Toronto LRT Information Blog

The City of Toronto will be holding a public meeting on July 2 at 10:00 am at City Hall, in Committee Room 1, 2nd floor to amend the city’s Official Plan to enable public works related to the Transit City - Sheppard LRT line to proceed east of McCowan Road. Currently, only the portion of Sheppard Avenue East from Don Mills Road to McCowan Road is identified in the Official Plan for higher order transit use. The amendment will extend this to Meadowvale Road.

You are invited to attend the public meeting to make your views known regarding the proposal. To assist in scheduling, if you wish to address the Planning and Growth Management Committee, please notify the City Clerk, attention: Merle MacDonald, Administrator, Planning and Growth Management Committee, at 416-392-7340, or e-mail to pgmc@toronto.ca, by no later than 12:00 p.m. on June 30, 2008.

If you wish to submit written comments, please forward them to the City Clerk, attention: Merle MacDonald, Administrator, Planning and Growth Management Committee, at the address set out in this notice, or by Fax: 416-392-1879, or e-mail to pgmc@toronto.ca.

Option 3 of the Sheppard LRT plan has the line going underground west of Consumers Road in and meeting the Subway at Don Mills at the same level on an extended platform to the east end of the existing platform. The tunnel would be built to Subway standards to protect for future conversion to full Subway, if needed.

While this option will cost $250 million (including surface tracks in mixed traffic to allow LRVs on the future Don Mills LRT line to travel to maintenance/storage facilities), it provides the most convenient transfer to most who will use this line, plus it leaves two future options open:

1. Extending the Subway east, or
2. Converting the Subway to LRT to extend the LRT west to Yonge.

My concern for spending money to protect for a future change, is how likely the change is to be feasible later. I have argued that building the Eglinton LRT’s tunnel to Subway standards is a waste. I base this argument on how I believe that a later conversion is highly unlikely because once the line is carrying a large number of commuters, taking it out of service for several months simply won’t happen. This will be a 10 km section of underground LRT that will have services extending beyond both ends.

Update: In the comments section, Karl Junkin has outlined a feasable way that Eglinton could be converted in the future, so I have changed my opinion. Plus, the difference in cost of building that line with the underground section capable of 5-car LRV trains and full HRV subways is likely not extremely significant.

In looking at building an LRT tunnel from Consumers Road to the Don Mills Subway station to full Subway standards, it is not enough to simply say, “It’s only about one kilometre.” To be consistent, I have to go through a thought experiment to test the possibility of being able to convert it once it is in use. I suspect that conversion could take place in stages with relatively short outages. Keep in mind that this is only speculation on my part…

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The EA Open Houses this week presented the latest enhancements to the plan. The three most notable items are the scope of the project, location of stops, and the reduction of options for connecting with the Sheppard Subway. I will discuss these main points, but a good outline of everything can be seen on Steve Munro’s site here.

The scope of the project now extends as far east as Meadowvale instead of Morningside. There is some mention of a carhouse location possibly being on the hydro lands just west of Meadowvale. 

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I had planned to post this earlier in the week when I received email notification, but other things came up. Then I received a notice in today’s mail, which reminded me. Anyone know why the city is spending money to mail out information that is also being emailed out?

The Sheppard East LRT meetings are on June 3 (Agincourt Collegiate) and June 4 (Malvern Community Centre).  Both of these will be from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm. They will include presentation of:

the recommended design for the Sheppard Avenue East LRT, including stop locations, the proposed grade separation of Sheppard Avenue at the Agincourt Go Line and the preferred option for making the LRT/subway connection.

The Scarborough RT Extension meetings are on June 4 (Malvern Community Centre, jointly with the Sheppard EA) from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm and June 5 (Scarborough RT Station) from 4:30 pm to 7:00 pm.  They will include:

The rationale for selecting the preferred network: an SRT extension to Malvern Town Centre, and SRT alignments to be considered for detailed evaluation.

Though this is a busy week with a number of transit-related open houses, I plan to stop by the open house on Wednesday.

The TTC and the city held two Environmental Assessment open houses this week. The first was on Tuesday at Sts. Peter and Paul Banquet Hall on Milner Avenue, which covered the Sheppard East LRT and the proposed extension(s) of the SRT. The second was held this evening at Sir John A MacDonald Collegiate on Pharmacy Avenue.

I had the chance to visit tonight’s open house and was quite impressed with the turnout:

Listening to some of the questions people were asking, there is still a great deal of information about LRT that needs to get out to the general public. It is nice to see people making the effort to seek information at such a meeting.

There was also a great deal of effort given to filling in the comment sheets by a number of the visitors. Hopefully, not too many of them were simply writing, “just extend the Sheppard subway line“.