[micheal_can]

I follow a lot of threads here.I comment on very few.Those few either directly or indirectly affect me in some way. I am getting tired of driving in congestion and trying to find parking. I am looking forwards to the Northlander open up so I can drive 2 hours to then take the train to Toronto/London/Ottawa/Montreal on an almost monthly basis. Since Christmas,I have been to one of those cities almost once a month. That is normal in my life. The fact that I may be collecting CPP by the time this opens is rather annoying. That is why I want to see this project open sooner.

^^ By my count, this was the ninth post by @micheal_can in the last 24 hours in this thread and it‘s just his usual monopolizing of the discussion with low-effort posts just to see if he can make people take the bate. For the sake of my mental health and of that of others here, can we please move this kind of conversation to a different thread or private messages?

I did:
https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threads/making-transit-construction-faster.41977/#post-2223609

 

[nfitz]

Yep, there will always be a 0%.

Well ... 0.01% ...

I don't see though, what's your issue with generalcanada's question?

 

[ProjectEnd]

Well ... 0.01% ...

I don't see though, what's your issue with generalcanada's question?

I don't think this country / province / city are capable of doing a project like this at all, so to speculate and debate about at what level of design it might currently be is kinda...pissing in the wind, IMO.

 

[Urban Sky]

I don't think this country / province / city are capable of doing a project like this at all, so to speculate and debate about at what level of design it might currently be is kinda...pissing in the wind, IMO.

Truckloads of money (the high denominations, of course!) can buy you a lot things, but I am increasingly fearing that the lack of willingness to provide that in the required quantities will kill (or drastically curtail) the project, just like it did with all its precedessors. The way to save a project is to scale and stage it into more digestible chunks and this project has so far religiously chosen the opposite route (relentless scope creep and lack of focus)…

 

[ProjectEnd]

Truckloads of money (the high denominations, of course!) can buy you a lot things, but I am increasingly fearing that the lack of willingness to provide that in the required quantities will kill (or drastically curtail) the project, just like it did with all its precedessors. The way to save a project is to scale and stage it into more digestible chunks and this project has so far religiously chosen the opposite route (relentless scope creep and lack of focus)…

Sure, money is one thing ("truckloads", even), but "money" isn't investment. The latter requires clear thinking and a defined scope, neither of which this utter mess has. The previous government made an 'announcement' - whoop-de-frickin-doo. We (the Canadian public) genuinely don't know anything about this project, and, if domestic tendering and procurement practices are precedent to go by, we won't. Ever. And that, especially when you're trying to sell a rightly-skeptical public on a new technology, just is not going to cut it.

Despite being constantly kicked in the face, I am and never have been a "government can't do anything" kinda guy. Quite the opposite, really. That said, when it comes to transportation, especially highly specialized stuff like this, Canada's approach simply isn't going to work. We are 49 pages into this thread already and we have 0 confirmed facts from the feds. That's absurd nonsense, and it is very telling.

I forget who it was, but someone very rightly said earlier in this thread: HSR isn't something you just do, it's the crowning achievement in a long history of 'ferroequinological' accomplishment. With "Alto", Canada is a toddler attempting to enter the Olympics. We simply don't have the fundamentals to make this a remote possibility. We don't understand trackbed, we don't care about standardization, we don't have a hope in hell when it comes to electrification, we're still utter cucks to the Class 1s. But somehow we think we're going to 'go for the gold' because...?

 

[lead82]

That’s exactly right. Canada can’t even run a conventional diesel passenger service properly. Via is a failure and irrelevant form of transportation between our largest 3 cities. The fact no one cares that the service is significantly worse with the new trains and there is zero effort to fix it shows Alto is not in but a political stunt. It is what Canadas successive Liberal governments keep doing. Give people false hope , spend money on wasteful studies and kill any trust or momentum that government has competency to do this. It doesn’t and Alto isn’t a serious plan and will never be actually built.

 

[generalcanada]

Sure, money is one thing ("truckloads", even), but "money" isn't investment. The latter requires clear thinking and a defined scope, neither of which this utter mess has. The previous government made an 'announcement' - whoop-de-frickin-doo. We (the Canadian public) genuinely don't know anything about this project, and, if domestic tendering and procurement practices are precedent to go by, we won't. Ever. And that, especially when you're trying to sell a rightly-skeptical public on a new technology, just is not going to cut it.

Despite being constantly kicked in the face, I am and never have been a "government can't do anything" kinda guy. Quite the opposite, really. That said, when it comes to transportation, especially highly specialized stuff like this, Canada's approach simply isn't going to work. We are 49 pages into this thread already and we have 0 confirmed facts from the feds. That's absurd nonsense, and it is very telling.

I forget who it was, but someone very rightly said earlier in this thread: HSR isn't something you just do, it's the crowning achievement in a long history of 'ferroequinological' accomplishment. With "Alto", Canada is a toddler attempting to enter the Olympics. We simply don't have the fundamentals to make this a remote possibility. We don't understand trackbed, we don't care about standardization, we don't have a hope in hell when it comes to electrification, we're still utter cucks to the Class 1s. But somehow we think we're going to 'go for the gold' because...?

Query...whats your opinion of Go Expansion? You seem to think Canada is incapable of building high-quality rail? Electrified frequent RER service? Go is using standardized ECTS?

Ill say it before and ill say it again, theres no point giving a fixed-price contract if you dont even know what the price is. Even if we dont proceed with the final determined price, we have environmental studies, pre-construction activities, super detailed designs as Bean said.
Yes the scope changed, but unless youre suggesting were talking about Maglev Im not sure how you can say the scope is still changing in terms of what we are building?

We were 700 pages deep in the ontario line thread even before the revamp of the DRL. Define "facts". do you mean like which electrification voltage? or what speeds in what sections the trains will run at? The former requires the development work, the latter is probably a general guideline in the confidential proposals

 

[rbt]

Query...whats your opinion of Go Expansion? You seem to think Canada is incapable of building high-quality rail? Electrified frequent RER service? Go is using standardized ECTS?

Considering we're 7 years past the announcement date for GO RER which was expected to offer a small amount of electrified service in 2025, that may not be the best example of "success" at developing a railway system.

 

[Urban Sky]

Considering we're 7 years past the announcement date for GO RER which was expected to offer a small amount of electrified service in 2025, that may not be the best example of "success" at developing a railway system.

As someone who works in the railway engineering industry, I can assure you that more stuff is happening in Toronto than anywhere else in North America and you won‘t recognize this city in 10 years‘ time:

The striking thing about the GTHA is how these expansions almost dwarf the existing network:

• Extending 2 of the existing 3 Subway Lines: SSE and YNSE
• Building the first Light Metro line: Ontario Line
• Building the first three (!) LRT lines: Eglinton (incl. Western Extension), Finch, Hurontario
• More than doubling the train volume of the Commuter Rail network while electrifying most of it: RER/ONxpress

All of that is already funded and happening simultaneously…

Could it have happened faster and sooner? For sure! But it is still absolutely amazing how this city and province leaves the rest of North America in the dust when it comes to transit investments…

 

[JJTheJetPln]

I don't think this country / province / city are capable of doing a project like this at all, so to speculate and debate about at what level of design it might currently be is kinda...pissing in the wind, IMO.

I share a similar sentiment, but I think the issue comes down to the duration of time it takes as opposed to being able to do it at all. I believe it can be done, but I don't believe it can be done within my lifetime.

I'm concerned about the training and retaining of employees in the rail industry. A lot of construction companies are struggling for employees nowadays, but there is nary a company willing to take on a significant amount of people, put them through training, and send them out to the field to get the job done. A lot of entry level positions are showing up on job sites asking for 2 to 5 years worth of experience. It's a weird timeline we live in where entry level positions are required to have some form of experience.

On top of that, we also have to contend with expropriation of land that can take a significant amount of time due to procedural red tape, and the need for the government to prove the need for the land to be expropriated. By the time the land is expropriated, we're already 2-3 years in without rail being laid because we still need to survey the land, and nobody knows what issues we're going to have construction wise that will make the process take even longer. There's so much procedural red tape in place because of things that have happened in the past. A lot of it is liability, not much of it will help speed anything up.

 

[rbt]

As someone who works in the railway engineering industry, I can assure you that more stuff is happening in Toronto than anywhere else in North America and you won‘t recognize this city in 10 year‘s time:

I certainly hope so and enthusiastically look forward to Union Station crushing Grand Central for ridership.

That said, after 7 years of design/engineering work we cannot yet use GO Expansion as an example of Canada being "... capable of building high-quality rail" as mentioned in generalcanada's post. There's a lot of on-the-fly learning for Metrolinx in that project: Doing the EA twice, tendering under 2 different contract models, and an aborted operations hand-over show the process is far from refined. Strong political will and a seemingly unlimited budget will get GO Expansion there in the end.

 

[ProjectEnd]

That’s exactly right. Canada can’t even run a conventional diesel passenger service properly. Via is a failure and irrelevant form of transportation between our largest 3 cities. The fact no one cares that the service is significantly worse with the new trains and there is zero effort to fix it shows Alto is not in but a political stunt. It is what Canadas successive Liberal governments keep doing. Give people false hope , spend money on wasteful studies and kill any trust or momentum that government has competency to do this. It doesn’t and Alto isn’t a serious plan and will never be actually built.

Why associate this lethargy with a particular party? Under which government did VIA see its most severe cuts in 1990?

Query...whats your opinion of Go Expansion? You seem to think Canada is incapable of building high-quality rail? Electrified frequent RER service? Go is using standardized ECTS?

Ill say it before and ill say it again, theres no point giving a fixed-price contract if you dont even know what the price is. Even if we dont proceed with the final determined price, we have environmental studies, pre-construction activities, super detailed designs as Bean said.
Yes the scope changed, but unless youre suggesting were talking about Maglev Im not sure how you can say the scope is still changing in terms of what we are building?

We were 700 pages deep in the ontario line thread even before the revamp of the DRL. Define "facts". do you mean like which electrification voltage? or what speeds in what sections the trains will run at? The former requires the development work, the latter is probably a general guideline in the confidential proposals

Are you enjoying that electrified UPX service? Why is there no program to rebalast and upgrade roadbed to concrete ties on a massive scale all over the system? Why does it take 20 minutes to come off the York and onto the Georgetown at 5kph? Why did it take a year to tie West Harbour into the Grimsby? Why is two tracking on the Stouville taking a decade? Why is four tracking the Weston and third platforming Bloor going to take a similar amount of time? Why is the best we can do for underpasses at new stations raw concrete? Why does the Belleville extension have no timeline? Why, as Marco Chitti rightly harps on, is none of this stuff public?

It's because rail, by and large, just isn't that important.

I share a similar sentiment, but I think the issue comes down to the duration of time it takes as opposed to being able to do it at all. I believe it can be done, but I don't believe it can be done within my lifetime.

I'm concerned about the training and retaining of employees in the rail industry. A lot of construction companies are struggling for employees nowadays, but there is nary a company willing to take on a significant amount of people, put them through training, and send them out to the field to get the job done. A lot of entry level positions are showing up on job sites asking for 2 to 5 years worth of experience. It's a weird timeline we live in where entry level positions are required to have some form of experience.

On top of that, we also have to contend with expropriation of land that can take a significant amount of time due to procedural red tape, and the need for the government to prove the need for the land to be expropriated. By the time the land is expropriated, we're already 2-3 years in without rail being laid because we still need to survey the land, and nobody knows what issues we're going to have construction wise that will make the process take even longer. There's so much procedural red tape in place because of things that have happened in the past. A lot of it is liability, not much of it will help speed anything up.

Eh, I agree generally, but the government (both provincial and federal) can expropriate with great alacrity if they want to. Let's just say, for arguments sake, that we are using Havelock (a monumentally dumb idea). Directly out of Toronto, you're faced with this:

If the red line is the desired path, that's probably 15(+) properties and 4 grade crossings in this tiny area alone. Alright, fine. Are we engaging owners? Have we decided how this *small piece* of the larger line will be tracked? We can all piss into the wind here (and trust me, I do a lot of pissing into the wind on UT so guilty as charged!), but I just don't see how a country like Canada can commit to the hard, almost dictatorial, things that are required to get this thing going.

People ride the Shinkansen nowadays and say 'wow, that's really cool, wish we had that at home', assuming it was easy or something in 1950s and 60s Japan. It wasn't. Hideo Shima and Shinji Sogo, the brains and thrust behind it all, resigned in 1963 because of cost overruns and a general public dissatisfaction with how the project had been handled. And they were rail guys. We don't have a single 'rail person' behind this stupid waste of time.

 

[just east of the creek]

It will be worth a look to see how the new provincial legislation - the Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act, 2025 - may affect substantial infrastructure projects, such as touched on above. I do not know myself as yet, there is a lot to read and I have not had the time, but numerous groups are raising flags on this act, so a review is needed.

 

[Urban Sky]

Why associate this lethargy with a particular party? Under which government did VIA see its most severe cuts in 1990?

Agreed, and similarly: which government has invested into a major rebuild of the long-distance fleet (allowing the creation of the „Prestige Class“) and the triple-tracking of an essential railway corridor for VIA (Kingston Sub)?

Are you enjoying that electrified UPX service? Why is there no program to rebalast and upgrade roadbed to concrete ties on a massive scale all over the system? Why does it take 20 minutes to come off the York and onto the Georgetown at 5kph? Why did it take a year to tie West Harbour into the Grimsby? Why is two tracking on the Stouville taking a decade? Why is four tracking the Weston and third platforming Bloor going to take a similar amount of time? Why is the best we can do for underpasses at new stations pass raw concrete? Why does the Belleville extension have no timeline? Why, as Marco Chitti rightly harps on, is none of this stuff public?

It's because rail, by and large, just isn't that important.

Eh, I agree generally, but the government (both provincial and federal) can expropriate with great alacrity if they want to. Let's just say, for arguments sake, that we are using Havelock (a monumentally dumb idea). Directly out of Toronto, you're faced with this:

View attachment 645079

If the red line is the desired path, that's probably 15(+) properties and 4 grade crossings in this tiny area alone. Alright, fine. Are we engaging owners? Have we decided how this *small piece* of the larger line will be tracked? We can all piss into the wind here (and trust me, I do a lot of pissing into the wind on UT so guilty as charged!), but I just don't see how a country like Canada can commit to the hard, almost dictatorial, things that are required to get this thing going.

People ride the Shinkansen nowadays and say 'wow, that's really cool, wish we had that at home', assuming it was easy or something in 1950s and 60s Japan. It wasn't. Hideo Shima and Shinji Sogo, the brains and thrust behind it all, resigned in 1963 because of cost overruns and a general public dissatisfaction with how the project had been handled. And they were rail guys. We don't have a single 'rail person' behind this stupid waste of time.

I wonder what you would do. I somehow believe that you would agree that it would be much more realistic to pull off HSR had we at least once proven that we can deliver the construction or upgrade of a dedicated passenger rail infrastructure, say, upgrading Montreal-Ottawa to HFR standard with hourly service - i.e., the kind of semi-fast and reasonably frequent intercity rail service which preceeded HSR in almost any HSR nation, such as Germany, Italy or the United States…

 

[ProjectEnd]

Agreed, and similarly: which government has invested into a major rebuild of the long-distance fleet (allowing the creation of the „Prestige Class“) and the triple-tracking of an essential railway corridor for VIA (Kingston Sub)?

I wonder what you would do. I somehow believe that you would agree that it would be much more realistic to pull off HSR had we at least once proven that we can deliver the construction or upgrade of a dedicated passenger rail infrastructure, say, upgrading Montreal-Ottawa to HFR standard with hourly service - i.e., the kind of semi-fast and reasonably frequent intercity rail service which preceeded HSR in almost any HSR nation, such as Germany, Italy or the United States…

100,000%.

Hell, even the NEC, the preeminent North American passenger rail line, as it exists today as the result of the efforts of at least four corporations over a century, two enormous federal public works projects, funding at all levels, etc. is...kinda shitty, on a global standard. I'm sorry, I just don't see us committing to the tough choices that are required to make this happen.