jmi22 said:
I've never seen a clear explanation for why the TTC completely abandoned anything except below-grade alignments starting in the 1980s.
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Because they didn't abandon planning above-ground alignments. It's was, and still is, specific to each option and location.

For instance, much of SRT extension was going to be above ground. Same goes with its conversion to LRT. The western extension of Sheppard was projected to be above-ground over the West Don River. Hell, it is over the East Don River at Leslie.

But it has always depended on the topography and site. The City has long held transit to be a city-building tool. If you build transit above ground there, it makes it difficult-to-impossible to build anything else on the same land. The SRT worked because it ran in a hydro corridor and along the back of industrial properties. It would have been trickier to build it along Kennedy or Midland, although not impossible.

jmi22 said:
They sub out the elevated tracks over the Eglinton Flats, and an (admittedly optimistic) option for an elevated run up Weston for wholly tunneled alignments, even when they would be crazy expensive as is the case with tunneling under the Humber River. Around the same time period, the proposed Line 2 extension to Sherway along mostly a wide freight rail corridor is proposed as wholly tunneled despite running through wholly industrial and commercial lands, driving up costs to the point of never building the relatively easy extension.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with tunnelling under the Flats, although it does make building the stations at Jane and Scarlett more complicated. I do agree that it does seem wasteful to have planned it that way, however.

The Sherway extension was going to depart from the CPR alignment pretty quickly, so it was going to have to need to go underground to get there.

jmi22 said:
It does not feel like a coincidence that this is the same time period when subway expansion functionally died out (yes other factors were contributing to this) and I can't understand why the TTC basically threw their decades of successful alignment planning out of the window.
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I mean, if you're looking for correlation without causation, sure, you've gotten there.

Subway construction was getting more expensive, absolutely. But that had already started in the 1970s, and is why the Yonge subway extension was shortened to Finch instead of the originally planned Steeles (and why it was built with fewer stations). And that's why they were looking for cheaper technologies to provide three-quarters of the service for half the price - at least if you listened to the marketing wank. But that's how we got the bag of bolts known as the ICTS, and that ended up scaring off people to more subway expansion until we absolutely had to.

The flattening of the Metro level of government, along with the general gutting of the municipalities in general during the Mike Harris era certainly did no favours, either.

Dan
 
smallspy said:
Because they didn't abandon planning above-ground alignments. It's was, and still is, specific to each option and location.

For instance, much of SRT extension was going to be above ground. Same goes with its conversion to LRT. The western extension of Sheppard was projected to be above-ground over the West Don River. Hell, it is over the East Don River at Leslie.

But it has always depended on the topography and site. The City has long held transit to be a city-building tool. If you build transit above ground there, it makes it difficult-to-impossible to build anything else on the same land. The SRT worked because it ran in a hydro corridor and along the back of industrial properties. It would have been trickier to build it along Kennedy or Midland, although not impossible.


There is nothing inherently wrong with tunnelling under the Flats, although it does make building the stations at Jane and Scarlett more complicated. I do agree that it does seem wasteful to have planned it that way, however.

The Sherway extension was going to depart from the CPR alignment pretty quickly, so it was going to have to need to go underground to get there.
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1. That's exactly my point, after a certain time the TTC only utilized above ground construction when absolutely needed and sought to bring alignments back underground as rapidly as possible once major roadblocks to tunneled construction (ie the Don Valley) were passed. Almost any possible extension of Line 4 could use incredibly limited amounts of tunnelling, if any at all (not counting the necessary portal segments from the existing track) but the TTC has never even speculated as to what that would look like in a public manner.

2. A 10m wide elevated guideway does not preclude the intensification of any overall area, and the removal of the narrow corridor from development purposes for transit infrastructure is hardly large enough to impact an entire neighborhood. Nobody would say the continued existence of a 20m wide road inhibits "city-building", so I can't understand how a right-of-way half that width would. It goes without saying there are hundreds of examples around the globe where non-tunneled rail exists perfectly fine in dense, growing urban areas, with many of them being in Toronto.

3. Needlessly tunnelling under the Flats and thus driving up costs, construction complexity and hurting passenger experience is a textbook definition of an "inherently wrong" choice in infrastructure delivery. What other than blowing out costs and worsening station circulation would need to happen for an alignment to be a inherently bad choice in your mind?

4. Where do you pull the assumption that by nature of the Sherway extension leaving the CPR corridor it would *have* to go below ground? The low-rise commercial and industrial lands and parking lots the alignment would pass through is exactly the same context in which Vancouver, Montreal, London and a dozen other cities very frequently build elevated guideways via targeted expropriation for pillar construction. Yes, a hydro corridor and other conflicts exist in the area, that could have been worked around in the same way they worked around them to build the elevated 427/QEW interchange in the exact same area.

I'm not trying to be antagonistic, it just seems there a great many hard-coded assumptions in a now very old, and ineffective (from an expansion standpoint) organization's outlook that has only hurt itself. Additionally, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the TTC's multi-decade run of only publicizing wholly tunneled alignments options or nothing at all was a major driver of the endlessly stupid tunneled subway v.s LRT debates. Refusing to study or advocate for alternative methods will naturally see the expertise and public familiarity with them go out the window.
 
Bojaxs said:
Isn't one of these issues with "cut & cover" is that it requires the relocation of underground infrastructure such as water pipes, fiber optic cables, etc.? Where as with tunneling you can simply go underneath all of that.
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Cut-and-cover was done in the 1950's and 1960's.
Toronto has a big problem with 100 year old pipes needing replacement.
1950's and 60's subway construction temporarily supported those pipes.
So requiring relocation of underground infrastructure is not really the reason some think it is, since a lot of it was in place when cut-and-cover previously done.
It's political. I call it the Jane Jacobs effect.
Activists realized the power they had, so all construction followed the path of least resistance (complaints), regardless of how much the cost was. And if people do complain, it is a lot easier to politicians to state how much money they are spending to satisfy those who complain. Spending money is viewed as a positive.
 
Aplus23 said:
Would a canopy over the open trench segments reduce the need for maintenance and upkeep thus resulting in less slow zones but also be much less cheaper than a full on tunnel??
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Turn the "cover/canopy" into parkland and develop adjacent parkland (office/residential towers) to pay for it.
 
jmi22 said:
Also: new article up on the ECWE
urbantoronto.ca

Eglinton Line 5 West Extension Tunnel, Elevated Guideway Progressing | UrbanToronto

On the west side of Toronto, the West Extension of Eglinton Line 5 has reached a major milestone. The segment of the tunnel immediately west of Mount Dennis station is now fully mined, and work on the elevated guideway is also advancing. As part of the 9.2-kilometre extension of the recently...
urbantoronto.ca urbantoronto.ca

Remarkable how fast elevated guideway construction can be, even with the numbnuts at MX running the show
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Because it's essentially a bridge. Ontari0 (MTO) has a lot of experience building bridges. Presumably mulitple qualified contractors mean reasonable costs. Deep tunneling has no local experience meaning they have difficulty making contracts, contractors have difficulty constructing, and foreinger contractor have trouble understanding local requirements - all increasing costs.
 
How are we feeling about the unenclosed elevated stations? imo i'm not too bothered about it (aesthetically they look fine), but I feel like it's gonna be very annoying when it's windy and/or snowing

x16DuzgAV9.png
 
Westey said:
Because it's essentially a bridge. Ontari0 (MTO) has a lot of experience building bridges. Presumably mulitple qualified contractors mean reasonable costs. Deep tunneling has no local experience meaning they have difficulty making contracts, contractors have difficulty constructing, and foreinger contractor have trouble understanding local requirements - all increasing costs.
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Agreed, it's the same reasons some of the fastest metro buildouts to ever occur were done in an almost entirely elevated manner. Cheap, fast, relativley simple and enjoyed a massive labour pool from which to pull.

As much as record breaking infrastructure projects make great content for 1BM, they don't make for adequately served cities.
 
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