing a massive economic restructuring and, as you said, lost 1/4 of all its transit riders. Housing prices collapsed at levels not seen until the foreclosure crisis in the US. Office growth, if it was to happen at all, was forecast to take place in the suburban centres of the 416 (this led Metro to cancel the DRL). Finally, deficit spending was beginning to be looked at unfavourably. Canada had a debt-to-GDP ratio that was only exceeded by countries like Italy. Our fiscal situation looked very precarious.

It wouldn't have been hard to pare down or cancel major rapid transit investment projects. The demand wasn't there, the money wasn't there and the future for Toronto was probably as bleak as ever. Toronto was never like a Detroit, but it was skirting into Philadelphia territory. It's kind of amazing that we turned it all around. Now, of course, we have to pay the price for inaction but I can't blame the planners/politicians of the day for their lack of action.
 
Hipster:

But on the flip side, as long as one is fairly sure of the fundamentals these sort of downturns would be the best time to actually build up the transit system - lower ridership = less sensitive to disruption, lower costs borrowing and construction costs, etc.

AoD
 
^But that's the thing with transit - one is never sure of the fundamentals, especially when employment is shifting or, worse, being eliminated. Besides, it's worth noting that the Ontario government of the time was spending a lot of deficit money on another infrastructure project: nuclear power. Darlington cost $14.4B (in 1993 dollars!) when it finally opened - about 4X what it had been projected to cost. Bruce and Pickering had just wrapped up major expansion projects, too. While Network 2011 wasn't a nuclear power plant, I think that Ontarians would have stomached another multibillion dollar infrastructure project with about the same gusto as the Americans would have stomached entering a third middle eastern war in 2008.
 
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Hipster Duck said:
^But that's the thing with transit - one is never sure of the fundamentals, especially when employment is shifting or, worse, being eliminated. Besides, it's worth noting that the Ontario government of the time was spending a lot of deficit money on another infrastructure project: nuclear power. Darlington cost $14.4B (in 1993 dollars!) when it finally opened - about 4X what it had been projected to cost. Bruce and Pickering had just wrapped up major expansion projects, too. While Network 2011 wasn't a nuclear power plant, I think that Ontarians would have stomached another multibillion dollar infrastructure project with about the same gusto as the Americans would have stomached entering a third middle eastern war in 2008.
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Except that we really didn't completely stop spending money on transit (Sheppard, plus Downsview and there was at least 1B of SOGR post 95). Even if we don't go for a full Network 2011, we could have spent the expansion dollars where it would give the most bang for the buck (i.e. downtown) instead of the politically expedient.

AoD
 
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AlvinofDiaspar said:
Except that we really didn't completely stop spending money on transit (Sheppard, plus Downsview and there was at least 1B of SOGR post 95). Even if we don't go for a full Network 2011, we could have spent the expansion dollars where it would give the most bang for the buck (i.e. downtown) instead of the politically expedient.

AoD
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But my original point was that downtown seemed like a bad bet for transit expansion. Job growth was forecasted to take place in the 'burbs (which it did, just not in the burbs of the 416!), and Metro's strategic plan was to focus employment in a polycentric fashion, anyway. The city centre hemmhoraged jobs with the closing of Inglis, Massey Ferguson and other industrial jobs and ridership declined precipitously. The brand new ALRVs were pressed into service on the 501 Queen just as daily ridership on that line tumbled from 80,000 to 40,000. If I were to bet on transit expansion in the early 1990s, I would not have bet on downtown.

Now, I will agree that the lack of transit expansion downtown in the early 1980s and early 2000s, when downtown was growing, was a major oversight.
 
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^As I postulated in another thread the funny thing is that lack of transit expansion downtown may actually be accelerating growth in the inner city. Inner city development is a North American wide demographic and cultural phenomenon but there is no doubt that Toronto is embracing this with a ferver that goes beyond it's peers.
 
Hipster Duck said:
Most days, I grumble about how shortsighted we were back in the late 1980s/early 1990s when we basically sat on our hands and didn't build rapid transit. How great would it have been to ride something like Network 2011?

At the same time, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the planners of the day, because the future for transit ridership and even for Toronto, itself, seemed bleak. Toronto was undergoing a massive economic restructuring and, as you said, lost 1/4 of all its transit riders. Housing prices collapsed at levels not seen until the foreclosure crisis in the US. Office growth, if it was to happen at all, was forecast to take place in the suburban centres of the 416 (this led Metro to cancel the DRL). Finally, deficit spending was beginning to be looked at unfavourably. Canada had a debt-to-GDP ratio that was only exceeded by countries like Italy. Our fiscal situation looked very precarious.

It wouldn't have been hard to pare down or cancel major rapid transit investment projects. The demand wasn't there, the money wasn't there and the future for Toronto was probably as bleak as ever. Toronto was never like a Detroit, but it was skirting into Philadelphia territory. It's kind of amazing that we turned it all around. Now, of course, we have to pay the price for inaction but I can't blame the planners/politicians of the day for their lack of action.
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I liked the cheap housing!
 
The situation wasn't that bleak. There was opposition among some downtown residents that building the DRL would mean more superblock development projects that they opposed for destroying large swaths of the old city. More office development of a nature that concerned local residents must have been a concerning possibility. Transit ridership really fell with the massive service cuts that happened in that time.
 
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
Yeah, interesting...The NDP built Sheppard and Eglinton ...
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What? That's rather a retcon isn't it.

The NDP shelved the Peterson governements plans for subway expansion, until right at the end of their mandate. Then suddenly when they realised they weren't going to be on the hook for the deficit any more, they funded Eglinton and Sheppard - which the Conservatives quickly cancelled when they came to office. Toronto continued to fund Sheppard itself, and the Conservatives eventually came to the table with some money for it.

NDP was a huge disaster for transit. Not a surprise given how hard Layton fought, and managed to sink the DRL line.

All the parties are responsible for the mess we are in. What scares me is one of them still thinks cancelling most of the plans is the way forward, and a second is still not committing to anything, and seems likely to once again shelve much of the plans.

We need to depoliticize the process.
 
Hipster Duck said:
But my original point was that downtown seemed like a bad bet for transit expansion. Job growth was forecasted to take place in the 'burbs (which it did, just not in the burbs of the 416!), and Metro's strategic plan was to focus employment in a polycentric fashion, anyway. The city centre hemmhoraged jobs with the closing of Inglis, Massey Ferguson and other industrial jobs and ridership declined precipitously. The brand new ALRVs were pressed into service on the 501 Queen just as daily ridership on that line tumbled from 80,000 to 40,000. If I were to bet on transit expansion in the early 1990s, I would not have bet on downtown.

Now, I will agree that the lack of transit expansion downtown in the early 1980s and early 2000s, when downtown was growing, was a major oversight.
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I think in general one should be bet on transit downtown just because of the sheer concentration of residents and activity and the inertia that creates - as bleak as the situation is back in the early 90s, transit use is still far superior to the burbs due to sheer necessity (and we really aren't suffering some sort of flight scenario like the US inner cities in any case - and that is more pattern is more of an anomaly in urban development). Of course hindsight is always 20/20.

AoD
 
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