Toronto LRT Information Blog

Thanks go out to Raffi Derharian for providing me with information to post here from the information sessions held while I was out of town. This post is mostly his words, with a bit of formatting and some other bits (like comparisons to some of the Transit City presentations).

At some point, hopefully soon, there will be soft copies of the presentation material. I will update this post to add links when they become available. In the meantime, Raffi has been kind enough to provide a couple of photos of the drawings. Click on the thumbnails to see them in greater detail.

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Two open houses will be held on Tuesday June 17 and Wednesday June 18 on the next generation of Viva. These open houses will focus on the proposed:

• Yonge Street subway extension from Finch Avenue to Highway 7
• Highway 7 rapidways between Yonge Street and Kennedy Road

These will be held at the Premiere Ballroom and Convention Centre at 9019 Leslie Street, Richmond Hill (one block north of Highway 7).  They run from 5 pm to 9 pm with a presentation on Highway 7 Rapidways at 6 pm and a presentation on the Yonge Street Subway at 7 pm.

Updated: I wanted to attend at least one of these sessions, but business has me in Denver for the first half of the week. If anyone reading this attends, I would appreciate it if you could email me with any notes or comments.

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 YRT website page on PLAN09 has these, but I thought I would put copies here:

• Draft PLAN09 Priorities
• Proposed Routing Adjustments for 2009 - Southern York Region Map
• Proposed Routing Adjustments for 2009- Northern York Region Map

There are a number of propposed service improvements that are good, but I had to laugh out loud at one thing on the Northern Map. There are several areas to be served by a dial-a-bus service. Some at peak times only, some at other times, but take a look at the West Aurora area - it only applies during off-peak times on a certain type of day!