Ontario Line

[reecemartin]

Wanted to rename other thread but didn't seem to be able to.


This project is actually VERY exciting and can relieve Yonge Bloor and Yonge Eglinton with trains similar to Sydney Metro.
Heres our summary and analysis: 

 

[nfitz]

The project sounds like another stillborn disaster. 

We don't need another thread for this. Why create another one?

There's no demand between Ontario Place and Queen Street. This looks more like a stealth attempt by Metrolinx to put a line that terminates near the rail tracks, so they can end some services there instead of at Union.

Sad that some are excited by such complete BS being spread by a corrupt conman!

[Xtrazsteve]

47 minutes ago, nfitz said:

The project sounds like another stillborn disaster. 

We don't need another thread for this. Why create another one?

There's no demand between Ontario Place and Queen Street. This looks more like a stealth attempt by Metrolinx to put a line that terminates near the rail tracks, so they can end some services there instead of at Union.

Sad that some are excited by such complete BS being spread by a corrupt conman!

It accomplishes one more thing, it raises the potential land cost and increases Ontario Places' attractiveness for redevelopment if it has a subway to it. 

I totally agree we don't need this thread.

[Someguy3071]

We need this thread as much as Toronto needs this Ontario line. 

[GrandeWest_B35G]

36 minutes ago, Someguy3071 said:

We need this thread as much as Toronto needs this Ontario line. 

So desperately, to relieve the existing TTC subway and general TTC threads?

[dowlingm]

I have yet to have the opportunity to go back and check, but my recollection is that Steve Munro was a strong supporter of the Relief Line diving southwest beyond Osgoode towards the Ex (and Ont Place would just be one stop further). Mind you, I think his most recent opinion was that subsequent developments have blocked the most convenient routings to have that occur.

Luckily we have plenty of reason to believe DoFo has venal reasons like laying pipe for an Ontario Place casino or some other commercial end to push high order transit there - for it to be just Doug taking Steve’s advice would be serious lions laying down with lambs, dogs and cats getting along territory!

[Archer]

I'm not opposed to pushing the line to Ontario Place - it just removes the option of combining the West Relief Line with it's eastern counterpart - not that I think splitting them into separate lines is a bad idea (so you don't end up with certain stations becoming hubs for all directions; perhaps the west line can terminate at King and go under King until Liberty Village, then follow the rail corridor northward from there. Just musing, though).

It is stupid to not use existing subway technology though, which is also capable of fully automated operation if built that way from the start, as now they can't use Greenwood Yard for the storage of trains once the Bloor-Danforth shifts to Obico, unless you build a completely separate connection.

And I have no idea where they might consider putting a yard otherwise. Downtown doesn't have the room (except for Fort York, which is a non-starter), and I can't think of anywhere around the Science Centre end that has the room, either, unless you buy the Celestica lands at a huge premium, cancel the development there, and use those lands as the yard. Or, you look at appropriating land from the Wicksteed business park, which is going to infuriate the residents of Thorncliffe Park due to the noise since it's in close proximity (that, and the fact that the plan as is doesn't call for a station in Thorncliffe Park - how can you put a subway line through the densest part of Toronto population-wise and not build a damn station?)

The hydro corridors aren't large enough, and a lot of the open space is parkland belonging to the Don Valley system.

[dowlingm]

One place they could think about putting a yard is - subject to a bridge and some expropriation - in the vicinity of Bermondsey Transfer Station. It’s at an extreme end of the line as planned, but so is Mount Dennis and the proposed Obico yard.

[Downsview 108]

This transit plan will not see the light of day. Guaranteed.

That's what happens when you elect a bunch of children playing in a sandbox.

[reecemartin]

On 4/10/2019 at 7:03 PM, nfitz said:

The project sounds like another stillborn disaster. 

We don't need another thread for this. Why create another one?

There's no demand between Ontario Place and Queen Street. This looks more like a stealth attempt by Metrolinx to put a line that terminates near the rail tracks, so they can end some services there instead of at Union.

Sad that some are excited by such complete BS being spread by a corrupt conman!

 

On 4/10/2019 at 7:50 PM, Xtrazsteve said:

It accomplishes one more thing, it raises the potential land cost and increases Ontario Places' attractiveness for redevelopment if it has a subway to it. 

I totally agree we don't need this thread.

Just because Ford proposed it doesn't mean its bad, and for goodness sake, this forum has 0 threads on it, despite it currently being the most expensive proposed transit line in the country.

This is far better than the cities existing relief line plan given it also can act to relieve Eglinton Yonge which will be overcrowded when the Crosstown opens. The cities proposal would not do this until further extended. It also hit some high priority neighborhoods south of OSC.

In terms of yard size, you need less with automated vehicles, as storage can occur virtually anywhere on the ROW because nobody has to pick the trains up in the mornings, you simply shift storage around based on the maintenance schedule. This has happened on Skytrain for quite a while.

And finally there is actually a good chance this happens, the province DOES have significant powers to push a project like this through as can be seen in Quebec with REM where they basically legislated it through planning etc on an accelerated pace. 

[GM5000]

While everyone's arguing about a subway to Ontario Place, what colour the licence plates should be, and where to find buck-a-beer for the tailgate party, lost in all the hoopla was the cancellation of the doubling of the gas tax for transit by 2021-22. 

[Transit geek]

I would like to chip in here by suggesting that Doug Ford can't always have his own way. We are probably lucky that there are only three levels of government in this country. It gets a lot more complicated in Europe, such as France. Hey, we could draw parallels between this project and the Grand Paris Express. Two line extensions plus four brand-new lines using technology incompatible with the existing ones. How quickly can they get it ready for the Olympics in five years' time?

[GojiMet86]

I'd like to know what is the deal with these new lines that Toronto is building. I'm from New York, so I don't understand the politics from it. Is this project good, bad?

[TechnicaProductions]

6 hours ago, GojiMet86 said:

I'd like to know what is the deal with these new lines that Toronto is building. I'm from New York, so I don't understand the politics from it. Is this project good, bad?

The original plan was greenlit, and then the newly elected government scrapped it for a new plan that is separate from the subway and is likely to be worse

 

[Ed T.]

8 hours ago, GojiMet86 said:

I'd like to know what is the deal with these new lines that Toronto is building. I'm from New York, so I don't understand the politics from it. Is this project good, bad?

The project is 'good' in that something has to be done. The N-S spine of the Yonge Street subway is grossly overloaded. People can't get on several trains in a row, key interchange stations need crowd control, and it will be difficult if not impossible to significantly upgrade capacity. (Toronto does not have local/express subways, for a start.) In addition, even if capacity upgrades were possible, the Yonge subway is already too big to fail, with chaos and dangerous overcrowding if there's a service interruption of any length in the peak periods. Trying to increase its capacity just makes this worse.

For any number of reasons, the TTC in particular didn't want to admit this until fairly recently, so the 'relief line' (as in to relieve Yonge Street) was put off, as being not imminently needed. That has pretty definitively changed in the past couple of years, and the necessity of another N-S line to downtown, east of Yonge Street, has general support.

As to the 'Ontario Line', we have no details beyond what would amount to campaign-slogan type hype. The proposed length of the line is greater than the initial first stage build that was proposed before, and that's a good thing in my opinion. Other proposed details are more problematic, but they may get sorted out when actual detailed plans start being drawn up. Or maybe not. So it's too early to say whether this needed project will be done in a better way, or a worse way.

 

[nfitz]

4 hours ago, TechnicaProductions said:

The original plan was greenlit, and then the newly elected government scrapped it for a new plan that is separate from the subway and is likely to be worse

The bottom line is that there's so little information about the new project, that it's not clear what it will be. Will there be less stations? Will it be LRT or subway or something else (monorail?). Will it really go to Ontario Place - there's some indication that was a bald-faced lie, and it will only get to the existing Exhibition station. Will key sections be underground or elevated?

 

11 hours ago, GojiMet86 said:

I'd like to know what is the deal with these new lines that Toronto is building.

We'd like to know as well - at least for this downtown line. The suburban extensions of the other 2 subway lines are pretty straight-forward.

[TTC T6H-5307N 2252]

13 hours ago, GojiMet86 said:

I'd like to know what is the deal with these new lines that Toronto is building. I'm from New York, so I don't understand the politics from it. Is this project good, bad?

The Leaside bridge won’t probably handle the subway underneath thought

[Articulated]

9 hours ago, TTC T6H-5307N 2252 said:

The Leaside bridge won’t probably handle the subway underneath thought

No, the Leaside Viaduct was not built the same way as the Prince Edward Viaduct was with the second level underneath. The Leaside Viaduct was supposedly built with extra strength to allow for streetcar rails to be installed on the road deck, although any residual extra capacity would have been taken up with the expansion from 4 to 6 vehicle lanes.

The plan for any relief line always considered using an individual, separate bridge crossing of the Don Valley. This would also provide a better alignment to the populous communities of Thorncliffe Park, and from the Pape Station (which is the connection point with Line 2 that is usually identified in any relief line study)

[Mark Walton]

If the Ontario Line is the "Son of DRL", it's half-assed if it ends downtown instead of continuing west to meet that end of the BD line at about Dundas West. What's the latest on Ontario Place? 

[Streety McCarface]

On 4/11/2019 at 12:45 PM, Downsview 108 said:

This transit plan will not see the light of day. Guaranteed.

That's what happens when you elect a bunch of children playing in a sandbox.

God I hope it doesn't, because not building a subway on this corridor and not having the line extend to Sheppard would be a disaster for the city long term. 

[Cityflyer]

https://urbantoronto.ca/news/2019/07/confidential-document-reveals-more-details-ontario-line-0

[dowlingm]

On 5/11/2019 at 11:18 PM, Articulated said:

No, the Leaside Viaduct was not built the same way as the Prince Edward Viaduct was with the second level underneath. The Leaside Viaduct was supposedly built with extra strength to allow for streetcar rails to be installed on the road deck, although any residual extra capacity would have been taken up with the expansion from 4 to 6 vehicle lanes.

The plan for any relief line always considered using an individual, separate bridge crossing of the Don Valley. This would also provide a better alignment to the populous communities of Thorncliffe Park, and from the Pape Station (which is the connection point with Line 2 that is usually identified in any relief line study)

A bridge on a Pape alignment is probably going to be longer than Leaside. Will also be interesting to see how elevations are handled - that's a deep dip and has to clear DVP, the river, then curve northeast. If the tunnel exits from under Hopedale/Minton Place then you're probably looking passing under Millwood/Overlea in tunnel and moving up into the elevated guideway somewhere along Overlea.

The City played itself by splitting the RL North and RL South. They probably figured it was more realistic to spend planning $ on the bit more likely to get built, but now you have Metrolinx rather dishonestly using the only bit they committed to as the comparator, and by TTC insisting on using Greenwood they allow Metrolinx to say it has to be semi-automated since Line 2 is not ATC. An RL North+South with it's own yard would change the imperatives around constructing Obico and remove the impacts on Line 2 of trains moving into and out of the wye at beginning and end of service, but if the Pape connection was still built they could have some emergency movement and storage options similar to the St George-Bay wye.

[Mark Walton]

I never considered the old DRL much use unless it connected with both ends of the BD line. This line doesn't look like it will be any more useful in that respect.

[Ed T.]

18 minutes ago, Mark Walton said:

I never considered the old DRL much use unless it connected with both ends of the BD line. This line doesn't look like it will be any more useful in that respect.

What's the reason for thinking the west end relief to be as necessary as the east end relief?

[Mark Walton]

2 hours ago, Ed T. said:

What's the reason for thinking the west end relief to be as necessary as the east end relief?

Aren't both the east and west legs of the BD line about equally congested? Don't all those transferring passengers clog up the 2 interchange stations, B-Y and St. George, about equally? That's why I think both ends of that line need relief.