Toronto LRT Information Blog

February 26 update: I just received the email notice of these open houses today, so I have replaced the official notice link with a link to the PDF notice sent to me.  

There will be two open houses dealing with the coversion of the SRT to Transit City LRT technology and address the extension plans to Malvern. You can read the official notice here.

Both will be held from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm. The dates and locations are as  follows:

• Monday March 8 at Jean Vanier Catholic Secondary School, 959 Midland Avenue (north of Eglinton)
• Thursday March 11 at Chinese Cultural Centre, 5183 Sheppard Avenue East (at Progress Ave)

Things have been rather quiet here over the past month, so I thought I would write a post about the TTC’s customer service given the events of the past few weeks. What prompted me to write this was a comment made by John Tory on his NewsTalk 1010 show. He spent a half hour on the latest situation, where a rider made a video of a TTC driver taking a seven minute washroom/coffee break. At the end of the topic, Tory made about five suggestions aimed at TTC management, employees, and the union, as well as at the public at large. For the most part, these were very constructive suggestions. However, his last suggestion was aimed at the public and encouraged the documenting and reporting of issues. That suggestion was also constructive in so far as encouraging reporting incidents to the TTC’s customer service department. I took issue with the second part of that suggestion, where Tory asked for a halt to sending photos and videos to the media, primarily because “we” are all too tired of these.

There is a small truth to this, as is the case for just about any story that surfaces in this 24-hour-news-at-any-moment environment. I am not so sure that anyone should be thinking twice about sending the details, with photos and videos if available, to the media. Personally, for far too long I, and I suspect that much of the public, have found that complaints to the TTC simply fall upon deaf ears, or worse, insincere ears that are only there to pretend to pat one on the back and say, “there there.” In some recent news stories, some people being interviewed have indicated that they even experienced what they called rudeness from the complaint line.

I believe that the public’s lack of faith that the TTC can or will actually do something about complaints has been brewing sometime. Combined with instances of poor service, we had a powder keg waiting to be ignited, and the recent fare increase along with the way it was handled, has set it off. This leaves the TTC with very poor credibility when it comes to saying that they will listen to complaints.

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The Toronto Star reported yesterday that the TTC has agreed to build Transit City lines to standard gauge (4′-8.5″), instead of the TTC gauge (4′-10.875″) that is used on the subway and legacy streetcar lines.

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I was going to post about this when it first came out in early December, but I thought I would wait until an electronic version was available.
Regional and local councillor Vito Spatafora made use of an image originally from this site in his Fall-Winter 2009-2010 newsletter. While credit for the image would have been nice, it is not necessary as this site’s copyright notice allows the non-commercial use of photos and diagrams created by myself (hold you mouse over a photo or image on a non-blog page and a tool-text will appear telling you if it was me, the page author, or someone else).

I can’t speak for his position on LRT development, aside from the Don Mills/Leslie extension of the Transit City Don Mills line. I have sent him a message through his website (my email bounces when sent to the Town of Richmond Hill) but have yet to hear a reply.

The display boards (2.5 MB) for the open houses are now available.

These boards do not do a great job of showing the proposed connection with the subway at Yonge and Finch. The one cross-section drawing shows the LRT above the subway tracks with pedestrian walkways flanking each side of the subway tunnel. Stairs, escalators, and elevators will connect each end of each of the side platforms of the LRT with these walkways.

 What is not shown is that the Finch Subway station is located north of Finch. This means that the pedestrian tunnels head north on each side of the subway tunnel until they are under the mezzanine of the station where stairs, escalators, and elevators take people up to that level where they can reach the stairs, escalators, and elevators to the centre platform of the subway. In other words, there will be three level changes to transfer from LRT to subway. Unfortunately, there is really no way to reduce this without either going with an on-street platform that is on Yonge above the subway station, or having a deep (and expensive) LRT station that is below the subway tracks. My concern is that given the TTC’s track record on maintaining its current lift infrastructure, the chances of a transfer that requires three sets of hardware having one of those out of service becomes remarkably significant.

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