Richmond Hill Yonge Line 1 North Subway Extension | ?m | ?s | Metrolinx

WislaHD said:
I would not be worried about Cummer Station.

Development will come. Cummer/Drewry will be to Finch Station what North York City Centre Station is to Sheppard Station.
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Yes and no. The M2M development - which is pretty huge - will be getting underway very soon and that will be a major anchor. And there are some used car lots and such across the street that will be perfect infill sites. I'm not sure how much development there will/can be along Cummer/Drewry and there are neighbourhoods in behind, so really the intensification will primarily be right on Yonge Street (and continue as such, clear to Highway 7).

It won't be NYCC but between the buses and surrounding development, I'm sure it'll be decently used, if not one of the Top 10 on the system.
 
There is a quite a lot of development approved and proposed surrounding Cummer/Drewry. It'll be fairly busy.

Plus there area few bus connections.
 
Reecemartin said:
Given the size of the land would it be inconceivable to relocate the hydro lines underground into a tunnel of some sort?
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It's definitely possible, for sure, the question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. We'd need something like 3 tunnels or one really large one to handle all the lines. If it brings a lot of development, there is certainly potential. The parking lots will likely be pushed out to the cummer area, and that makes sense because the 407 is nearby. However, this likely won't happen for at least another 20 years since they just did a bunch of work refurbishing the parking lots at finch.
 
Streety McCarface said:
It's definitely possible, for sure, the question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. We'd need something like 3 tunnels or one really large one to handle all the lines. If it brings a lot of development, there is certainly potential. The parking lots will likely be pushed out to the cummer area, and that makes sense because the 407 is nearby. However, this likely won't happen for at least another 20 years since they just did a bunch of work refurbishing the parking lots at finch.
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Burying hydro gets talked about a lot but rarely happens. Case in point, the Langstaff/RHC centre is broken up by the Highway 407 and the hydro corridor. They talked about burying the hydro - which would have made room for substantial development - but the costs were exorbitant. I think the only way it happens is if there's a fundamental change in technology or if it's explicitly made part of a development, somehow. If I was a betting man, I'd guess they lines covering the Finch Station parking will be there as long as I'm around, for starters.
 
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
Burying hydro gets talked about a lot but rarely happens.
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Rarely is kinda subjective. A non-trivial portion of Toronto Hydro's expansion capital budget is underground infrastructure but at 5x to 15x the cost of surface infrastructure it simply doesn't go very far.

That $200M Copeland substation project, which included 600m of tunnel, was their most expensive project at the time. The Front Street tunnel was their single most expensive piece of corridor (by distance) ever when it was built by a very wide margin (something like $40M/km versus around $1.5M/km for surface line). These are expensive projects with tiny capacity compared to electrical corridors like Finch.

I think they've got another tunnel project planned to join Front to Queen but I've not been able to find the business case or EA; so I might be misremembering.
 
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Fair enough and I'm no electricity expert but the towers at Finch and 407 are both high capacity/voltage lines, the burying which of is very different from the burying of streetside hydro (which is also not cheap). I'd love to see more of both happen but I'm looking around and, the projects you cite notwithstanding, don't see a lot of big spending on such things these days. This, for example, is from Vaughan's Official Plan. Note the distinction between wanting to bury hydro in urban areas and maintaining the high-voltage corridors:

1545407119123.png
 
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
Burying hydro gets talked about a lot but rarely happens. Case in point, the Langstaff/RHC centre is broken up by the Highway 407 and the hydro corridor. They talked about burying the hydro - which would have made room for substantial development - but the costs were exorbitant. I think the only way it happens is if there's a fundamental change in technology or if it's explicitly made part of a development, somehow. If I was a betting man, I'd guess they lines covering the Finch Station parking will be there as long as I'm around, for starters.
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Or they can do this:
https://twitter.com/x/status/975746859389083648
 
There are a number of online articles outlining the pros and cons of burying electrical utilities, and the biggest con is obviously cost. Most of the articles seem to discuss direct burial, as opposed to burial in a tunnel or vault to permit service access, which would inflate the costs even higher. If direct burial, there would still need to be an restrictive easement along the corridors, although not as wide as for overhead lines. On thing that is unclear in many of the articles is whether they are talking about distribution lines or transmission lines which operate at much higher voltages. Costs to accommodate the physics of higher voltages may inflate the costs even further.
 
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
Fair enough and I'm no electricity expert but the towers at Finch and 407 are both high capacity/voltage lines, the burying which of is very different from the burying of streetside hydro (which is also not cheap).
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lenaitch said:
There are a number of online articles outlining the pros and cons of burying electrical utilities, and the biggest con is obviously cost.
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lenaitch said:
On(e) thing that is unclear in many of the articles is whether they are talking about distribution lines or transmission lines which operate at much higher voltages
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One of the best examples to study (due to language same) is London, UK:

London Power Tunnels | National Grid ET

https://www.nationalgridet.com/infrastructure-projects/london-power-tunnels
New Essential Infrastructure. London Power Tunnels. London ... being constructed deep below the road network, which will carry high voltage electricity cables.

CABLE TUNNELS, 400KV EXTRA HIGH VOLTAGE CABLE TUNNELS ...

https://www.cablejoints.co.uk/sub-product.../low-voltage.../cable-tunnels-national-grid
Cable Tunnels - National Grid London Cable Tunnels (400kV) ... National Grid owns the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales and ...
[PDF]London cable tunnels - energy for london

www.energyforlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Lon_Tunnels.pdf
by SJ Wood - ‎Related articles
National Grid owns the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales and operates the system across Great Britain. It also owns and ...
Energising London's £1bn energy superhighway - ABB Group

https://new.abb.com/news/detail/5770/energising-londons-1bn-energy-superhighway
Jul 23, 2018 - The tunnels house National Grid's transmission cables as well as the local ... the site's switchgear is rated at 550 kV, the highest in the UK. ... as high-voltage cabling and protection and control equipment in the final phase.
 
320map.gif

From link.

Where's the York Region "Blue Night" service along Yonge Street? Shouldn't they put in a 15 minute or better night (past 2:30 AM) bus service first, before we can talk about a Line 1 extension?

From link.

Some YRT services begin as early as approximately 5 a.m. with late night services running until approximately 2:30 a.m.
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Maybe a 5 minute or better headway service during the rush hours, as well.
 
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steveintoronto said:
One of the best examples to study (due to language same) is London, UK:

London Power Tunnels | National Grid ET
https://www.nationalgridet.com/infrastructure-projects/london-power-tunnels
New Essential Infrastructure. London Power Tunnels. London ... being constructed deep below the road network, which will carry high voltage electricity cables.

CABLE TUNNELS, 400KV EXTRA HIGH VOLTAGE CABLE TUNNELS ...
https://www.cablejoints.co.uk/sub-product.../low-voltage.../cable-tunnels-national-grid
Cable Tunnels - National Grid London Cable Tunnels (400kV) ... National Grid owns the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales and ...
[PDF]London cable tunnels - energy for london
www.energyforlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Lon_Tunnels.pdf
by SJ Wood - ‎Related articles
National Grid owns the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales and operates the system across Great Britain. It also owns and ...
Energising London's £1bn energy superhighway - ABB Group
https://new.abb.com/news/detail/5770/energising-londons-1bn-energy-superhighway
Jul 23, 2018 - The tunnels house National Grid's transmission cables as well as the local ... the site's switchgear is rated at 550 kV, the highest in the UK. ... as high-voltage cabling and protection and control equipment in the final phase.
Click to expand...


So, technically feasible. The north Toronto corridor is 6 x 230Kv circuits times a length I didn't calculate. They question would become - who would pay for it. City? Province? Hydro One? Recall that no one is willing to have increased rates or taxes.
 
lenaitch said:
So, technically feasible. The north Toronto corridor is 6 x 230Kv circuits times a length I didn't calculate. They question would become - who would pay for it. City? Province? Hydro One? Recall that no one is willing to have increased rates or taxes.
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Cost would be high. However:
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
Fair enough and I'm no electricity expert but the towers at Finch and 407 are both high capacity/voltage lines, the burying which of is very different from the burying of streetside hydro (which is also not cheap). I'd love to see more of both happen but I'm looking around and, the projects you cite notwithstanding, don't see a lot of big spending on such things these days. This, for example, is from Vaughan's Official Plan. Note the distinction between wanting to bury hydro in urban areas and maintaining the high-voltage corridors:
Click to expand...
[...]
1546046082227.png

It really might be time to look at the costs of burying HV vs. The Bigger Picture. To do it on a 'stand-alone' basis would be ridiculous, but to unlock the land for other uses, it could well be worth it...
 
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