[ssiguy2]

The money is about the number of people served, not just about the distance added !

That's my whole point! The number of people {and destinations} being served by this line is a mere fraction of the number that could be served by GO electrification and/or RapidTO.

I am NOT saying the Waterfront/Portlands will not need superior transit as clearly it will and therefore money spent would be wise IF it was a reasonable price. What will these current 28 meter streetcars with ROW be able to do that a 28 meter Volvo battery bi-articulated bus can't? If they are also staying with the current streetcars than the buses are even more versatile as they can have doors on each side and make extensions much easier even with ROW.

 

[Van647]

Toronto needs a Waterfront LRT but not at any price. This price is obscene and would be laughed at anywhere else on the planet. There is absolutely no way this line can be justified at such a price and the money would be FAR better spent on other needed projects like RapidTO and GO serving hundreds of thousands more passengers and thousands of more destinations. This is particularly true of providing service to unserved area which also are often low-income and the most transit dependent. The last point is crucial as this line wreaks of elitism making sure the well-off who can afford to live near the Waterfront get served before the millions who can't . Of course, that is Chow all over..........a downtown elitist Patrician who claims to support the lower income people but simultaneously would get a nose bleed if she had to go north of Eglinton or, God forbid, people in Scar/Etob/NY. Her photo-op for the opening of the Finch line was probably the first time she had visited the area since the last election and she probably took a shower after doing it.

Not sure how you can call someone using a streetcar in that dingy station elitist... these same Scarborough politicians voted to spend a billion dollars to rebuild eastern portion of the Gardner that sees little traffic and then were shocked they needed more money to get more than one station for Scarborough Subway extension ... may be the fault isn't with the downtown folks .. the speeding high drunken stooper tried to save Toronto city a billion dollars by hiding the accounting, building multilevel parking for a spa, the gravy train is the fat guy giving tax break to builders .. and while you are at it .. exempt yourself from freedom of information / text so your stink in hidden

 

[urbanclient]

That's my whole point! The number of people {and destinations} being served by this line is a mere fraction of the number that could be served by GO electrification and/or RapidTO.

I am NOT saying the Waterfront/Portlands will not need superior transit as clearly it will and therefore money spent would be wise IF it was a reasonable price. What will these current 28 meter streetcars with ROW be able to do that a 28 meter Volvo battery bi-articulated bus can't? If they are also staying with the current streetcars than the buses are even more versatile as they can have doors on each side and make extensions much easier even with ROW.

Your overt love for battery-powered-everything doesn't lend credence to your impartiality.

I've criticized WELRT calling it overpriced even if it includes the Union loop/tunnel stuff. You can look at my post history on this thread. Commiserating over this tiny streetcar network extension. But that's just the way things are in Toronto. Everything is overpriced and somehow lower quality than some third-world systems.

There's no viable alternative to WELRT. Articulated buses don't seem demonstrably better than WELRT either. Where and how are they supposed to stop near Union?

I wish Hurontario, and certainly Eglinton were fully grade separated light metros, at worst like O-Train Line 1/3. However, I don't see light metro working in place of WELRT.

What @nfitz says here is already pushing the limits.

The discussion shouldn't be about the project, but if there's opposition to the cost, remove the expensive bits (Cherry and the new Union loop) and just run Waterfront East service on Queens Quay from somewhere in the west, not entering Union. Then all you need is the portal, and everything else is relatively cheap. That should get it into the hundreds of millions not billions.

As has been mentioned on UT before, had the legacy streetcar system not survived the rise of the automobile, a Queen subway would've likely been built much earlier. And it would've been more likely for multiple downtown subways to be built. I'm of the opinion that all of downtown should be within 800 metres of a subway station, but sadly, that is not the case, and likely will never be the case as long as the streetcars are around.

College-Carlton is 1 km south of Bloor, 1km north of Queen. In a similar sized Chinese city, there would be a subway going from Dundas West station through Queens Park station to College station, maybe even to Gerrard station. (That's not to say I think the streetcar network should be dismantled).

If the streetcars didn't exist, would the next round be spearheaded by a tangential line like Line 4? Instead of say, Ontario Line West or another line crossing downtown? Would a Line 1 extension to Richmond Hill be necessary in 2026?

It's largely because the streetcar network already exists that WELRT makes sense. If no streetcar lines existed, I'm sure alternatives would have been considered for Waterfront East.

 

[xmyth_]

A streetcar line east west on Queens Quay should have been done 40yrs ago. And the Eglinton line should have been completed instead of filled in. And Newmarket and Vaughn should be paying into their subway extensions, and Scarborough should have had a subway forever ago-

Here’s the thing though.

All the “under-served” parts of the city not visited by the “downtown elites” VOTED for that. Scarborough voted for the people that killed transit city. If Etobicoke is a hole, well they voted for a dynasty of anger and air. You get what you wanted.

If Hearn, Basin Media Hub, Ookwemin and Queens Quay are gonna get overbuilt and require transit- that’s not because of some favoured nation status, that’s because there are highly valuable swaths of land that developers see huge money in that the city is going to clear the path to build.

If Scarborough, East York, North York, Etobicoke and York suck because they appear under served in this city- then volunteer up a couple hundred blocks of low density, detached homes we can plow under and expand the city beyond Yonge going north.

But again, that’s the thing. These ex-urbs (am I using that properly?) vote for low/frozen property taxes, they vote for NIMBYism, and they vote for pols taking bribes from developers. They vote to retain low density single family homes that don’t generate demand or tax bases to support the services the downtown “gets”.

So you can’t whine when Ford MZOs a bunch of stuff downtown to support super talls that desperately need transit, so some angry goofball from Aurora can drive his Ford Raptor along Lakeshore at a decent clip.

I’m attaching an aerial of Yonge so we can see the flat parts of the city that vote against their own interests, but can’t stop whining about “downtown elites” and their new streetcar.

 

[JSF-1]

As has been mentioned on UT before, had the legacy streetcar system not survived the rise of the automobile, a Queen subway would've likely been built much earlier. And it would've been more likely for multiple downtown subways to be built. I'm of the opinion that all of downtown should be within 800 metres of a subway station, but sadly, that is not the case, and likely will never be the case as long as the streetcars are around.

Ok I am going to have to push back on this as it wasn't the streetcar network that prevented the Queen Street line from being built, it has always been stalled by politics. Firstly in 1910 after residents voted in favour of Streetcar subways under Yonge and Queen, only for that proposal to be cancelled after the next election due to its cost. Also this first proposal wasn't just about "rapid transit" but also getting around the Toronto Railway Company's ownership of the network. Once the city took over the network in 1921 this stopped being an issue. The next proposal came around in the 40's after WWII with a heavy-rail subway under Yonge and a Streetcar subway under Queen. This was derailed because the Province and Feds couldn't agree on a post-war employment program so only the Yonge Line could be built at the time. The next proposal came around in the 50's/60's but this one fell through because the Bloor-Danforth corridor had become the city's primary east-west corridor and it is where all of the suburban riders from Scarborough, Etobicoke, East York, and York were being funnelled on to. The BLOOR streetcar was way over capacity (something like 18,000pph) and replacing it was now the higher priority. So while politics didn't kill this proposal the city's suburbanization and changing travel patterns did, and the suburbs would continue to be the biggest obstacle for constructing the line moving forward. In 1967 the first wave of amalgamations would see the Villages of Mimico, New Toronto, and Long Branch wiped off the map and with them their support for the Queen Streetcar Subway, leaving Toronto as the lone voice on Metro Council still championing the project. Since those three villages were streetcar suburbs anchored around the LONG BRANCH Streetcar they supported the Queen Line since it would speed up travel times for the streetcar, especially if it was connected to the Queensway ROW. From here on the balance of power on Metro Council shifted to the suburbs and every transit expansion project would be out there as it was both cheaper and more politically popular with suburbanites to extend the subway further into the burbs then build a brand new line downtown. As well with the three villages out of the picture there was no point keeping the line as a streetcar subway, so shortly after this the line evolved into a heavy-rail line. The DRL would pop up again in Network 2011 but that fell through after Davis retired, and the Liberals had no serious plan, and the NDP couldn't afford to build anything (iirc the DRL wasn't even part of the NDP's plan).

So it wasn't the legacy network that stopped the Queen Subway from being built as the city tried multiple times to build it. The blame for this lay largely with the suburbian municipalities which were more valuable to politicans then voters in the inner core. I remember when Rob Ford was making rediculous statments about how "Downtown had enough subways" eventhough not a singe new subway station had opened downtown since 1966. While at the time he was making those statements the Sheppard Line was only 10 years old. Finally the precedent of replacing streetcar lines with subways had already been set in this city as we did exactly that on Yonge Street and Bloor and Danforth, so I don't know how the legacy network prevented us from building a line along Queen Street when we had already replaced 2 other streetcar lines. Ideally we would have built the Queen Line after the Bloor-Danforth, now of course what form the line takes be it a streetcar subway or heavy-rail subway is a matter of debate but as we all know, that is not what happened. Instead the subway was expanded further in Scarborough, Etobicoke, and North York as they were now the ones with the largest voice on Metro Council and the rest is history.