Toronto's new subway communities will create almost 55,000 jobs and 7,000 homes
blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2022/04/toront...
blogto.comPosted Apr 12, 2022, 11:49 PM UTC
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blogto.comWith all these condos the transit system is going to be full before it’s even built
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At least they won’t overload the other lines or roads - the homes would have gone somewhere or prices would have jumped to compensate.
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What do you mean? The neighborhoods they mention here are on some existing lines and you can’t ever predetermine where condo dwellers are going to travel either by car or transit.
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Better than the highways being full before they’re built.
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According to the projections in the preliminary design business case, it should be good until at least the 2060s. And at that point we should consider it a success and start working on a relief line for the Ontario line.
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There was a funny footnote in the city's evaluation of Metrolinx's business case, regarding the line meeting capacity for 50 years after opening (and also while using Metrolinx's inflated capacity numbers), "this estimate does not account for changes in development and growth patterns that will likely occur in response to the Ontario Line's construction."
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The document I linked projects that they won't even have to switch to 100m trains until the 2060s. Even if they're wrong and the line is much more popular than anticipated, that just means they would have to start work on a relief line for the Ontario Line earlier than expected. If there's really going to be that much new demand to travel downtown, it makes more sense to serve it with two large subway lines rather than one gigantic line.
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this estimate does not account for changes in development and growth patterns that will likely occur in response to the Ontario Line's construction
Wait, what? They've built something that draws more people to the area, but didn't include an increased growth pattern?
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More reason to fund public transit! (While also relieving the housing crisis)
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Nah, subways have huge capacity. And each new resident doesnt translate to 1 increase jn rush hour ridership.
And we should be planning the next subway line either way.
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I would love to see GO transit stations turn into transit oriented communities as well. Take you right into the downtowns of other neighbouring cities
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A problem with that could be that neighbouring cities aren't always centered around their GO station
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I agree, but some stations have unused land around it or are not dense enough that they can become transit communities. Off the top of my head… Unionville, Port Credit, Cooksville, Bramalea, Malton, Pickering, Long Branch, Mimico and a lot of stations along Barrie and Richmond Hill would all be good to have some transit communities be built in
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Take a look at the developments around Mimico Station, they are doing exactly that.
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Yes, I am aware and would love to see more of that outside GTA. I know York U is building it’s campus by Unionville GO so that will be cool to see how it develops and impacts the surrounding area as well
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Bramalea Station is in the middle of an industrial area but your point still stands.
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Maybe Guelph would’ve been a better example on the Kitchener line
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Without clicking I choose to believe this means we are building these communities underground. Can’t wait to buy my home in layer 2 Rosedale.
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Wtf are you doing under my mansion?
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layer 2 Rosedale
Underdale.
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Awesome that means that each house needs to house 4 adults working 2 jobs each.
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That's an interesting ratio....
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The People want the jobs that where taken from the back
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[deleted]
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Okay now imagine if those 7000 homes were 1 person homes, or even 2 person homes or even 4 person homes.
Those will not be enough homes for that many jobs
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You know people from the pre-existing surrounding communities or from around the GTA can also work there, right??
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More man slaves for community building a better life? Kidding?
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If we ever get the financials on Dougie's Bullshit Train the scale of theft of taxpayer money will be BREATHTAKING. It will exceed Mike Harris's record by some distance
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People "I hate conservative governments, they short change the population by not investing in infrastructure which costs us more in the long term"
Con government "Here's some grade separated rapid transit right in the heart of Toronto we're fully paying for that'll be useful for a century or more"
Also people "No"
Like I hate Ford as much as anyone, but pick a fucking lane on this shit, people! Go after him for the blood on his hands with long term health care homes, the bungling of Covid handling, our piss poor health system and many many other things. But this recent trend of "He's spending too much money on transit that's just too useful! We could be doing this for cheaper and getting worse transit!" is not it.
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Transit oriented communities are exciting- we need more homes and a new satellite downtown.
But I'm a little fearful about capacity with this new line. It will have smaller cars, lower capacity, and already a bunch of latent demand.
It won't have a lower capacity because of much shorter headways.
It’ll have slightly shorter headways, not much shorter: TTC line 1 has almost completed implementing what’s called “communications based train control” (CBTC) which detects trains in front with more accuracy, therefore allowing short headways. It’ll still have human drivers though. Ontario Line will be driverless, like Vancouver’s Skytrain system. Driverless systems run at much shorter headways than traditional train signalling systems but only a bit shorter than CBTC systems.
Just a random thought. Vancouver’s skytrain system has been driverless from inception, in **1985. ** Over 35 years ago lol.
The SRT is supposed to be driverless too. (It's the same tech) but the Union pushed for an on-board guard.
This resulted in millions of dollars for retrofitting cabins, less capacity and when it first came out, Operators over applied the brakes damaging the wheel much faster than anticipated
Large passenger numbers will overwhelm shorter headways because of the increased dwell times as people struggle to get on and off a jam-packed train. All you’ll get is the smaller trains bunching up behind one another waiting to get into each station, vs larger trains able to enter the station at optimal speed, load more people, and leave quickly.
The Ontario Line trains will be 3 metres wide and 20 metres long.
The Toronto Rocket’s are 3 metres wide and 23 metres long.
The OL will run up to 5-cars to form one train.
TTC Line 1 runs 6-cars to form one train.
This is not as huge of a difference as you are suggesting, and if Metrolinx can get the line’s frequency to even as close as they advertise (90 seconds) then capacity will be similar between the two lines.
Have they confirmed the Ontario line rolling stock's final specs? Or is it still the "trains could be about 100 metres in length assuming a 3 metre car width" from their website? Maybe I didn't search well enough, but I couldn't find anything more concrete than that.
3 metres length per car, and one car less per train, is a lot less space. That's 414m2 for a TR train vs 300m2 for an OL train, or 72% less (yes, not all of the space inside is useable and the proportions of this will vary between types of train and even the types of car within one train). 72% of a TR's crush loading of 1,458 is 1,049. Every 90 seconds is 40 OL trains, or 41,990 passengers per hour, vs 46,650 for TRs (using the TTC's ambition for 32 per hour for Line 1 with ATC), a difference of 4,660, or four and a half OL trains.
This is all just my bad math; however, this still raises a lot of questions. If this line is being built both to take on existing heavy demand and stimulate passenger growth in the areas it will serve, has it been future proofed enough? That's before we consider the costs of having to add in yet another new technology to the TTC, a dedicated yard with its own maintenance facility, dedicated maintenance vehicles, training staff on its idiosyncrasies... vs the DRL's plan for the same heavy rail subway technology that the TTC has extensive experience with, has proven train designs for, and has higher capacity.
You'll excuse my cynicism, seeing the Ontario Line as Son of the Scarborough RT: political meddling by a Conservative government forcing the city to accept their cocktail napkin plan and unknown technology over what had been laid out by actual transit planners.
Wrong. The spec Metrolinx put out explicitly places the capacity below that of the manually driven subway we have right now.
Can you give a citation for that? Right now afaik, Line 1 can carry a little less than 30,000 people per direction per hour. The Ontario Line is supposed to be able to operate at 90 second headways (40 trains per hour) and trains should have a capacity of around 750 people which gives a total capacity of 40*750 = 30,000 ppdph.
Metrolinx actually claimed 850 people per train with 20K/hour opening day capacity with a max of 34K/hour at maximum. Which I do not buy for one second.
This is where Metrolinx and the light metro people get misleading. Proponents of light metro systems usually do this.
The TTC's subway loading standard is a little over 2 passengers per square metre of floor space. Metrolinx is eyeing putting 2.85 passengers into each square metre. This was in the IBC they released 2 years ago. That's how they arrived at these too good to be true numbers.