Tag: rob ford

• Subways – except the downtown relief line

  Politics rewards consistency. Even if you’re wrong, it’s better to be consistently wrong than come across as wavering – however noble and rational the intentions may be. And that’s exactly what happened with Rob Ford and his commitment to subways, subways and subways.

  John Lorinc of Spacing wrote an interesting piece yesterday on how, despite all the debating that went on, Ford is delivering what he said he was going to deliver: a subway. It doesn’t matter that all technical and financial considerations were thrown out the window, he got it funded.

  As I said earlier this week, I think the Scarborough line is the wrong subway to be building and that the downtown relief line is infinitely more important for the region. However, Lorinc makes a good case in his article for why this line will not be funded despite the current focus on subways, subways and subways:

  “Fourth, it’s important to recognize that there will be one notably perverse exception to the foregoing, which is the [Insert Euphemism Here] Relief Line. I do admire Josh Matlow’s advocacy on this front. But Ford will never take up the DRL cause because (i) he doesn’t get the purpose of said extension; and (ii) because the project doesn’t butter his bread, electorally speaking. I’m guessing it will be years before someone with the mayor’s block-headed tenacity emerges to champion a line with a politically inconvenient name and an eye-bulging price tag.

  In fact, the sheer heft of the relief line will allow marginally useful yet politically supported subway projects — extensions in the west end to Sherway Gardens or up Yonge to Richmond Hill – to continue to elbow their way to the front of the line, just exactly as the Scarborough subway project did. Indeed, because we no longer care, at any level of government, about subjecting our transit investment choices to a rational policy framework, the most crucial project in the GTA will always lose out in the funding lottery because it has the most diffuse constituency and the most conceptually complicated purpose.”

  The disparaging thing about these two paragraphs is that it’s a sad reality.

  2013.09.25

• Wrong subway

  It was announced this morning that the feds will be contributing $660M towards Toronto’s new Scarborough subway line. While transit investment of any kind is generally a good thing, it’s a shame that we can’t get our priorities straight. Decisions are being made based on politics rather than rational thought.

  Here’s what TTC CEO Andy Byford said:

  “We all know that Toronto has a congestion problem, so it can only be good that we get more funding,” Andy Byford told reporters after the announcement. “I’ve said since the day I got here that the downtown relief line remains a priority for the TTC. I reiterate that point. But I think that, with the time scales available, it’s possible we can do more than one thing at a time.”

  This is Byford being diplomatic.

  The downtown relief line is absolutely the most important (planned) subway line in Toronto. For one, the Yonge & Bloor subway interchange is at capacity. Until these pressures are relieved, any extension of existing lines will only exacerbate the problem.

  At the same time, the density levels are way higher in the core, meaning that ridership levels will be higher and the required government subsidies will be lower. Not surprisingly, subway lines make more fiscal sense when you build them where demand is greatest.

  So the irony is that our Mayor – who ran on a campaign to “stop the gravy train” – is pushing to build a rail line that will ultimately cost taxpayers more money.

  Oh, politics.

  2013.09.23

• There’s no light rail in Toronto

  Next City published an interesting article this morning on the politics behind Rob Ford’s subway obsession. I encourage you to have a read if you’re interested in politics, transit and/or the increasing polarization of North American cities (core vs. suburbs). It’s called Canada’s Strangest Straphanger.

  There are a number of great take-aways from the article, but I’d like to highlight one that I’m not sure many Torontonians realize: There’s currently no light rail (LRT) in the city. We have streetcars, of course. But no light rail. There’s a difference.

  Here’s an exert from Next City:

  “It is true that most people in Scarborough don’t want a light rail. They want a subway, and the reason they want it is that there is no light rail in Toronto,” says Jay Young, SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “We just have streetcars and subways and they think light rail is a streetcar, when actually it’s very close to a subway in terms of having its own right of way.”

  This may seem like semantics, but it’s not. Again, one difference is that light rail has its own right of way and streetcars compete with vehicular traffic. The other significant difference is station spacing. Streetcars stops are spaced similar to bus stops, which let’s say averages around 250m. LRT stations on the other hand are often in the range of 400-600m. This makes them similar to subways.

  It’s for this reason that even though the St Clair streetcar has its own right of way, I would not personally consider it a true LRT. As someone who lived in midtown for over 3 years, I can tell you that the stations are way too close together and that it’s highly inefficient during peak times – much like the rest of our streetcar network.

  Given the constant debates going on this city about light rail vs. subways, I think it’s important that we’re clear on definitions. Light rail has the potential to be an effective (read: cheaper and faster) way of delivering rapid transit to a greater number of people in the city. Before we dismiss that proposition, let’s please understand what it is.

  2013.09.10