Rails instead of Roads, only 90 Years Too Late
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 03.24.06
90 years ago Adam Beck, the man who tamed Niagara Falls and built Ontario Hydro was worried about what he would do with so much electricity. Thinking about the future, he proposed a series of electrified rail lines radiating out of Toronto. WW1, politics and the automobile intervened and the few that were built fell into disuse. Not much happened for 50 years and then low density sprawl took over. Now, the Ontario Government has proposed to extend Toronto's subway system out beyond the City for the first time at the cost of close to a billion dollars. Many people think this is a wonderful idea, that an enlightened government is finally investing in rail instead of roads. We are not so sure.
wonderful anagram map of the TTC system, which their lawyers immediately shut down. see the whole thing here.
Don't get us wrong, we appreciate the attention after years of taking from the City instead of giving to it. We also like other things in the budget like the doubling of the tax credit for buying a hybrid. Unfortunately as far as the subway is concerned, the horse is out of the barn.
-history shows that subways get their customers from either dense development close to the subway or decent feeder surface transit. North of Toronto the density is low and the transit terrible. The few buses there are can barely move because the arterial roads are clogged. The distances are huge compared to within the City- nobody is going to sit on a bus for an hour to get to the subway.
-traffic no longer goes from a residential suburb to a downtown core where the jobs are- unfair tax policies have caused most of the jobs to move to the suburbs and most people who live in the suburbs now work in the suburbs. The problem is that the design of their communities is such that they need a car to get a quart of milk, let alone their job. Ultimately here this treehugger agrees with James Howard Kunstler- the suburbs are unsustainable. Building a subway to one point in one suburb will do nothing when people cannot get to it.
Its great, its wonderful, we love people throwing money at us. But it will do little to relieve congestion or save energy- the City is too diffuse, the industrial and employment model has changed. What we need now is a diffuse network of buses in dedicated lanes, bike lanes, light rail in the suburbs between the suburbs. When that exists, linking it to the subway will be useful.
If they had listened to Adam Beck and designed development around infrastructure instead of trying to build infrastructure around development we would not be having this discussion. If it were up to this Treehugger we would take that billion and fill the potholes, make the buses and streetcars run on time, or build Chris Hardwicke's Velo-City bike paths. At least that would get used. ::the Star
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People dont want to spend an hour on the bus? Why dont you try going to a more spread out area like the GVRD (greater vancouver regional district). I very frequently spend 30-45 minutes on a bus that only comes once an hour, in order to get to the skytrain. The alternative to that is me not going anywhere as i currently do not have a car. No one likes being stuck in suburbia. Maybe if you spent any time in the 905 areas WITHOUT a car, you would realize that a bus that comes every hour is much better than walking 20km to a sky train station, if that were even an option.
well if they build the subway then there will be dense development around the stations in the near future, especially if driving won't be so cheap anymore.
i just wonder if it has to be subways, they are very expensive. monorails cost about a quarter and can be put over existing streets.
http://www.skytran.net/
This little thought experiment answers a lot of questions that light rail doesn't. I think that mass transportation has been a semisuccessful experiment, but it is time to start exploring new alternatives outside of the box, which utilize modern technology.
I have to wonder to some degree if the author lives in Toronto. First, the new subway line is going to pass right by the York University campus, one of the most widely-demanded routes for a subway, and one which, serving students, is likely to get a lot of use. Also, many of the surface transit systems north of Toronto, such as VIVA, are actually incredibly good, much better than core surface transit in fact.
However, the part that really made me scratch my head was the suggestion that jobs have moved so that nobody commutes into the downtown core from the suburbs anymore. It's not indicative of Toronto at all. While I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, I'd like to observe that well over 2/3 of the people I know personally do, in fact, commute from the fringes of the city and the suburbs into the downtown core. Toronto's downtown is a triving business hub, especially because of the financial district. I can think of only two people I know who work outside of anything that could loosely be called the downtown core, and I know a fair number of people. My sister lives completely outside the city and takes the GO transit commuter train in (and can walk from her house to the GO station where she lives). GO is extremely popular, with an enormous amount of its use being people commuting in from the suburbs to the downtown core. The problem with GO is that it doesn't go into the northern areas of the city, which is where this subway extension will go.
I'm not a prognosticator, so I won't say that this will be a wild success. However, I think that the arguments presented above are simply not accurate for this city.
Irfon, read Lawrence Solomon here- "To please politicians intent on pleasing their constituents, the TTC compromised in maintenance and cut back service on profitable city routes in order to service unprofitable suburban ones. Urban customers balked at the rough ride they were now subjected to and deserted the system. In the end, virtually all TTC routes became money losers and the TTC became the welfare case that we see today." or Spacing Wire here. Investing billions in commuter lines into low density suburbs is a sinkhole. I will meet you any time at any stop on the Shepard line to discuss this further.
The thing is, if you build light rail, the stations/stops will eventually become hubs. And hubs are major part of good, sustainable, development. If you combine those stations/stops with mixed-use zoning laws, and encourage sustainable development, you've got gold!
But without mass transit, you can't possibly have sustainable development. Buses are ok, but trains are proven to be far better at attracting ridership. And trains don't just carry people from the suburbs to the city, they carry people from one hub to another.
The mixed-use, small town center hub model is the most promising idea yet for creating areas of dense development while allowing access to more rural areas, where farms and environmentally friendly industry can be located. It may take several decades, but if you don't start the process in one way or another, we'll never get there.
And note that with Toronto's winters a subway doesn't have to be kept clear of snow to be useful. How much energy is expended to keep surface roads clear for cars, buses and light rail?
Cleveland went with a cheaper alternative, a new bus rapid transit line, over a subway. Let's see where these different transit systems are in ten years.