Toronto LRT's

LRTs – the worst example of bad planning by unqualified politicians
They are not rapid – we don’t want them – we want subways



The St. Clair streetcar right-of-way in 1928 (left) abolished in 1936,
and Today (right) restored recently.
No progress in nearly 100 years

The LRTs proposed by David Miller and now by our errant city councillors, are just streetcars. They are slow at 13 km/h on weekdays and 17 km/h on weekends.

1. They cause more gridlock and pollution because they do not allow left turns for cars except at major intersections.
2. They make it difficult for delivery trucks to bring supplies to stores, but our councillors, against the wishes of the voters and with the help of Metrolinx want to build them anyway!
3. The irony is that the TTC bus terminal on Sheppard Avenue west of Scunthorpe Road relies on their 300 buses having the ability to turn left to get to their routes in Scarborough every morning. With an LRT on Sheppard they would be unable to do that, and the TTC never even contemplated this in their planning!
4. Then there is the suppressed Bob Leek fire department report that says the LRT right of way might prevent fire trucks to get to the scene of a large fire in good time or not at all.
5. There is also a high safety risk for commuters like the elderly and young children, who now have to go to the middle of the street to board the LRT at busy intersections.
6. And the TTC does a poor job of clearing snow and ice on their elevated concrete slab so that the elderly cannot safely cross to board the LRT.
7. And jaywalkers will be tempted to cross the elevated platform between major intersections.
8. LRT stops are 600 to 800 metres apart, too far for many seniors to walk. So if they don’t get a subway, they would rather just keep the buses.
9. All left turn lanes at major intersections will be eliminated so that vehicles turning left will stall traffic.

Write or e-mail Premier Dalton McGuinty dmcguinty.co.mpp@liberal.ola.org and the other MPPs to tell them we don’t want LRTs and remind them that the voters overwhelmingly voted for Rob Ford’s agenda for subways. By voting for LRTs now, they are betraying the trust of the voters.

Toronto got rid of the streetcars on Kingston Road and St. Clair Ave in 1936 and David Miller wanted to bring them back and misled us by calling them ‘Rapid Transit’! Are Karen Stintz, Joe Mihevc, Glenn de Baeremaeker, and Adam Vaughan really one hundred years behind in time by wanting to bring them back?

The TTC’s own studies done a few years ago said streetcars create gridlock

They cause gridlock in all directions and traffic jams cause horrendous pollution.

Every major world city like Paris, London, and New York got rid of their streetcars in the 1950’s because they caused horrific traffic jams and pollution.

With our government’s green agenda, we would assume that you would not build streetcars that will create more pollution. When David Miller talked about European cities where streetcars work well, he was talking about very small cities like Brussels which at 30 square kilometres is about 1/20th the size of Toronto or Basel which at 20 square kilometres is 1/30th the size of Toronto.

Cities like London and Paris have recently installed a few LRT's, but this is after having very extensive subway systems in place. The Croydon Tramlink in London serves only one small part of the Greater London Area in the suburbs, which the subway does not serve. The bulk of London is served by a large subway system, which is still being extended. The Croydon Tramlink is separated from traffic and mostly runs along railway lines. In Paris, another city mostly served by subways, some LRT's have been built, but in the existing wide medians of highways. These are very unlike Toronto's 'Transit City' plan which is meant to serve the entire city and will remove street space and make left turns and crossing the street very difficult.

Our politicians never calculate the real cost of building LRTs. When you add in the horrendous cost of businesses and jobs that get killed by the process, the fact that LRT’s are costlier to maintain, require snow removal and must be replaced every 20 years, LRTs are much more expensive in the long run.

No European city ever came up with this asinine idea of running Streetcars on a 6” platform that prevents cars from making left turns.

And during the ‘Designing Transit Cities Symposium’ in November in Toronto, cities such as Paris, Zurich, Portland, New York City, and Washington, none of their experts believed that you should build transit to GET RID OF CARS, but build a Good TRANSIT system and people will leave their cars home. The simple message was ‘people drive because public transit is no good!’

Streetcars on 6” platforms mean no left turns except at major intersections’.

Imagine that every time you want to make a left turn you can’t. You will have to turn right and then make a U-turn at the next intersection. And you will have to do so without the benefit of a left turn lane, because left turn lanes will be eliminated.

Building the proposed streetcars now would bring automobile traffic to a crawl and raise the level of pollution to unheard of levels. So it’s not about pollution – it was nothing more than a war on cars and a war on businesses!

They tell you this project will reduce the number of cars on the road.

Fact: No government has ever been able to get people out of cars, without providing fast, efficient transportation to get people where they want to go fast.

Just one small example how one country failed to reduce the number of cars on the road is the Philippines. They did it by allowing cars with odd licence plates to travel only on odd days, and cars with licence plates with even number on even days. And instead of reducing cars on the road, even in this relatively poor country, everybody bought a second car. Today it takes two hours or more to go anywhere in Manila, and Toronto will soon end up the same.

In Paris, London, New York, Seoul, and Madrid you can go just about anywhere in those cities in 30 minutes or less. In Toronto?

LRTs are killing businesses

Many of our councillors don’t give a damn how many business will get killed with the construction of LRTs. They pay more attention to the city’s Occupy Toronto people, the professional demonstrators who spend all their time figuring more ways to mooch off the taxpayer when they should court businesses and treat them well so they can create jobs that will reduce poverty. The streetcar they built on St. Clair Avenue put 200 merchants out of business and killed hundreds of jobs instead of creating them. The net result is a decrease in jobs. Ontario already lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the last seven years. At this rate there won’t be any manufacturing in Toronto by 2030. And people and businesses are moving out of the city at unprecedented numbers and none of them will continue to pay taxes in Toronto. Even now I know lots of people who do all their shopping outside the city. A recent Globe and Mail article said that the middle class has disappeared from Toronto. And we have recently seen a large increase in the number of vacant stores and run-down strip plazas everywhere

Sheppard Avenue, Finch Avenue West, and Don Mills Road and most other arteries in Toronto do not need a streetcar.

Sheppard Avenue needs a subway, as does Eglinton Avenue. How can we justify the great expense for a useless streetcar running down the centre of Sheppard Avenue, Finch Avenue or Eglinton Avenue? There may be the odd street where a streetcar might be justified, but considering the cost, no one could justify that expense for a project that was put together on the back of a napkin after only a two week study. The city wants to spend $220 million per kilometre to tunnel a streetcar in Eglinton when in Madrid, Spain, they managed to build subways for only $91 million. It’s time our city councillors listened to the advice of transit experts instead of washed up politicians who never achieved anything when they were in power.

The proposed streetcar network is a joke, a real Dinosaur. Miller’s regime was one hundred years behind the rest of the world and so are 25 of our city councillors today!

The city of Toronto spent over one hundred and twenty million dollars on the St. Clair Avenue streetcar and this so-called improvement resulted in saving riders only one minute in travel time from Yonge Street to Lansdowne! And now they want to build more streetcars, the one along Eglinton Avenue from Kennedy to the Airport as a fast link to the Airport. Who is kidding who? How long it will take a streetcar to travel from Kennedy to the Airport? About one and a half hours is the closest estimate. One would have to pack a lunch to take that ‘fast’ route! Do you honestly believe anyone would ever take that route? (Only one percent of passengers arrive at the Airport by public transit – only Vancouver has a chance to improve that with their new elevated system)

Subways are the way to go on Sheppard as Adam Giambrone told the Toronto Star in 2007 two weeks before he changed his mind and wanted LRTs instead. While the initial cost is higher, there is plenty of money available from private sources, pension funds and the Canada Pension fund. The CPP fund invested $3 billion in Australian toll roads, why not invest the money in subways here? Once built, subways are much cheaper to maintain and no snow removal will be required. Subway cars are cheaper than LRT cars, and no overhead wires are required. Tunneling for subways is cheaper because the tunnels are smaller since no room for overhead wiring is needed.

Please my friends join me in fighting this nonsense.

Let us write to all MPP’s to let them know we expect them to support a plan that was recommended by transportation experts and by the voters instead of unqualified politicians who want to push their own agenda for whatever reason and ask them to do what the voters want and to ignore the 25 city councillors who want to rush into something that has already been found to be detrimental to the city by previous studies of the TTC.

We must stop this streetcar construction mania.

We don’t want to build streetcars all over the city that will have to be ripped out in 10 years because they are a disaster and we will have to start all over. Let us build what’s best and is much cheaper in the long run.

How about a 30 year bond or a mortgage to raise the money?

If you wanted to buy a house, but don’t have the money, you’d get a mortgage. Why can’t we do the same for something as important as proper transportation?

Karl Haab, 201-4466 Sheppard Avenue East, Scarborough M1S 1V2 
Telephone 416-292-5959 e-mail khaab@on.aibn.com