Toronto transit projects

[ijmorlan]

It's stupid to me that Toronto wants to rip out the Scarborough rt and replace it with a two-stop stubway, instead of spending a fraction of the cost and buying new ICTS MK 3 trains. Such a stupid and wasteful decision. They've been using the excuse "oh we can't get parts and bombardier doesn't make them anymore" which is hilarious considering Vancouver just finished refurbishing their entire MK I fleet (same as Toronto's) to get another 15-20 years out of them.

Toronto is a transit planing disaster. Always has been, always will be.

My understanding is that the Mark 3 trains would not fit through the tunnel between Ellesmere and Midland. Also, the hope is/was to extend the line to Malvern, and to run an integrated network with LRT lines on Sheppard, Eglinton, and Morningside/Kingston. As such, continuing to maintain one relatively short line as ICTS doesn’t really make sense.

That being said, the subway plan for Scarborough is utterly idiotic. For the same money, all the LRT lines ever seriously proposed for Scarborough could be built, giving high-quality transit service to a large number of neighbourhoods and important destinations with Scarborough, including many which won’t be helped at all by the subway plan.

I believe the original plan was for the SRT to be replaced with LRT in time for the Pan-Am games in, what year was it again, oh right, 2015. The Sheppard LRT would also have definitely been operating already. It’s easy to blame this all on Ford, but your observation that Toronto has always been (and, pessimistically, always will be) a planning disaster is apt — in fact, Ford can only really be blamed for less than two years of delay on the LRT projects. He was elected in 2010, and within less than two years Council voted to reinstate Transit City. Most of the delay is actually due to flip-flopping on the funding by the Ontario government. Ford just provided the extra push that changed significant delay and a reduction in the original plan into massive delay, an even bigger reduction in the original plan, and an alternative, extremely wasteful, subway plan.