Recall the little debate we had with Northy on his Don line idea. Here's how he defends the development potential of his industrial park station in Thorncliffe Park:
His station that's located next to a hydro ROW and CP switching yard, and that's also well out of the way from the actual residential area, will somehow "still be very much used" because it will attract redevelopment in that godawful location. But when it comes to suburban city centres located on the most key transportation corridors in the GTA, he sings a completely different tune:
He's going to accuse you of being disingenuous and taking his remarks out of context and possibly making things up.
In reference to the previous page - someone asked if we couldn't engage in discussion without ad hominem attacks etc. Of course we can and most of us do but 44North is a special case who keeps making ridiculous, contradictory, ill-informed statements. He's too well-meaning, in his bizarre way, to be called a troll but he ultimately has the same effect.
What we have in this region is a comprehensive regional growth plan - an award-winning one at that - supplemented by a Greenbelt and a transit plan that would be pretty impressive if it were actually built and funded properly. But to him it's all "top-down planning," and "bad investment" and nothing in The Big Move is 1/2 as clever as his fantasy map. There's no developed-over-years-by-experts plan as thoughtful as his ad hoc ramblings.
Heaven forbid Markham or Vaughan or Richmond Hill look at vacant or under-used sites along the region's most substantial transit corridors and (unlike, say, Scarborough) say, "Give us high-order transit and we will make a sincere effort to build a LEED-certified, sustainable transit-oriented community."
So, it's frustrating.
It's not news that the Spadina line isn't perfect; ain't nothing perfect in this region. But the overall principle of trying to develop an urban centre for a sprawling suburb along high-order transit is a laudable one. I don't get the point of bashing Sorbara five years into construction and I really don't get the point of criticizing the line because there's a WalMart there - especially when even his "look how horrible it is!" picture shows there is substantial office and residential construction going 2 years before the subway is even set to open. (OK, it was supposed to open this year, but still...) When SmartCentres, the epitome of a sprawl-driven business, is on-board, it might be worth considering they know something he doesn't about the prospects for success in VMC.
When you start getting into transit projects for the purpose of 'inducing' (i.e., relocating) development to one area you're kinda abandoning the entire pretext of objectivity. If a given politician decides, 'hey, this project is still worth it,' we should do our best to tease out the actual transit benefits vs. benefits to developers and hold politicians to account for, effectively, funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars to small interest groups.
I don't think you're totally off-base but this is effectively the entire premise of Places to Grow and The Big Move: create a series of transit-oriented nodes, connected by a network, across the GTA. Every node is either a historical urban centre or a designated greenfield site. Some have transit, some don't. By definition, the ones that don't need it. Maybe I'm naive, but I believe in that vision and that's why I see the shovels in the ground at Jane/7 and am hopeful.
Like, look at Steve Munro. He's clearly super knowledgeable and well intentioned and worth taking seriously, but he's clearly nowhere near objective. He'll talk about the DRL to Don Mills like it's obvious even though it would be a heavily underused segment while pillorying the Scarborough subway endlessly. Is it just a coincidence he's lived in East York?
I totally agree! Munro is clever as all get out but he has his bugaboos like anyone else. He also has a real tendency, IMHO, to look at transit-qua-transit. He can tell you about headways and capacity until you're blue in the face but has very little sense of transit-oriented planning as a concept.
In 2031, the DRL from Dundas West to Pape is projected to move a reasonable 17,000 pphpd. In 2010, it was projected to move only about 10,000 pphpd, iirc. I can't begin to imagine how few people would have used the line in the 1980s.
In the 1980s, the DRL corridor didn't have the usage to justify the expenditure, nor was the Yonge Subway anywhere at the point of needing relief. This would have been a poor investment.
Through the 90s and early 2000s, TTC usage declined significantly. Usage of the DRL would have been even lower than it would have been in the 1980s.
Through the 00s, the Yonge Subway is approaching capacity. The TTC moves forward with the procurement of our Toronto Rocket transits and automatic train operation, significantly increasing capacity on the Yonge Subway. The expectation was that there wouldn't be any capacity issues.
In 2007 the Yonge North extension was proposed. This extension, which will move 25,000 people at peak point/hour (that's more than Line 2), will saturate the capacity of the Yonge Subway and Bloor-Yonge station, even with ATO upgrades. This was the appropriate time to move forward with the DRL.
It's a helpful history and some good points in there. I still think it's pretty clear the subway network is under-developed. The TTC ridership drop in the 1990s came out of the recession and then the Harris cuts, which you rightly note. Would a DRL have been a drain? Maybe....It's hard to engage in that hypothetical at this point but clearly Toronto has grown to the point where it's now needed.
but it's also been 8 years since the need for the DRL was recognized; it took all that time just to get to an EA and once it's done, it may be shelved in favour of SmartTrack. And now we're at the point where the DRL and yonge subway can't be seen as "local" lines. They serve regional populations and purposes so Toronto's inconsistent priorities (accentuated by a lack of capital funding that is beyond their control) is having a ripple effect. That's my concern at this point.
EDIT: Just to add that I saw Bryan Tuckey the head of BILD, has an article in today's Star; it doesn't seem to be online yet but the headline is "New Transit Needs New Housing." In relation to my point about Places to Grow above: we shouldn't be building transit to serve private developers or trying to force people to live where they don't want to BUT we should be encouraged by the increasing market for condo development along transit lines in the suburbs and not miss that opportunity. That's why this subway is important.