The Eglinton Light Rail – The Story from The Ground!

One of the problems with commenting on “other people’s” transit stories from “other cities” is that one does not get the full story and what may seem to be a problem caused by “A”, was really caused by “B”, compounded by “C”.

Mr. Cow is a Canadian Transit Professional, who lives not far from Toronto and offers his expertise on my previous post.

The problem that I see is that the politcal machines and news outlets in Metro Vancouver, point to the cost issues with light rail and compare them to our SkyTrain system. It has been brought to my attention that a local CBC Radio program said that light rail system in Ottawa was a disaster and an another failure of light rail, which is far from the truth, where politcal interference largely caused many of the problems with the Confederation Line. My fear is the $13 billion price tag for the Eglinton LRT will be used against any future light rail planning on this side of the Rockies.

Subway construction is horribly expensive, but with a planned maximum daily ridership of 300,000 customers, a subway maybe justified. In Vancouver, we are building a now almost $4 billion, 4.5 km subway to move a mere 50,000 to 60,000 customers a day.

Let us not forget in Metro Vancouver, the government took a $1.63 billion light rail plan and turned it into a $6 to $7 billion SkyTrain line, which has been ignored by the legacy mainstream media including the CBC!

From Mr. Cow.

It’s LRT Zwei. It had to have a tunnel because many parts of that corridor of Eglinton is far too narrow for surface LRT. People sometimes forget how old certain areas of cities are in eastern North America. The Yonge/Eglinton area for example, was a long busy crossroads community even in the 1820’s. In1837, the area was the site of the Battle of Montgomery’s Tavern in the Rebellion of 1837-38 here in Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec). Major portions of Eglinton Ave never had streetcars, the sections that did have them were literally widened by moving or destroying the existing buildings during the late period of the Toronto Railway Company and the early TTC period (1910-1925). Most Toronto roads are based on a right of way width of 66 feet or an imperial “chain length”, where as many parts of the Crosstown’s tunnel corridor were laid out with a 52-56 foot width.

The tunnel section exists because that section of Eglinton Avenue East & West, although a major east west concession road under the original British land survey of Upper Canada, like most of Ontario’s main roads, was unfortunately, laid out as a “residential avenue” when that section of farmers road was being developed in the 1870’s-1890’s. When it started becoming a major commercial street as well during the 1890’s through to the early 1910’s, many commercial businesses at the time, complained of its narrow nature. Even when I was a student planner in Toronto in the early 1990’s, certain sections of Eglinton Ave. West were so narrow, although there appeared to be 4 lanes with a centre turning lane, you couldn’t open your car door in an emergency to get out of your car in those lanes without the door being stopped by a very close vehicle or utility pole. There was just no room.

The 5,500 p/h/d is there because it’s based on the bus numbers before construction began. Much of the eastbound Eglinton West bus routes prematurely ended at Eglinton West Subway Station and didn’t continue through to Yonge and Eglinton. Eglinton Ave East had most of its bus traffic siphoned off to the Davisville Subway Station because by 2010 the bus bays at Eglinton Station which dated from 1954 (the opening of the Yonge Subway), were too small due to the  narrow streetcars and buses that the Eglinton Division used before 1954. Those bus bays had become too difficult to access (due to traffic and location), with modern buses by the time construction was actually started.

The line is expected to have 110,000-120,000 riders per day on its opening day, its designed for 300,000 per day because  Mayor Rob Ford who had the original design changed, hated Transit City, LRT or anything to do with streetcars and wanted,”subways, subways, subways and only subways!”. Unfortunately, outside of the tunnel portion, most of Eglinton’s bus passenger counts don’t warrant anything close to a full scale subway line. Not to mention, those areas of Eglinton East and West are more than wide enough for surface LRT. The Eglinton West LRT extension currently is mostly tunneled because Premier Doug Ford  (Mayor Rob Ford’s older brother) also dislikes anything that interferes with road traffic.

The high cost of the Crosstown was primarily due to Rob Ford changing the original tunnel and station designs after 2010. Originally, the tunnel stations were to be much simpler, with limited access points to reduce costs, that changed under Ford. Rob Ford stated he wanted the entire length 19 km, in a tunnel.

The second problem was the portion of LRT tunnel that went directly under the original Yonge Subway tunnel box  (built between 1947-1952, opening in 1954), revealed that, by 2015, the then 63 to 68 year old tunnel box floor was going to fail if you dug underneath it. The construction lateness was due to having to spend 6 years redesigning the LRT Tunnel box and reinforcing/rebuilding 450 metres of the Yonge St. Subway tunnel box floor. All this construction occurred while the Yonge Street subway was still operating and therefore had to be done slowly and carefully. The resulting court case was because the builders of the Eglinton Crosstown didn’t want to pay for that. The TTC, the City of Toronto, Metrolinx and the Government of Ontario disagreed with that assessment.

The fact that the famous TTC Guage wasn’t used and standard gauge was used was simply done to decrease cost and the fact that originally, none  of the Eglinton Crosstown or any Transit City LRT line were to be TTC run or operated. The LRT network and the streetcar network were separate entities.

The standard gauge LRV’s also can’t navigate Toronto’s incredibly tight streetcar track turning radius of 8-11 metres without significant modification (modern LRV’s are limited to 25 M radius turns), these modifications lead to not being able to operate in multiple car trains. The new streetcars Toronto uses had this issue, the standard answer is to use smaller streetcar or tram bogies instead of the common standard full sized railway bogies preferred by all builders.

Many European cities including Karlsruhe, have this same issue by the way. Many of the “zwei” powered LRV fleet can’t operate on certain streets due to turning radius issues. Some of the track rights of way in Karlsruhe, like Toronto as well, date back to a time of tiny 6 to 10 metre long streetcars pulled by horses. The usual answer to this problem, using smaller tram or streetcar bogies instead of the larger standard railway bogies becomes problematic in Karlsruhe, the smaller streetcar bogies have difficulty on long sections of mainline railways that they travel on, due to their being “too light” for lack of a better term, for use on main line railway tracks.