Hey guys, welcome back to the channel! So, today we are going to be talking about something
that is a volatile topic: the Scarborough Subway. Now, I’ve never really dipped my
feet in the water here, so please spare me yelling in the comments, let’s all be relaxed,
and just discuss this thing from the facts. So, the Scarborough Subway replacement plan,
the plan we have. Let’s start with the facts: it’s unnecessary.
Currently, there is a route, the Scarborough RT, that runs literally across the entire
route that the planned one-stop line, which is the one that, as far as we know, is going
to be built: Doug Ford has proposed a new plan, however,
I haven’t really seen movement on that in months. I’m not sure it’ll happen, especially
if the amount of conflict you see politically between the city and the province. I think
the city might end up winning this one. Nonetheless, irrespective, the Scarborough
RT covers 99% of the land that the Scarborough Subway would be covering, so question one
is: why do we even need the subway? So there is one good reason for a subway:
there’s only one good reason. Okay, there’s two reasons.
One is that the subway would have more capacity potentially than the SRT because the subway
platforms and the trains are simply larger than what the stations [have], and frankly
the width is much larger than the SRT trains. So technically yes, the subway would have
higher capacity, though not that much higher because if you remember, the SRT uses the
same technology as the Vancouver Skytrain system, which has a max capacity of about
more than 2500 people per direction per hour. The Toronto Subway‘s only at 3500 people
per direction per hour, so it’s solidly about 70% [of] the capacity.
Now, Vancouver Skytrain also explains how exactly we can make this line modern, fresh
and nice without having to spend 3 million dollars and actually losing stations on our
subway network. Yes, there are a few concerns: because there’s
a curve at Kennedy, and there‘s a curve after passing Ellesmere station to the north
towards Midland that is a bit too tight for the Skytrain rolling stock that Bombardier
has developed over the years to use — currently the issue with the SRT is that it is still
using the oldest type of rolling stock: the Skytrain Mark I cars, which you can see in
our Skytrain videos, there’ll be a link in the video description. Because they’re
using the oldest cars on the SRT, they’re kind of worn down, they’re not very good
cars, they only have two doors per car, the cars aren’t interlinked, they feel very
narrow; they’re just old and clunky.
Now, the newest cars are actually very nice: the ones Vancouver has, the Mark IIIs (again,
there’ll be a link in the description to check out what we could have on the SRT).
What I envision happening is: you’re already doing a ton of construction at Kennedy and
Eglinton for the crosstown, there’s going to be an eastward construction at some point
that’s going to require more construction, why don’t what you do is simply relocate
the SRT station on the land — so perhaps where there’s a parking lot just to the
south of the current SRT station, you could link up a new set of platforms.
There's actually quite a bit of land, there’s not a lot of high-density development, so
there’s plenty of room at Kennedy to add some new platforms such that you can straighten
out the curve that’s currently limiting us to use those garbage cars on the line.
That would mean that we could use more modern cars; that's a big win if we have modern cars.
And that means we could have a lot more capacity since they’re a lot larger and they have
a lot more doors than the existing cars.
Second things to fix: remove the curve at Ellesmere. Again, this wouldn’t be cheap,
but this and the Kennedy relocation project combined, I can't imagine them being more
than 1 billion dollars, which sounds crazy: that's a lot of money, right?
But we’re spending 3 Million to get one subway station, so I have a lot to work with
here. Now, imagining that we did spend 1 billion to reengineer the curve at Ellesmere, we could
stretch it out, there's plenty of room — you could even elevate it over the Stouffville
line — but you could re-engineer that curve. You could replace the station at Kennedy:
you could make the station at Kennedy much more modern — I would point to any of the
Skytrain stations on the Evergreen line in Vancouver as examples of what they could look
like — but there's a lot of modern, airy designs that we could use for the new Kennedy
station. You could also do some work on the existing
stations, which actually has some value. A station like Lawrence East, for example, it’s
fairly nice to have because that way Lawrence actually has three stations across its width.
Having a station like that is very nice. I’m not sure that the platform is currently
long enough for the Mark III SkyTrain cars, however, those platform extensions could happen.
There’s quite a bit of land available around the SRT stations. I’m not sure what the
deal with Lawrence East GO station on Stouffville line is, but I'm not really concerned about
that happening if we still had the SRT.
That being said, since we have so much money, we could spend another couple hundred million
to majorly renovate Lawrence East, Ellesmere, Midland, Scarborough Centre, and McCowan.
We could basically rip them down to their bare components, rebuild them. I mean, most
of them are concrete boxes, so we can make them look more modern, cleaner, we could put
in some nice new tech, so some next train screens some new bus bays: just features of
some of the newer stations. They could even put in some platform screen
doors, which is something that I think would be absolutely fantastic, and could actually
turn the SRT into a line that everyone’s like: “Wow, I’m so excited to ride the
SRT”, not you know, just the utter depression it is right now.
So, you could upgrade all the stations, you could rebuild Kennedy and the curve at Ellesmere,
you could have new trains: we are still under our budget of the one-stop subway. I don’t
want to talk about actually extending the line, but given the location at Kennedy being
above grade, it is totally possible to extend the line south, which could be worth considering,
maybe to the beaches or something like that. You could also continue to extend the line
north, perhaps it could turn off Scarborough Centre, skip McCowan, and head towards Sheppard
as its kind of planned with some of the Scarborough Subway expansion plans. I do think a station
at Sheppard would be useful because eventually, you could extend the Sheppard Subway east,
and you would have this kind of eastern loop on the subway system.
So that’s what I would say in terms of expansions.
And finally, you could give the whole OMSF a whole overhaul, clean the whole thing up,
make it more modern, expand it to handle the newer trains, and then finally you could rework
the existing trackage. I know there are issues in winter because
there’s not a lot of room on either side of the tracks to remove snow, so something
as simple as a shed with a slanted roof over the top of the critical areas where snow buildup
is really bad, so you could just have the snow either pile up on top and slide off the
corridor, or you could do something of that length.
Building a shed would be relatively cheap in comparison with digging a several kilometer-long
tunnel for one subway station. Anyways, guys, that was a bit of a rant, but
the current plan is just not very good. We have a line, let’s just use the line we
have, let’s upgrade it, let's make it nice, let’s not throw away a pretty good technology.
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a good night.