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Seizing the Transit Initiative

This week, news came out that plans to bury the Eglinton LRT may be revised. Does this signal a break between TTC Chair Karen Stintz, council, and Mayor Ford on the transit file?

By • Photos by Harry Choi

For the past year, TTC Chair Karen Stintz (Ward 16, Eglinton-Lawrence) appeared content to advocate for Mayor Ford’s transit agenda, right down to her recent vote on the 2012 budget. Never mind that a majority of councillors approved a $5 million addition to the TTC subsidy, to undo planned service cuts. Stintz was right there on the barricades defending the Ford budget story, and planned to thwart the will of council by using the money either for capital spending or for Wheel Trans.

Now Stintz champions a revised rapid transit plan, one that blends bits of the original Transit City, a small fragment of Ford’s Sheppard subway extension scheme, and a bus rapid transit (BRT) upgrade to Finch Avenue running across the city.

First, a clarification, since the term “LRT” has suffered much abuse, and misuse, in our current debate. A light rapid transit route is one with streetcar-like vehicles running in reserved lanes with limited cross streets and priority at traffic signals. “Light” refers more to the infrastructure than the vehicles because complete grade separation of tracks and stations is not required as it is for subways.

Now, a rough outline of the revised plan:

  • The Eglinton (Crosstown) LRT would revert to a surface alignment between Leaside and Kennedy, much as proposed in Transit City. In Transit City, only a short section at Don Mills Station would have been underground; in the new version vehicles would surface east of the Don Valley Parkway.
  • The Scarborough RT would be converted to LRT and through-routed with Eglinton as in the current plan.

Funds released from the Eglinton project (estimates of saving range from $1 to $2 billion) would be shifted to paying for:

  • An extension of the Sheppard subway two kilometres east to Victoria Park, with a stop at Consumers Road.
  • A BRT line stretching across Finch from eastern Scarborough to Humber College in northwestern Etobicoke.

This plan appears to have good support from across the political spectrum of Toronto council—though not from the mayor, who remains opposed to rail transit on streets. (Rob Ford’s policy advisor, Mark Towhey, told the National Post that they still preferred the current option of burying Eglinton entirely, saying “Residents don’t want trains running down the middle of the street.”) However, support for specifics beyond the Eglinton line may not be as broad, and a consensus could be undone by conflicting priorities.

Metrolinx and Queen’s Park bought into the original Ford plan with undue haste almost a year ago, and they must agree to any revisions. Metrolinx President and CEO, Bruce McCuaig, emphasizes that council needs to be clear in its desires. It’s about time. For the past year, Metrolinx worked on the Ford plan as if it were official city policy without any council endorsement.

If Toronto heads down this path, more is at stake than just shuffling around an $8.3-billion nest egg from Queen’s Park. Some open questions:

  • Recent attention has focused on the eastern portion of the Eglinton line, but debate remains about the section from Black Creek west to Jane Street. How will the line pass through Mount Dennis (Weston and Eglinton) and connect with GO services on the rail corridor? During the environmental assessment, TTC and Metrolinx staff fought for a surface route claiming that a tunnel would be too expensive. This claim shattered when Queen’s Park agreed to put the whole Crosstown route underground.
  • A two-station extension of the Sheppard line will take some time to build, and by the time it opens, the mayor’s anti-LRT stance may have less weight in transit planning. Will Victoria Park Station simply be a temporary terminal that anticipates further extension, or will it provide for the possibility of a Sheppard East LRT? How would a Finch BRT compete with rapid transit on Sheppard?
  • Construction priorities could be revisited especially if Finch will be a comparatively inexpensive and easy to build BRT operation. Could this be moved up so that a Finch West BRT opens concurrently with the Spadina subway extension in 2015? Politicians love “quick wins” and this is an obvious one.

Completely missing from the current discussions is any comment about waterfront transit. Even though a council-approved review of plans for the Port Lands and the area around the Don River is now underway, there is no talk of how to finance transit to serve a large population east of Yonge. TTC cost estimates for such a transit line continue to rise thanks to the complexity of expanding the streetcar loop at Union Station and the challenges of building a new tunnel exit to Queen’s Quay East. Expensive this may be, but the cost is tiny compared with the billions to be spent elsewhere.

Toronto cannot afford to muddle through and hope to serve the new developments with rudimentary extensions of the bus network. This is not the “transit first” planning we were supposed to see on the waterfront: developments here will be in place before any of the suburban lines opens for business.

Finally, council must address the issue of transit service quality and quantity. Just building new lines isn’t enough, and Toronto must strongly support day-to-day operations. Even Metrolinx recognizes that operating costs and service may be a funding challenge, but they form an integral part of transit delivery. How can Toronto justify billions in construction while passengers languish on overfull buses and streetcars? The new alliance on council must think hard about what it expects transit to do and how they are willing to pay for this service.

Council now knows that it can amend a Ford budget, and those who would see better transit cannot hide behind the spectre of a penny-pinching, all-powerful mayor. Council must seize control of the plans for future years so that the TTC goes into 2013 and beyond with a strong mandate for improvement, not further cutbacks.

Comments

  • Anonymous

    BRT (bus rapid transit) is, what, more buses? Longer buses? Separate bus lanes?

    • Anonymous

      Separate bus lanes, fewer stops (hence faster).

  • http://twitter.com/CodeRedTO #CodeRedTO
    • Anonymous

      Ridership warrants conversion to LRT on Finch west of Finch station right now, more like 10 years ago actually. Is ridership east of Finch station even large enough to justify a BRT? I honestly don’t know but I’ve never heard complaints about that stretch like I have about Finch west. This plan is still better than Ford’s plan but I still think the best option is to put in LRT right now on Finch, at least west of the Spadina extension at Keele, if there isn’t the money now to continue it to Finch station then build a centre of the road BRT to Finch station until there is money for the LRT. Or build the LRT on Finch from Yonge to Keele and BRT from Keel to Humber’s north campus, whichever has the most demand.

      Finch east has never been identified as a high priority transit line, why should we be spending money there when the need is so much greater on the west end?

      • http://twitter.com/enricobianco Enrico Bianco

        Agreed. Maria Augileri’s video of riding the Finch Ave W bus, uploaded to YouTube on Dec 13, 2011, matches pretty much exactly my experience of riding the Finch Ave W bus since 2000 and even some years before then.

        Finch has been suffering for far too long and Ford offers nothing because he doesn’t want to be “treating Scarborough like second-class citizens?” Who are the second-class citizens here?

      • Eric S. Smith

        Is ridership east of Finch station even large enough to justify a BRT?

        The extremely frequent eastbound articulated buses that served Finch East between Warden and McCowan back in 1999 were pretty busy in the early evenings. I’m not talking about crush loads, but ridership definitely warranted headways of only a few minutes.

  • Anonymous

    BRT costs less to build than LRT but it costs more to operate, considering past experience with TTC BRTs, from Downsview to York U its most likely that any BRT would mean even more crowding on the Finch line since a more predictable and faster bus route means the TTC can move the same number of people per hour with fewer vehicles more tightly packed to combat operating costs. That’s exactly what they did when they opened the Downsview to York BRT. At least with LRT you get much larger vehicles than buses so the crowding is reduced and loading/unloading time is minimized.

    The advantage of a BRT across Finch though is that it apparently could stretch the entire way from the west end to the east end of Finch for the same cost of building an LRT from the Spadina subway extension at Keele and Finch to Humber’s north campus. I find that hard to believe personally unless what they have in mind is not something that could be converted to LRT easily later on by running the bus lanes down the centre of the road with loading islands like for a LRT and instead just use the wide set back along Finch for adding another lane for buses on each side of the road, that would mean it’d be very expensive and difficult to switch to LRT later on. The number of transit users on Finch would mean that a BRT would be over capacity in at most a few years in the west end and maybe 10-15 years in the east end.

    The worst possible solution would be if they stuck the Finch BRT along the hydro corridor. The hydro corridor is too far north of Finch to provide practical value for Finch riders going to locations on Finch. Besides which a hydro corridor BRT would do nothing to encourage development along Finch, one of the main benefits of LRT, and maybe BRT too. Everywhere a LRT line has been built there has been increased development along it, that just doesn’t happen with regular buses at least though I’m unsure about BRTs effect.

    To me since Finch carries so many people in a such an under serviced area it would make the most sense to build the LRT portion as originally planned connecting to the Spadina subway extension at Keele and running to Humber’s north campus and then building a centre of the road BRT to at least Finch station on the Yonge line and continue as far as funding will allow to the east end. Assuming that like at St Clair West station the LRT will run underground into the subway station it would provide a sheltered comfortable space for people to transfer from LRT to BRT and continue east until the money exists to extend the LRT all the way to Finch station.

    Ideally the LRT should run as in the original plan before it was scaled back from Finch station to Humber’s north campus. But that would probably mean no subway extension for Ford. Apparently allowing Ford to save face is a prerequisite since no one wants to hurt Ford’s feelings or publicly acknowledge what everyone has been publicly acknowledging all along that the Sheppard subway extension was a bad idea. But perhaps with just a short extension of the Sheppard subway it would still be possible to build an LRT right from Finch station to Humber’s north campus where there is high demand for increased improved transit. Or they could serve even more people if they converted Sheppard’s subway extension to LRT which would eventually extend much further along Sheppard when funding allowed than the subway plan would have done and thereby better serve more people along Sheppard in Scarborough with improved transit appropriate for the lower density suburban development that exists there. I think the ideal solution would be to convert the Sheppard subway line to LRT to make for a continuous ride from eastern Scarborough to Downsview station.

  • Anonymous

    A few years ago I read that TTC streetcars and (perhaps) buses were equipped to change traffic lights as they approach intersections, but it never received approval from the traffic management gods (police?). Maybe it was just a plan. This seems like a pretty sensible and low-cost way to increase efficiency of transit and, if done right, traffic flow in general. What is the present status of this feature?

  • Anonymous

    I fear that if a BRT is built along Finch it will delay the construction the the LRT by a few more decades. Finch need proper trains, not busses.

  • Ted Mendes

    I am in full support with Rob Ford , bury the Eglington line and not have a surface LRT. The ones we have in Toronto, St. Clair, Spadina/Queens Quay do not appreciately speed the movement of people. Please spend time watching them in action. A complete waste of money. You would be better to provide advance greens on existing street cars and get the same results. Do the right thing and not just because its cheaper. No business would survive with that type a a vision/plan.

    • Rohan

      St. Clair and Spadina are not real LRT lines, they are just streetcars in dedicated lanes. LRTs are so much more: traffic signal priority, boarding from multiple doors, pre-paid fares. The speed of these kind of lines would be way more comparable to subway cars than the glorified streetcars we have running on spadina or St Clair.

      Now what would actually be a huge waste of money is burying the Eglinton line east of Leaside when you have a massive right of way to build it on the surface and encourage development in that area. If you’re looking for bang for the buck, it’s on Shepard and Finch, not building more subways in areas that don’t have the density to support them.