Between 1954 and 1980, Toronto built two subway lines with 62 stations and 55 km of track. Between 1980 and 2018, by which time the Spadina extension to Vaughan will be complete, we’ll have constructed just 19 new stations and only 22 km of track (Downsview up to Vaughan and the Sheppard stubway).
Do the math and you discover that during those initial 26 years, we created subways at a speed of about 2 km per year. Over the subsequent five decades, however, the pace slackened to less than half a kilometer per year. Between 1990 and 2020, in turn, Toronto will have constructed about 36 km of dedicated light rail line, or about 1.9 km/yr, about half of which (the Eglinton Crosstown LRT) is provincially funded and will function much like a subway for much of its length.
Project forward over the coming century, and Toronto will have built about 45 km of additional subway tunnels by 2111, assuming we continue at the current rate. Madrid managed the same feat in about a decade; it is still building tunnels.
Why should we be thinking so far ahead? All great urban infrastructure — sewers, pipes, bridges, highways, etc. — exists in a kind of time warp that defies both politics and biology because it endures for such long periods.
The earliest subways — London, Budapest, New York, and Paris — all date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they continue to define those cities in the 21st. To paraphrase Zhou En Lai’s famous wisecrack about the impact of the French Revolution, it may be too soon to say precisely how subways affect urban form and the behaviour of city-dwellers. But cities with extended rapid transit networks (subways, LRTs, commuter rail) also seem to get denser over time.
I’d argue that the much-maligned Sheppard line is already proving the point. Despite considerable zoning obstacles, the stretch from Downview to Don Mills has seen a surge of mid- and high-density development since the Sheppard stubway went into service in 2001 — 16 of the 19 apartment complexes along that stretch have opened since 2003, according to market research firm Urbanation, and there are presently ten projects with 2,200 units in the pipeline or under construction.
Yes, the Sheppard subway is seriously under-used right now, and represents a drain on the TTC’s operating budget.
Will it ever be thus?
Absent concerted efforts to significantly boost densities along the route proposed by Mayor Rob Ford, there’s little doubt that a conventionally-developed Sheppard line will remain under-used for decades, draining resources from the rest of the TTC.
But I’d argue that we should resist the temptation to reflexively dismiss Ford’s pitch last week to finance the line by auctioning off the project to a private consortium while aggressively promoting corridor intensification as an inducement to builders and crystallizing the value of all that up-zoning with transit-oriented development charges and some kind tax increment financing scheme.
There are lots of solid reasons to be skeptical about this gamble, and many pieces need to fall into place before the city can even think about soliciting tenders.
For all that, I’d like to throw out the following caveats:
One, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the idea that Sheppard should be re-designated as a high density arterial from Downsview over to Kennedy/Midland. Look at Bay south of Davenport or Yonge north of 401. We’ve done this sort of thing before, including in suburban settings. If Ford and his council have the guts to push through high-density zoning in the inner suburbs, I have no issue with that.
Two, the building industry should be shouldering part of the cost of this kind of infrastructure. Developers in the past decade have made fortunes erecting high-rises within the 416, but the city has been exceedingly tentative about asking them to help pay for the costs associated with increasing population density. If Ford and his council have the jam to stare down the building industry by imposing appropriate development charges, I have no problem with that, either.
Three, the political process that created subways between 1954 and 1980 has generated nothing but gridlock ever since. If Ford thinks he can entice private capital by using suburban intensification as the carrot, and if the city can guarantee a professionally managed tendering process with crystal clear objectives, maybe we should give this experiment a shot.
For the record, I did not spend the long-weekend in the thrall of some kind of free market hallucinatory agent. This transformation will take a very long time (North York City Centre took three decades to gestate). What’s more, it is entirely plausible that a private consortium may dig itself in with a long-term deal and then turn around and ask for more cash if the promised development doesn’t materialize.
On the other hand, if the city can concoct a model that relies on a witch’s brew of subways, private capital and urban-minded up-zoning to goose densities in a carbon-addled suburban landscape, the reward may be worth the risk.
After all, do we really want Scarborough (or North York or Etobicoke, for that matter) circa 2111 to look and function the way it does in 2011?
And if not, what must the city do to alter its increasingly congested destiny?
photo by Wylie Poon
34 comments
“Do the math and you discover that during those initial 26 years, we created subways at a speed of about 2 km per year”
Heh, that was exactly Jane Pitfield’s campaign platform in 2006, and as I recall she was ridiculed for that promise in these here parts.
Very refreshing to see reasoned caution trump irrational fear, for a change.
This is an interesting article and I agree with much of what you say, Mr. Lorinc, but would also point out that much of the other (comparatively) recent subway expansion in Toronto *hasn’t* led to increased density, even after decades. e.g. it seems that the area around Warden Station has only recently been developed, decades after it was built — same goes for much of the western part of the Bloor line and the Davis-era Spadina line expansion. Is this a function of low demand, restrictive zoning, or something else?
John, you’re bang on with this article. But you aren’t vehement enough in your opinion! 🙂
Mr. Ford is right in wanting to build subways a they are th best vehicle for moving a LOT of people). I hope however that he doesn’t do it at the expense of other worthwhile projects (we need to be building/renovating/maintaining a lot of other things too). On thingI’m fearful of is that we’re not creating a co-ordinated response to the inadequacies of the City’s transit system. Anyway, back to the issue….think about it….the City built that 55km of track with a population of half(?) the size! So, on per capita basis….not just twice the number of person/km of track, but FOUR times (+/-).
The reason we’re not building subways (or other infrastructure)? Because people don’t want to pay for it. Ok, fair enough. I’m pretty cheap too. BUT, people need to understand (they need to be educated…or, just have it rammed down their throats by someone with no regard to political fallout) that it is not us that should be shouldered with the cost….it is our children that should be. We shoud be borrowing HEAVILY to build it. They will thank us for it…just as we thank our parents everyday for building the subways we have (wepaid for it…ddn’t hear a lot of people complain, did you?). But it should be the City that builds (sorry John, I don’t agree with you on that point – it’s a civic project and one that everyone owns…not one we should beholdin’ to a developer for).
John, you’re being unusually nice compared to your article in the Globe. Unnecessarily so. His plan is insane, and nobody in Ford’s general vicinity has the nerve to say so.
The response to Ford’s proposal isn’t reflexive, it is *reasoned* and it’s dishonest of you to suggest otherwise. Here’s some reasoning.
Baseline comparison: The disastrous CityPlace ghetto has about 6,500 units in 17 buildings, or about 380 units per building.
You quote the mayor’s office: $5 billion in private financing for a redesigned Sheppard project after redirecting funds from Finch. The first place financing is going to come from is development levies. Is $25,000 per unit a good levy? You need 200,000 housing units, or 530 CityPlace-style highrises. I hope it is plain, this is impossible as it’s taken a decade to build 16 buildings at Front and Spadina.
The other source of funding is called Tax Increment Financing. Another word for that is municipal debt secured by future increases in property tax receipts. I can’t find current figures on our municipal debt, but our annual interest is $450M, which suggests we have about $6B in debt. So, shall we double it? For an extension of the subway to nowhere? While the residents of Finch West make do with “enhanced bus service”?
John, thank you for your long term perspective. I appreciate that the city’s forefathers had the ambition to build projects that would last for centuries.
The TIF scheme to finance the Sheppard is not a bad idea. It creates a self-imposed responsibility on the municipality to encourage development and intensification along the transit corridor if there is any hope to pay off whatever contracts the city enters with a private consortium. Furthermore, it creates transparency as to how property taxes in the TIF zone are spent.
John, I don’t think anyone would disagree that subways are wonderful things that do a terrific job of citybuilding if you can find a way to build them. Planning students from around the world are taught about Toronto because few flatland cities anywhere have achieved such Manhattanization almost entirely through postwar subway planning. Those 1950s and 60s subways did a hell of a job.
However, I think what people resent about Ford is his fixation on the Sheppard line at the cost of more realistic projects. Yes, the stubway is a terrible, painful reminder of Toronto’s failures in the 1990s, almost like the stub of Bay-Adelaide mocked us for a decade. It certainly burns ones eyes to see it on a map. Nonetheless, it should not be extended at the cost of surface light rail just because it is the nearest hole in the ground in which to detour any money meant for those evil asphalt-hogging super-streetcars.
I would be much more supportive of Sheppard if extensions were intelligently designed to turn it into a branch of the Spadina line, thereby creating a link to the CBD. In other words, focus on running west, to Downsview, and create a Y-junction there so that every other Spadina train would run to Don Mills (the others go to Vaughan). This is how many subway lines around the world are laid out. See Vancouver or the #3 train in New York for particularly similar situations.
I have no problem with building up North York, Etobicoke, etc. but that should be done with subways and LRT that connect those centers to the core. If you want to try tax-incentives and other forms of PPP, great, but do it on the DRL or a string of light rail lines branching out from the existing centre. Those make sense for investors and for the city because they reinforce and leverage the existing cityscape and are easy to sell. Pushing Sheppard through as a subway from nowhere to nowhere is just a giant fool’s errand to stop surface rail from appearing in the street. I know it, you know it, everyone who has ever ridden a light rail vehicle or streetcar in any city in the world knows it, yet Rob Ford has somehow gotten away with beating us all with this brilliant diversion.
I wish people would stop saying that the Sheppard Subway is under used.
The truth is it is not. Almost 50,000 riders for 6.5 km of rail is actually very good, and is similar to ridership on other stretches of rapid transit of similar length. Actually it is higher in many regards.
Sheppard does not have a lack of riders. For a line that goes only halfway, we should be proud with the ridership it has.
St. Louis’ 70km light rail network only carries slightly more people than the Sheppard Subway.
Interesting point, John. I think many Torotonians (myself included) are not ideologically opposed to Ford’s private funding plan. But it’s still hard for me to accept a subway on Sheppard now while there are so many other pressing transit needs. While I recognize the argument that big infrastructure planning needs to take the long view, I feel like Toronto should increase density in the core before going to the suburbs.
Wouldn’t private investors be more interested in a DRL than a Sheppard line anyways? Why not use the province’s money to build Transit City as it is and then tap into private money for a much needed downtown subway? If Ford could see past his stubborn view on surface rail, he the potential to become the most transit friendly mayor in history.
While not a fan of adopting the full Sheppard to STC as immediate, priority 1 proposal….
I do think there is a strong argument to be made for extending what’s there.
I would argue, for a variety of reasons, that Downsview in the West to Vic. Park in the East is the most justifiable in the short-term.
(reason summary, Downsview provides access to the subway yard there, and considerable benefits from reduced ‘dead heading’ of trains, while also establishing a good link for people from eastern NY and Scarb. to York U and Yorkdale, 2 major trip generators; while Vic. Park has a major office hub, and also connects to a bus service than lands much further east (as opposed to Don Mills which lands at Pape)
There is no question that Sheppard’s development is putting it on pace to be well within global ridership norms for a subway in as little as one more decade, even with its current stub-way status. Given a more useful connection and size, this could likely be accelerated/improved on.
As a final note to the above; Sheppard is currently at capacity/overcrowding in rush hours, and ridership would climb steeply if the TTC added one new train)
I’m for a new subway, and paying the necessary cost for it, but what we need is the downtown relief line. A longer Sheppard line will just dump more passengers on an already maxed-out Yonge line. The DLR, if extended north to Eglinton, or even Sheppard, will siphon off passengers from the Yonge line, and make it function more smoothly. An the density is already there along much of it’s route. Let’s spend the next 15 – 20 years building the DRL, then extend the Sheppard subway.
Do you know if there are any studies or information available that compares increases in development and density that result from new subway lines compared to the result from new LRT’s? Because the question isn’t really whether subways will spur development, but whether or not they will spur enough development over-and-above what an LRT would, to justify the additional cost of the subway.
I’ve heard about LRTs in Portland spurring significant redevelopment, and anecdotes about how the Danforth line had a negative effect on commercial development as people were moved underground and off the street.
Re. “building industry should be shouldering part of the cost of this kind of infrastructure”: in fact it will be consumers who will shoulder the cost, John. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to pay more for buildings that have good transit access (everyone who lives close to the YUS subway seems to be willing to do so). On another note, however, as Steve Munro points out, the entire development charge levies collected per yer amount to only $61 million (versus an estimated cost of about 50x that for the Sheppard subway extension), and a private partnership model that sees tax breaks flow to developers who are funding subway construction will see tax revenue removed from the city. Sometimes government can borrow most cheaply and we really need to have a mature discussion about the PPP model (407, anyone?), and transit funding in general (implement road tolls that increase as transit infrastructure improves), national transit fund, etc.).
The problem is that more suburban subways don’t help if they reinforce existing commuting patterns. Extending the Sheppard will ease the commute for York U students, UTSC students and Scarborough TC workers – good – but it will also encourage connection at Yonge and at Downsview through the downtown U which is already at capacity with ridiculously expensive bandaids such as new platforms being dreamed up to squeeze a few more people in.
First, the TTC and GO Transit need to have their heads banged together in respect of projects like moving GO Oriole closer to TTC Leslie as previously proposed and additional services on GO Richmond Hill to attract Sheppard riders.
Second, the Downtown Relief Line has been badly sold – its name implies relief for downtowners (good luck with that in Fordville) when it is outer suburbians trying to make transfers at Bloor and St. George who will get relief by being able to do so at Pape and Dundas West, and east Eglintonians to get an empty seat at a Don Mills/Eglinton terminus. It defers the need for expensive capacity supplementation projects at St. George and at Bloor and could use either the 126 H6 cars TTC are gearing up to throw to the scrappers or T1 cars when Rocket trains start being acquired for Bloor-Danforth.
(Note – there are H4 and H5 cars still running 10 years older than the H6s so there’s at least some life left in them and a refurbishment could provide local industrial employment rather than throw yet another Toronto-funded billion dollar bone to the Great Bipartisan Northern Ontario Jobs Programme)
The increasing density of downtown is going to make it harder and harder to push a tunnel and stations through it – it’s vital that at least one mayoral candidate in 2014 endorses a new subway through downtown.
I think there’s a paradox here that makes the approach implausible.
We already have transit issues (long travel times, crush-loaded Yonge subway), and traffic congestion issues (I hear that Sheppard is terrible because all those condo owners drive [they certainly aren’t all waiting in a horde at Leslie, Bessarion, or Bayview stations!]).
Okay, we build up density along Sheppard to support a subway, but this doesn’t solve any of the existing problems. It will simply increase the traffic congestion and overload the Yonge line even more.
Both the Bloor-Danforth and Yonge lines were build to relieve overcrowded streetcar lines. There has been additional density, but hardly as much, as quickly, as seems to be envisaged for Sheppard.
So if Sheppard gets densified enough to support the subway, then that subway is there just to support the densification, and it doesn’t really help solve existing problems, just prevents new problems (until you try to get on a Yonge train at Yonge-Sheppard, anyway).
The advantage of Transit City is that it replaced busy bus routes with better, but still fairly local, service, improving conditions for existing riders. Transit City routes didn’t need a plethora of condo towers at every stop to justify them.
“I can’t find current figures on our municipal debt, but our annual interest is $450M, which suggests we have about $6B in debt.”
The $450M figure is often cited but is poorly understood. If we were truly paying $450M in *interest* then, yes, we might expect a debt of around $6B. But our debt is less than half that.
$450M is actually the cost of debt service, which is quite different than inteterst. Only about 1/3 of the $450M is actually interest – the balance is the cost of paying off debt (which is then reissued). In other words, most of what people talk about as “interest” is actually the cost of buying back municipal bonds as they come due – ie. paying off debt.
Understood another way, someone who pays $1000/month on their mortgage isn’t paying $12,000/year in mortgage interest, but some combination of interest and debt amortization.
But the right wing crowd (articulated in the last week by DoFo) has been keen on promoting the meme that Toronto is actually paying $450M in interest so as to promote their agenda. We shouldn’t be furthering that meme.
I get from this piece a solid argument for transit expansion into the suburbs — something I think most people can agree with –, but I still don’t understand why a subway is better suited to this than the light rail line as originally proposed.
The LRT would have brought new development too, with a significantly lower upfront and ongoing costs.
John, a comment that resembles reality, I’m shocked.
For the commenters: industry doesn’t want to invest in a DRL as there is little reasonable prospect of increased density. Much of the route will, by necessity, go under established neighbourhoods or existing historical districts. Very hard to get sufficient additional density to make that investment pay off.
The Sheppard stubway extension and the Eglinton line are very attractive from a development perspective as they are under very, very busy streets that should be reasonably easy to add large amounts of density. You can’t build large condos in these areas presently but a subway line would drastically improve their attractiveness as well as making it a shoe in at the OMB (though of course the point is that the City will rubber stamp these projects, that doesn’t stop our ever resourceful NIMBYs).
The DRL is a project that should be be funded through taxes, or else it should be turned into a Queen St subway and all height/density restrictions on Queen removed.
It is nice to see people finally acknowledge that subways have to be built ahead of intensification. Streetcars are beyond packed at current densities near their respective arteries, requiring large condos along their route before a subway would be considered is just impossible.
Thanks, McKingford. Some actual facts are so refreshing in a debate often fueled on very superficial understanding. It is ironic that so-called “conservatives” are more often than not the culprits in this regard.
banking on future development to make the line make sense is so foolish, we should build transit lines where there are already people living, like how they used to build them in the sixties (bloor and yonge).
here are some streets that could use a subway: Queen. eglinton. not shepherd.
Wow! Am more than a little surprised to see this article in Spacing… and by this author. Financing is certainly an issue with any infrastructure, but the bottom line is that while some parts of Transit City made sense (Eglinton), other parts simply did not. If we are going to be spending a great deal of money on capital infrastructure, then we should spend it on something that changes the way land is used. Speed is of critical importance to those who use transit — and despite what some of its proponents claimed, Transit City did not qualify as rapid transit (something Miller himself acknowledged). In other words, on many of its routes, it would probably not have attracted significantly more ridership than those currently using the buses… which begs the question, why build it then?
Ford is an idiot. But I think his insistence of subways should not be dismissed so lightly. I think one of the key reasons that the GTA is the big sprawling mess that it is is because various levels of government cheaped out and left Toronto with a lousy, insufficient subway network. If we had a stronger subway network, development in TO and in the GTA would have unfolded much more differently. But the real issue isn’t subway vs. LRT. It’s speed. The people who actually live in the far-flung areas of the city understand this — which is why few people in those areas supported Transit City. Rapid transit has the potential to fundamentally change the way land is used. In some cities, there are LRT systems than qualify as rapid transit. Unfortunately, Transit City was not about rapid transit. If we can achieve rapid transit with LRTs, then that would be the way to go. But there is no point in wasting capital dollars on an LRT plan that merely gives the appearance of improved service without changing the dynamics of how land can be used.
ps. if we really wanted to talk wasted oppurtunities, we should be asking why the Pearson/Union link/service isn’t being reconfigured in a way that serves broader transit needs. This line actually has the potential to significantly improve service across the city’s north-west corner.
John,
Fully agree that if Ford can make it work, good for him. I doubt the plan is achievable though. The one point no one has mentioned in the comments is the anti-density NIMBYs that will crawl out of the woodwork once this thing gets off the ground.
A subway is great and all, but when North York Centre or Downtown lands on front yards along Sheppard, expect a huge battle.
So Rob Ford was going to support the NIMBY crowd in Lawrence Heights who didn’t want any intensification around their neighbourhood, but thinks that people along Sheppard are going to welcome all the dozens of condo buildings and office towers that would be needed for this plan to come to fruition. If they are already up in arms about surface LRT, I sincerely doubt they are going to be up for rows of 40 story buildings overlooking their tranquil suburban oasis. No, they want their subway and their neighbourhood to be left the way it was. As long as the poor people are underground (out of sight, out of mind) and they don’t have to pay for it, they’ll support a subway.
@ Andrew M — for the record, both Ford and George Smitherman pandered to the contras east of Lawrence Heights, but I’d suggest to you that the opposition had far less to do w/ a fear of intensification in general and much more to do w/ race/culture/poverty. It was a different brand of NIMBYism than the sort of thing we’ve seen around Yonge and Eglinton.
That said, I do agree w/ most of the comments that warn of a big backlash from the neighbourhoods along Sheppard. However, I’d point again to the case of North York City Centre, where Mel Lastman and the local councillors developed, if you pardon the pun, an awkward but apparently durable detente w/ Willowdale homeowners, who were pretty outspoken about the proposed density along the Yonge corridor back in the 80s and 90s.
We also have to talk about serving the needs of dense suburban districts like Scarborough Town Centre and North York York Centre. People live and work there, and can go there for cultural events too, though the latter is not yet that common, but these places have movie theatres, bars, and regional destinations like their squares, civic centres and venues like the Toronto Centre for the Arts. It’s these nodes that have to be quickly linked. The Sheppard subway may move more people to Yonge, but we already see that the DRL is going to prove a necessity.
The Sheppard subway already exists, and it may pass through lower density areas, but the development potential is in fact big as we’ve seen from what has been accomplished so far. The ridership for a 5.5 kilometre long stub is quite high. It links high density areas that exist today. We’re a big metropolis, and the demand is only going to grow.
We should under no circumstance sacrifice the rest of Transit City to build Sheppard because of the high demand for surface routes to rapid transit and it’s just not feasible to build subways everywhere. However, the system needs a solid core of subway rapid transit in the suburbs for the speed, capacity and network building, and new lines downtown like the DRL. There are many ways to go about finishing the Sheppard subway, from a private sector-oriented approach to a series of extensions over a couple of decades. But it should be finished.
John,
I’m sure councillor Filion would disagree that all turned out well in North York Centre. Traffic there is horrendus and the subway is packed to capacity southbound at Sheppard-Yonge.
Dense and somewhat pedestrian friendly, yes. A resounding success? not so much.
1) One poster noted that the Sheppard “stubway” is crowded at rush hours. However that is not enough to make it successful. You need two-way traffic and all-day traffic. Will that be the case if the line is extended to Scarborought Town Centre?
2) What sort of riders will we get if there is massive redevelopment on Sheppard? Will the new residents use the system mainly in the a.m. and p/m/ rush hours? In the morning will they generally get on at their stop and ride to the end of the line (North York Centre or Scarborough Town Centre) 3) An advantage of building LRT’s in the suburbs is that there is a wide road allowance on the major arterial roads. If, sometime in the distant future, Sheppard starts to get crowded then you go 2km to the north and build on Finch (i.e. replicate the process.)
By your account, J, it does sound successful in that it’s very vibrant and pedestrian-friendly. However, the transportation infrastructure doesn’t seem to be keeping up. The 401 is probably the biggest culprit, jamming the city streets as urban freeways tend to do. Solving this issue will probably take a bigger network of fast, grade separated rapid transit (subways) in the city in general, and also LRT, which provides increased capacity over buses and better reliability and speed.
In all the debate over Sheppard, I can’t help asking why people assume that all of the development incentive and population growth would actually occur on one corridor for coming decades. Sheppard isn’t the only street where people want and need rapid transit. What happens if we build a second subway elsewhere that’s more attractive, maybe one that doesn’t have a development charge associated with it. Can you say “Eglinton”?
There is a naive sense that by building a subway, even with rezoning, we will actually force developers to build where we want them to. As we have seen in many other cases, developers build where they can make money and where there is a market. Sheppard isn’t the only game in town.
It’s no secret that the Metrolinx expansion plan is worth at least $50-billion, and that number is already a few years out of date. That, and the future operating costs of the transit network, won’t be funded by development charges or tax increments in the GTA.
It’s going to take more than vague references to “our forefathers’ great vision” to convince me we should build a subway out where there is nowhere near enough demand to justify it’s cost now or any time in the next four decades. The Bloor and Yonge lines were both built because the streetcar routes that serviced them became overwhelmed. That’s how sane transit planning is supposed to work – incrementally, not overnight. If our “grand forefathers” had followed our populist method of building transit infrastructure, we’d be quite screwed today.
One thing worth mentioning with the Sheppard subway is that there is a lot of lower income people in north Scarborough who are likely to take it, thus it is certain to have higher ridership than your average suburban subway. Even if Sheppard turns into a haven for condos and skyscrapers, people from lower income areas near by will transfer on to it. The lower density of the area could help reduce construction costs as well.
Also, is rapid transit in the suburbs really such a far fetched idea? Many cities in North America and around the world have full subway lines which reach well beyond the city limits and into lower density areas. Boston, Washington, and London all have subway lines which extend far beyond the reaches of their downtowns. Many cities which have moved to rapid transit in recent decades operate LRT routes along corridors which are far less dense than Sheppard.
Any decision for Sheppard East has been bogged down by ideological perspectives, and has not been given the thought it deserves. There are several factors such as:
Current infrastructure: The subway is already there. Are the benefits of changing modes greater than the benefits of extending the current line?
Socio-demographics: What are the incomes of people living along the line, and how will this effect ridership?
Public support: While I won’t argue that the masses don’t always know best (to say the least…), this is a democratic society and their opinions should count for something.
Ridership potential: Does an LRT provide enough space for future passenger volumes? Does a subway provide too much space for future passenger volumes?
Future expansions: Where else can this line go? Once completed, does it make sense to extend the line beyond Scarborough Town Center? Could intermediate forms of transit extend from Scarborough Town Center, or does it make sense to start these intermediate forms at Fairview?
Effects on congestion: Will an LRT be fast enough to reduce congestion on Sheppard, the 401, and other arterials? Will an LRT provide enough space to handle passengers who currently use parallel routes?
These are just some of the questions which need to be asked and debated upon to make an informed decision on what to do with Sheppard.
One thing that the subway advocates seem to forget is that expanding the existing GO train system is far more cost effective. Double tracking, electrifying and grade separating existing above ground rail corridors and increasing the number of trains is much cheaper than building a subway, probably comparable to the cost of an LRT while potentially offering several times the capacity of a LRT. Furthermore, improvements to GO lines will be needed if the Sheppard extension and/or Eglinton subway are built to provide alternatives to the Yonge and Spadina lines which will get insanely overcrowded otherwise. Of course development can follow these upgraded GO train lines as well, and it would probably be much easier to pay for the cost of upgrading GO train lines with development charges.
“Double tracking, electrifying and grade separating existing above ground rail corridors and increasing the number of trains is much cheaper than building a subway, probably comparable to the cost of an LRT while potentially offering several times the capacity of a LRT. ”
As long as you have no pesky freight trains to contend with. As federal railroads and as I understand it Metrolinx can offer to buy them out or where possible add enough tracks for co-existence but they can’t be forced to agree and can’t be expropriated by the City or Province.
The other problem is that existing train tracks often do not pass directly through areas where due to density or grade differences there are few if any logical places for stations – notably the CN and CP lines through the Don Valley.