The Eglinton Crosstown is delayed again. What's wrong with this project? - "big infrastructure projects are multidimensional — you can easily change some policy or input that has little to no impact on outcomes (or makes them worse!). At the same time, it’s worth asking if we as a society have really had a discussion about what needs to change so that big public works project start, well, working again. Now, if you’re familiar with the infrastructure construction space, you’re probably aware that it’s very common to lowball budgets and timelines to try to win political approval and the like, and that’s surely a problem here... Of course, part of the problem here is clearly media pressure. You will never get as much attention for finishing early and under budget as late and over budget, and this means that contingency that amounts to slack is often added to projects post lowballing to avoid letting people down. If you increase the budget enough, and give yourself enough time, you can never be late or over budget!... When you compare Vancouver’s recent transit projects to those happening in Ontario, the results are rather shocking. The Canada Line built for the 2010 Olympic games was completed on budget — which was a fraction of the price of current projects — and ahead of schedule. And even the Evergreen Line referenced above was only delayed about 6 months, despite having major subsidence issues resulting in large sinkholes when boring the project’s tunnel. Clearly, something is going on in BC (more likely multiple somethings) that is leading to better projects... smart construction methods, experienced contractors and extremely careful management. Lower risk approaches were taken, which reduced the risk of the project being delayed, and this also reduced the risk of cost overruns — which are often a direct result of delays!... One of the obvious ones is cut-and-cover tunneling. the Canada Line project more or less used cut and cover where it was easily practical — notably on the wide Cambie Street on the southern part of the tunneled section in the city of Vancouver. Cut-and-cover works were completed fairly quickly (remember, the whole project was three years), but even still, public and media backlash has meant that it will likely not be used again anytime soon. Shop owners sued successfully for disruption and the media has poured gasoline on the fire for years, but it seems pretty clear to me the disruption on Eglinton Avenue — where works have been going on for several times as long — has been far worse. If citizens and businesses are going to scream if you do the construction method which is faster and less expensive, and probably just better for society as a whole, making it no longer politically acceptable, that’s a really bad outcome!... Stations are one of the most costly and time consuming parts of building a transit line, given their scale and complexity, and so the Canada Line massively simplified these facilities as well — while providing the same capacity as the Crosstown... it’s not just on the west coast where there are lessons to be learned. Montreal’s REM project is building a 67km regional metro network faster and less expensively than the Crosstown... The media has a role to play in these dynamics. Toronto’s “BlogTO” culture of chasing clicks and headlines by hyperbolizing problems and disruption dumbs down conversation about important issues and distracts from underlying problems"
Ballooning costs and out-of-control delays: The story of public transit construction in Canada - "the politicization of transit proposals, often tied to the choice of construction, is a major source of disruption for such projects. Spoke says the political will to push past local opposition is required if higher levels of government want to see new transit built... Kyle Owens, president of Functional Transit Winnipeg, says eagerness by people and governments to unveil signature projects often results in approving them without proper consideration for the costs. “Everybody loves a ribbon-cutting…but it is very difficult to commit financially to those projects because of the resources involved,” says Owens. “The solution for a lot of municipalities is to just spread out that investment to extend the timeline so they never really need to make a significant commitment early on but they can still get the benefits of having approved the project.” The Eglinton Crosstown LRT has attracted criticism from residents along the planned route. Many of these critics also oppose building denser housing in their neighborhoods, as well as the potential loss of a local Tim Hortons due to LRT construction, stating it would be a major loss to the community. Spoke says the popular choice of “cut and cover”, the process of digging up road surfaces to build shallow transit lines before covering it back up, is more efficient than tunneling at deeper depths but attracts more opposition from locals. The Ontario Line, a 15-stop subway line unveiled by Premier Doug Ford in 2019, has been criticized by local residents along its planned route. One city councillor declared the line would resemble the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre if trees along its route were removed during construction... the prevalence of NIMBY (Not-In-My-Backyard) sentiment is a significant impediment to building new infrastructure within cities. “There has always been NIMBYism in the cities, people who’ve objected to the messes and the expropriation of properties,” says Wickens. “But people seem less willing to sacrifice on the level of people of that generation that endured the Great Depression and fought World War II.”... there are more impediments to building new transit than just NIMBYism, such as the reliance on the Public-Private Partnership (P3) model for building infrastructure... the budget planning process in Ontario is opaque and harms public trust in those responsible for building transit... investing in better service within existing transit systems is necessary to increase public enthusiasm for more public transit. He argues that although Winnipeg’s physical transit infrastructure, which currently features only buses, was improved last year, the service quality remained largely unchanged due to the number of buses remaining the same."
Toronto councillors demanding answers from Metrolinx about Ontario Line transit project : toronto - "And being public does much good? A bunch of NIMBYs roll themselves out to kill projects. Just look at the stupidity over a handful of trees that just occurred. Frankly, the downtown relief line is one of the fastest moving transit projects I’ve witnessed in decades. Whatever you are doing - it’s good for the city. Fuck the NIMBYs... this is exactly the problem with public consultations. Well thought out designs made by hundreds of professionals have to be questioned by every person in the city with absolutely no qualifications or experience in the field. They then try to stop projects based off their zero experience - thinking absolutely no professional had their idea, no work was done to check if that was feasible, and no work was done to weigh the best possible outcome."
Metrolinx announces plan to chop 2,800 trees in the Don Valley
Public transit is good. But trees are also good. So block everything and then complain about how delays and cost overruns show that the government is corrupt and incompetent
Environmental groups shocked after Metrolinx announces plan to chop 2,800 trees in the Don Valley : toronto - "I guarantee that you’ve never read an environmental impact assessment before. They have the duty to notify and consult on many things, and many of their documents are available to the public, or subjected to the freedom of information act. You can read their plans at any time"
Environmental groups shocked after Metrolinx announces plan to chop 2,800 trees in the Don Valley : toronto - "The more they are transparent about their plans, the more NIMBY opposition they face. They have to get these trees cut down before April 1st to make sure no birds nest in them, if they gave the activists time to organize then building this section of the line could be delayed months which would cost millions. Delays to the Ontario line are terrible for the environment, much worse than cutting down a few thousand trees. Much worse than cutting down ten thousand trees."
Environmental groups shocked after Metrolinx announces plan to chop 2,800 trees in the Don Valley : toronto - "I recognize that trees will need to come down, but does the fact that it's nearly 2,800 of them not cause some concern?"
Environmental groups shocked after Metrolinx announces plan to chop 2,800 trees in the Don Valley : toronto - "Okay, in your opinion, how many trees in that area need to be cut down to effectively build a subway line?"
Environmental groups shocked after Metrolinx announces plan to chop 2,800 trees in the Don Valley : toronto - "Oh shit, here come the Internet Transit Construction Experts."
In microtransit, passengers order a shuttle van instead of having to take a bus. - "Some cities and towns around the U.S. have begun to embrace the model, including the small city of Wilson, North Carolina, population 49,000. The town, about 55 miles east of Raleigh, took the dramatic step of replacing its bus system with on demand minivans about two years ago, and says it's been a game changer for residents. Before, the city had five fixed bus routes that ran once an hour. "That's really trapping for people," said Wilson's city planner, Rodger Lentz. "Now the system covers 100 percent of the city. So there's nowhere that is inaccessible by transit... The ride cost him $1.50, the standard fare residents pay when they order a van over the phone or through a mobile app. The vans will take them anywhere within city limits... These days, the service runs about 3,700 trips a week, Lentz said, or more than two and a half times the 1,400 rides the old bus system ran in a typical, pre-pandemic week. Lentz also said the on-demand rides aren't just helping kids get to school, they're also getting people to work... Lentz said the on-demand ride service is costing the city of Wilson about $1.6 million a year, compared to the $1.3 million it spent on bus service pre-pandemic. But for a small city like Wilson, Lentz said he thought it was worth it. "For $1.6 million, we're providing well over twice as many trips and covering 100 percent of the city with a system that picks you up within 15 to 20 minutes of your request, versus a bus that was only running once an hour.""
Why Did America Give Up on Mass Transit? (Don't Blame Cars.) - "One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world. Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support. Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak. Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population has grown. This has not happened in much of the rest of the world... At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies’ only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains... Even transit advocates have internalized the idea that transit cannot be successful outside the highest-density urban centers. And it very rarely is... research says that frequencies of 15 minutes or better—good enough for people to turn up and go without consulting a schedule—are where the biggest jumps in ridership happen. But that is so far off from service levels in most American cities that a 30-minute standard is more appropriate... [at the turn of the 20th century] transit could usually make money when combined with real-estate speculation on the newly accessible lands, at least in the short term. But then as now, it struggled to cover its costs over the long term, let alone turn a profit... public subsidy was politically challenging: There was a popular perception of transit as a business controlled by rapacious profiteers—as unpopular as cable companies and airlines are today. In 1920, the President’s Commission on Electric Railways described the entire industry as “virtually bankrupt,” thanks to rapid inflation in the World War I years and the nascent encroachment of the car... In the popular history of postwar urban development, blame for the decline of the streetcars and interurbans is often placed at the feet of National City Lines, the company owned by General Motors, Firestone, and others in the auto industry that bought out many local streetcar companies to convert their operations to rubber-tired, GM-made buses. But the main issue was not the technology change—it was the decline in transit service, which happened everywhere, whether or not NCL bought the local company... It is not a coincidence that, while almost every interurban and streetcar line in the U.S. failed, nearly every grade-separated subway or elevated system survived. Transit agencies continued to provide frequent service on these lines so they remained viable, and when trains did not have to share the road and stop at intersections, they could also be time competitive with the car. The subways and els of Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston are all still around, while the vast streetcar and interurban networks of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Detroit, and many others are long gone. Only when transit didn’t need to share the road with the car, and frequent service continued, was it able to survive... The coup de grace was the Westway, a project proposed in 1974 for a new expressway in Manhattan to replace an old elevated road that had fallen into such a parlous state that a truck driving to repair a pothole fell through the deck the year before. Westway seemingly incorporated all of the latest ideas in infrastructure, moving the road underground to be topped with waterfront parkland. Still, the idea of spending scarce infrastructure money on a highway when the subways were in a state of disrepair rubbed many New Yorkers the wrong way. Ultimately, after years of protest, it was killed by a judge who determined that its effect on the striped bass was not adequately considered in its planning... light rail lines often operate as isolated systems, with little connecting bus service to provide access to people not within walking distance of their stops. And though cheaper to build, light rail lines are often too slow and have too low capacity to make a truly meaningful dent in a city’s auto orientation. Nevertheless, light rail has been a successful catalyst for transit revival and denser development in many cities."
So much for liberal conspiracy theories about the automobile industry
It is interesting that the writer imagines that public transport to suburbs could've worked if it'd been tried, when he later notes that 1960s-1980s public transit was only successful where density was sufficiently high. He also paints NIMBYism in a good light when it was about blocking urban expressways, without recognising that it also makes public transit unfeasible, either directly (protests against the transit) or indirectly (protests against the density that makes transit sustainable), not to mention it blocking all other development
"Service drives demand", yet there're examples of under-utilised public transit
Why Public Transportation Works Better Outside the U.S. - Bloomberg - "Like Americans, Europeans saw the car as the wave of the future after World War II. Automobiles became a symbol of postwar reconstruction, from the Citroën Deux Chevaux to the Volkswagen Beetle. Cities across Europe developed elaborate plans to accommodate cars, bulldozing many historic neighborhoods (if they hadn’t already been destroyed in war) to make way for wide roads and parking. Urban areas expanded dramatically with the construction of suburbs and new towns. There was an important difference with what was happening across the Atlantic, however. Even in a country like Switzerland in 1960, which had a per-capita income higher than the United States, vehicle ownership per capita was barely a quarter as high as in the U.S. What happened? Unlike their American counterparts, European planners designed new suburbs in ways that made transit use still viable. Many new towns were built around train and metro stations. Early U.S. suburbs like Levittown, New York, on the other hand, were built along highways and had virtually no transit service at all. They’re almost all still built on the model developed in the 1940s: single-family homes on isolated streets, with stores surrounded by parking lots a decent drive away. In contrast, places like Vällingby, a Swedish suburb outside Stockholm built in the 1950s, were sited around a new Metro station. Building rail infrastructure through built-up areas is extremely expensive, but building it through farmland, before new neighborhoods are built, is comparatively cheap. This is the model that cities like Copenhagen, Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam have used. Instead of building highways first, which tends to make neighborhoods auto-centric and de-prioritizes transit, European cities tended to put transit first when they built new neighborhoods. Many, though not all, major cities in the U.S. have a number of rail lines radiating out of their centers. Most of them are only used by freight or a few commuter train trips a day. It’s a huge, untapped resource. There’s no reason why those railway lines can’t be turned into what are effectively subway lines—high-capacity routes that allow people to get across the city quickly—without the immense cost of tunneling... A good feeder bus system can save huge capital costs, because it can bring people to the existing rail line, thus eliminating the need to bring a rail line through existing development to the riders. Converting existing rail lines to run real transit service can be shockingly cheap: Ottawa converted a lightly-used freight route to a five-stop rail transit line with trains every 15 minutes for only $16 million. By comparison, one station on New York’s Second Avenue Subway cost $740 million; the 2.2-mile-long D.C. Streetcar cost $200 million. Even on lines with heavy freight traffic, adding extra tracks for passenger service costs a fraction of the cost of subway tunnels. For another example, take Munich, a German city with a population roughly comparable to that of Denver or St. Louis. It has 95 kilometers of subway—only about half the length of Washington’s Metro system. But on top of that, it has 434 kilometers of S-Bahn, which is like American commuter rail, except that it uses the same fare as the local bus and metro service and its trains come every 20 minutes, all day... It would never have been affordable for Munich to build that many miles of rail if it had to be in tunnels, like a subway. But most of these lines were already built a century before and had previously been used just for freight, long-distance, and conventional commuter trains. So it was comparatively cheap to adapt them to also provide local transit service. With that many kilometers of rail transit, the idea of centering most development around rail stations is actually realistic. The 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were a time of almost unimaginable highway construction, in both the the U.S. and Europe. Many European metros are encircled by expressway networks that would impress anyone from L.A. or Houston. In Germany, for example, high-speed Autobahnen go just about everywhere. The land of BMW and Mercedes-Benz boasts a strong car culture, and its plans for a national network of expressways were first formed in the 1920s; indeed, these highways helped inspire America’s interstate build-out. But Germany never stopped building rail systems... Fares need to be low enough that people can afford to take transit. New York City will soon join other cities like Tucson and Ann Arbor in having discounted fares for low-income people. That is important to make transit accessible to everyone. But fair fares isn’t just about keeping fares low. It’s also about eliminating arbitrary inequities. People shouldn’t have to pay a transfer penalty or a double fare just because they switch from bus to rail, transfer between agencies, or travel across the city limits. A transfer is an inconvenience—you shouldn’t have to pay extra for it. Fares should be set for the convenience of riders, not government agencies. A trip of a similar distance should have a similar fare, regardless of whether it’s on a bus or train, or if you have to cross city limits... In the German-speaking world, even when transit is run by many different agencies, they cooperate in a “traffic union” that coordinates fares and schedules... transit can be successful even in typical North American postwar suburbs. The key? Providing good service, even in places that are typically deemed “not transit supportive.” It’s worth looking closely at how things happened differently for a nearby neighbor: Toronto, Ontario... Despite its high service levels in low-density areas, Toronto’s transit system is also far less subsidized than any major American system. It gets about 70 percent of its revenue from fares, compared with 47 percent for the New York City Transit Authority, 30 percent for Boston’s MBTA, and 21 percent for Miami-Dade Transit—strikingly, a pretty clear inverse relationship with service level."
Toronto actually has lower population density than D.C. and San Francisco, but a busier subway system. American individualism might have something to do with this
Train: *Graffiti, homeless man sleeping on seat with newspaper, man mugging someone, Jordan Neely being restrained, rat, spilled drink, trash on floor, man peeing*
