Mississauga says, “We’ll take the money for LRT!”
In a previous posting, I quipped, “Perhaps if anything is not going to go ahead, Metrolinx could shift the funding to build VIVA Phase 3 (LRT lines) at this time in York Region!”
Well, it seems York Region is snoozing because the Toronto Star is reporting that Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion is saying that if Toronto Mayor Rob Ford doesn’t want the funding for Transit City, Mississauga will be only too happy to take the province’s money to build light rail transit.
One thing in the article that should be noted is this: “Above ground LRT costs about a third as much as subways — the TTC estimates about $100 million per kilometre compared to about $300 million for tunneling.” That is a bit of an overstatement of the costs of LRT construction that includes a fair bit of over-engineering in the Transit City plan, necessary or otherwise, including the underground part of the Eglinton line and the underground connection with the Sheppard subway on the Sheppard East line. Transit City’s own costs for median construction is only just over half that at about $50 million per kilometre, but Mississauga has the benefit of being able to use more side-of-the-road alignments that can use ballasted tie construction to bring that cost down to only $30-35 million per kilometre.
December 7th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
I think that Mississauga, York region and the surrounding areas would benefit greatly from LRT construction. I think it would even work better for them as they do not have a legacy of above ground rail transportation.
Side of road works better anyways.
Cal’s comment: Side of the road works when there are no (or very few) driveway entrances and a limited number of cross streets. Outside of Toronto’s borders, there are plenty of stretches where development (both residential and commercial) have properties with access only through side streets, leaving very few driveways entering main roads.