Today Thu Fri
It is forcast to be Thunderstorm at 11:00 PM EDT on May 22, 2013
Thunderstorm
24°/16°		 It is forcast to be Chance of Rain at 11:00 PM EDT on May 23, 2013
Chance of Rain
19°/6°		 It is forcast to be Chance of Rain at 11:00 PM EDT on May 24, 2013
Chance of Rain
14°/6°

7 Comments

news

Villain: Scarborough Rapid Transit

By

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we’ve either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.
villain_srt.jpg
It smells like a mixture of hot pee and old sweat. It’s really loud, sometimes emitting a high-pitched tone that makes our head want to go boom. It’s crowded, its seats aren’t evenly spaced, and the doors close really, really fast and really, really hard––we’ve seen bruises! Despite being called the TTC’s most reliable line, it’s still pretty damned unreliable, sometimes not working at all and other times working very, very slowly.
The TTC has recently announced in their 2008 Capital Budget that the SRT will be getting a revamp, with longer cars and a proposed extension to Sheppard and Markham roads. And with an estimated $1.28 billion price tag attached to it, the TTC is looking at outside sources for some of the funding. But why not just ditch the SRT altogether and go with the cheaper option––extending the Bloor-Danforth line to the Scarborough Town Centre? With a price tag of $1.22 billion, it’s not necessarily a huge savings, but when you consider how many people commute through the STC each day versus the amount of people who would benefit from an RT line up to Sheppard, it hardly makes sense. But then again, this is the TTC, and nothing ever really makes sense. Hell, come the next budget crunch, this whole project will probably go down the drain, and we’ll still be stuck with the pee-smelling, screeching, annoying behemoth we are dependent on today.
Photo by David Topping.

Comments

  • jamin

    Thank you Amanda for your frank honesty. I guess one good thing about extending the existing line to Sheppard is that it could later connect to the Sheppard Subway line. If they make this step now, then it might help spur the eastward extension of the Sheppard Stubway to Markham Road, and beyond. While this wouldn’t be of much use to me personally, it might cause the transit map to start to look more like a transit *system*, at least on paper. It’s funny that even though our streets are clearly a grid, the transit system doesn’t follow.

  • raches

    Amanda, you must not live in Scarborough, because if you did you would realize that the current RT works well enough (granted more space would be great but I can manage) and that tearing it down to replace it with the subway would be a waste of money. What they need to do with the money is extend it eastwards (not to the waste of space which is the Sheppard line). McCowan station, the last stop on the RT only extends halfway through Scarborough. Its completely unfair for the other half of Scarborough who have to take a 30-40 minute bus ride to even get to the RT. Scarbrough got the short end of the stick with subway and rapid transit provision.

  • rek

    I’m starting to think the Sheppard line is undeserving of its bad rep. This past Saturday I took it (for perhaps the 3rd time ever) to get to Ikea and it was full of people. It may not go anywhere spectacular, but if a Saturday during the holidays could fill the seats it must be going where people want it.

  • AR

    TR: The Sheppard line runs shorter trains made of four cars rather than six. So it still doesn’t compare to six car trains on the other two subway lines.

  • Diisparishun

    The stretch of Sheppard with a subway is chock full of high density condos. It is at least as deserving of a subway as, I dunno, lots of Bloor Street. Spending a whack of cash on an LRT instead of just finishing the Sheppard line already is … bizarre, in my opinion. Here’s why.
    Subways are for high ridership corridors. Ripping out an LRT to build a subway, instead of building a subway in the first place, makes sense only if the the cost excess — i.e. ripping and replacing rather than doing it right to start with — is made up for in operating costs during the years that the corridor would not merit a subway.
    So what the TTC is really saying here is that they do not think there would be much density or ridership on Sheppard, even if they finished the line, in … well, a while, presumably. The rapid densification of the existing subway line blows that premise out of the water. So does a little thought about what would happen if the stubway actually, you know, went somewhere.
    Imagine a Sheppard line that actually went from STC and York University. Consider just how connected transit patterns all through the Sheppard East corridor is becoming — from Scarborough Agincourt to Willowdale, with the ribbon of Markham and its VIVA connections to the Sheppard line all the way above it. And think about how badly the University-Spadina line needs a northern connection with the Yonge line to absorb more of the Yonge line’s north-south ridership — just as the University-Spadina line begins to stretch into the fast-growing bits of the 905 zone, adjacent to Brampton and Woodbridge and so on.
    In welding an LRT line onto the stubway, the TTC is planning for ten years ago, when they should be planning for ten — let’s go crazy, 20 and 30 — years into the future.
    Oh, it would be great to extend out Bloor-Danforth to STC, too, and make STC a connecting hub from which Scarborough transit could radiate out. But, well, that’s a whole other part of the discussion.

  • rek

    AR – 4 full cars is better than 4 empty cars.

  • awb

    also, i think it’s pretty obvious that north east scarborough has been terribly neglected by public transit and extending the RT out to sheppard will help alleviate some of that.