[Metroscapes]

I know that Smart Track seems to have been killed by Chow and we see her council's "pause" on the Liberty Village and Spadina Go stations, but I still think Smart Track, the idea of using existing tracks and stations with a new overground-type line, using regular TTC fares, that transfers between Go lines, essentially becoming an additional relief line that continues on the west side of the city, connecting to Union to Bloor-Danforth, was a fast, cheap way to get a well-needed new transit line. I think Tory was underrated for his work on this. It may be decades now before we see an extension of the Ontario Line north-west of Exhibition. How can his city justify putting the Liberty Village station on hold given the amount of development around Joe Shuster and in the Village?

*deep inhale*

John Tory did NOT propose an overground-type line. He and his supporters will tell you they did, but it never got off paper. It quickly devolved into Toronto capital budget dollars getting raked into GO expansion. Parts of which are now on the rocks.

SmartTrack was not a thing. It was always just GO trains, serving GO stations, at GO frequencies. It was John Tory's campaign sticker slapped on the provincial transit system.

Don't @ me.

 

[dowlingm]

I know that Smart Track seems to have been killed by Chow and we see her council's "pause" on the Liberty Village and Spadina Go stations, but I still think Smart Track, the idea of using existing tracks and stations with a new overground-type line, using regular TTC fares, that transfers between Go lines, essentially becoming an additional relief line that continues on the west side of the city, connecting to Union to Bloor-Danforth, was a fast, cheap way to get a well-needed new transit line. I think Tory was underrated for his work on this. It may be decades now before we see an extension of the Ontario Line north-west of Exhibition. How can this city justify putting the Liberty Village station on hold given the amount of development around Joe Shuster and in the Village?

Saying SmartTrack was killed by Chow is like blaming a vet for putting a horse down when it breaks its leg being ridden over a fence it would never clear (the horse trainer in this case is J. Tory)

 

[TorFuture]

*deep inhale*

John Tory did NOT propose an overground-type line. He and his supporters will tell you they did, but it never got off paper. It quickly devolved into Toronto capital budget dollars getting raked into GO expansion. Parts of which are now on the rocks.

SmartTrack was not a thing. It was always just GO trains, serving GO stations, at GO frequencies. It was John Tory's campaign sticker slapped on the provincial transit system.

Don't @ me.

I don’t see evidence that Tory watered it down. I do see that Metrolinx and the province folded it into Go RER. We never got a new line cobbled together from Barrie and Lakeshore West. We just got more Go stations at Go prices and slow implementation of electrification.

 

[TorFuture]

Saying SmartTrack was killed by Chow is like blaming a vet for putting a horse down when it breaks its leg being ridden over a fence it would never clear (the horse trainer in this case is J. Tory)

Name one Chow transit initiative besides more busses. She did scrap some Go/ST stations.

 

[TorFuture]

I think there's a lot here to unpack, because there's a lot of different pieces in something like this.

First, with Bill 98, the fare difference between GO and TTC is likely already going away. So the city doesn't need to run the line, there's all going to be one unified fare structure for the GTA.

Second, it's not that the city doesn't want the stations, it's about trying to get the province to pay for them. Most GO stations are funded entirely by the province, why in Toronto, where the stations function both as origins and destinations, should the city suddenly be on the hook for the costs? The city is also concerned about the insane costs that Metrolinx is charging for the work. The city is hardly a model of efficiency compared to Europe, yet it still seems to run projects better than Metrolinx. I think the city is banking on King-Liberty being important enough for the overall GO network that if they back out the province will pick up the tab. Whereas SCOW is going ahead because they know the province will never consider that important enough to fund.



I think the issue with Tory's plan was that the province had, at the time, already committed to the GO RER project, funded entirely by the province. Introducing SmartTrack into it just made everything more confusing. The province was already doing this, so what did SmartTrack really add? He basically signed the city up to pay for something that province was already planning to pay for. The city is still stuck owing the province hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars for stations because Tory bungled SmartTrack and brought the city into something that was happening anyways.

It's not that people here oppose the Overground-type service, I actually think it's a huge addition to the city, it's that SmartTrack was a particularly poor execution of it.

I agree that in an ideal world Go, TTC, and all the transit systems municipal and provincial in the GTA will get amalgamated into a single GTA transit authority (isn’t that what Metrolinx was supposed to be?) and this system would have a zone/distanced-based fare structure (the promise of Presto?), but the transit systems haven’t implemented the same fee structure and Go remains significantly more expensive than TTC. What’s more, in losing Smart Track, we not only lost the possibility of TTC fares on some above ground heavy rail, we lost the ability to have a new line made from transfers between lines. Sure, getting the province to pay for the stations is a tactic that serves the City’s budget constraints, but what matters is the impact on transit users of having more transit options at an affordable rate.

 

[urbanclient]

Saying SmartTrack was killed by Chow is like blaming a vet for putting a horse down when it breaks its leg being ridden over a fence it would never clear (the horse trainer in this case is J. Tory)

Wasn't SmartTrack largely killed by Metrolinx as around 7 of the 13 new stops from the 2014 proposal would cannibalize ridership/were made redundant by planned projects? Said Metrolinx projects will be finished 2 decades after 2014...

Ontario Line, Line 2 Scarborough extension.

St Clair-Old Weston, East Harbour are getting built. (2)

Spadina-Front and King-Liberty are in limbo. (2)

These 7 are at least somewhat redundant:
Ellesmere, Lawrence East were already SRT stations, and are ~2 km away from Line 2 SSE stations. (2)
Gerrard and Queen are Relief/Ontario line stations. (2)
Matheson Airport Centre, Kipling, and Scarlett/Jane were replaced by Eglinton West extension. (3)

14th Avenue is probably dead. Finch-Kennedy is in limbo. (2)

 

[Amare]

Wasn't SmartTrack largely killed by Metrolinx as around 7 of the 13 new stops from 2014 would cannibalize ridership/were made redundant by planned projects. Said Metrolinx projects will be finished 2 decades after 2014...

Ontario Line, Line 2 Scarborough extension.

St Clair-Old Weston, East Harbour are getting built. (2)

Spadina-Front and King-Liberty are in limbo. (2)

These 7 are at least somewhat redundant:
Ellesmere, Lawrence East were already SRT stations, and are ~2 km away from Line 2 SSE stations. (2)
Gerrard and Queen are Relief/Ontario line stations. (2)
Matheson Airport Centre, Kipling, and Scarlett/Jane were replaced by Eglinton West extension. (3)

14th Avenue is probably dead. Finch-Kennedy is in limbo. (2)

Smarttrack was always DOA.

It was always pixie dust, put out there by a clueless status-quo mayor who wasted all of our time and money.

 

[urbanclient]

Smarttrack was always DOA.

It was always pixie dust, put out there by a clueless status-quo mayor who wasted all of our time and money.

Do you think SCOW and East Harbour (and Bloor-Lansdowne) were just broken clock, twice a day?

 

[Amare]

Do you think SCOW and East Harbour (and Bloor-Lansdowne) were just broken clock, twice a day?

East Harbour would've gone ahead regardless because of the Ontario Line project.

St.Clair/Old Weston and Bloor-Lansdowne, who knows. If it wasnt those 2, it probably would've been another group of stations (had Tory pressured Metrolinx to build additional GO Stations in Toronto, instead of coming up with his idiotic concept).