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Posted Sep 21, 2009, 6:57 PM
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Join Date: Oct 2008
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http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/698499
Rumbling and grumbling on St. Clair
Quote:
DONOVAN VINCENT
CITY HALL BUREAU
It's about two years behind schedule, has ballooned in cost by $10 million, and the construction has been interminable.
A highly publicized court challenge by residents delayed it, and everyone from motorists to merchants, cyclists to firefighters, has had their beefs.
But by this time next year the entire six-kilometre dedicated St. Clair streetcar line, from Yonge to just west of Keele St., should be finished. The TTC and the city have touted the right-of-way as the wave of the future – the answer to a cry for more reliable transit service along a busy midtown corridor.
Will those promised gains be worth the pain?
Mayor David Miller is aggressively pushing his multi-billion-dollar Transit City plan, which calls for a network of seven light-rail routes similar to the one on St. Clair, to roll out over the next several years.
The aim is transit that's cheaper and quicker to build than subways and that, with raised curbs and limits on left turns, gets cars out of the way. The Sheppard East LRT, the first Transit City line, is to break ground within weeks.
So St. Clair has become a sort of litmus test.
Large sections are finished or near completion, but there's still fierce debate about its usefulness.
Optician Patricia Raymond, who operates an eyewear business on St. Clair, east of Avenue Rd., doesn't believe the "devastating'' construction work she endured was worth it. The section between Yonge and the St. Clair West subway station was completed in 2007 and runs in front of her store.
"The streets were so backed up (during construction) that it took an hour to drive here from a few blocks away. So people just didn't bother to come, and my business hasn't returned to normal yet,'' says Raymond, who has been operating there for 21 years.
"If you ask me if it was better before, I say yes." The right-of-way "is ugly and it just looks like a sea of concrete now,'' Raymond says.
Too much was sacrificed for what boils down to slightly improved service during rush hour but virtually empty streetcars the rest of the time, Raymond argues.
The TTC has no data yet to indicate how that completed section is performing, TTC chair Adam Giambrone said last week. Studies won't be available until sometime after the full line is operational.
But on the streetcar line, the point isn't really about improving speed, says Giambrone.
"No stops (on the St. Clair line) were removed, unlike the new LRT routes, which actually double or triple the space between stops. That's where you begin to pick up speed,'' he explains.
Buses and streetcars average about 18 km/h; subway trains about 32 km/h. Transit City's light rail cars are expected to hit a happy medium of 24 km/h.
Before construction, the entire St. Clair line served 32,000 passengers a day. It took about 30 minutes to ride from end to end.
The dedicated line won't shave many minutes off that, the TTC admits, but with cars out of the way it will take the guesswork out of travelling. Another streetcar will be always be along soon.
"It's like the old adage: there's always a car in sight on Spadina,'' Giambrone says, referring to the Spadina streetcar right-of-way, which opened in 1997.
The Spadina line went through the same growing pains as St. Clair, but 12 years out, ridership has "almost doubled'' and there's a huge increase in reliability, Giambrone argues. "Three or four years from now, things will be good on St. Clair."
Rider Alan Madras, 50, a computer programmer, says that despite some bugs in the design he already finds the streetcar between the St. Clair West subway and Yonge quite convenient.
Councillor Joe Mihevc got an earful from irate residents and businesses during the 2006 election, when construction had left the stretch in his area – from Bathurst close to Oakwood – looking like a war zone. But he still won that vote handily, in what he calls a referendum on the right-of-way.
"If I'd lost here (Ward 21, St. Paul's), Transit City would not be happening,'' Mihevc now says.
Still, there's widespread grumbling. Delays have added $10 million to the TTC's overall cost for the project – it's now at $75 million, transit commission staff say. One reason is that buses are running along unfinished sections, which carry half as many passengers as streetcars. That means higher costs for fuel and wages.
Mihevc says work on that stretch was slowed significantly because other infrastructure projects – replacing water mains and old gas pipes, burying hydro lines – were piggybacked on the work.
Toronto's fire department also expressed safety concerns about the right of way in an internal report last year that described it as unusable for emergency response, and "without doubt unsafe."
Trucks, it said, would smash into the central power traction poles or suffer damaged tires on the curbs, with the width of the pavement only 6 metres instead of the usual 9.
But Fire Chief Bill Stewart downplayed the report, giving the line a thumbs-up.
TTC staff say city repairs to roads and sidewalks will create a consistent height between the road and right-of-way and better allow movement on and off the line for emergency vehicles. Minor fixes in key areas near some side streets will also improve access.
But critics like Jeff Gillan, executive director of the Corso Italia BIA, which represents businesses near Dufferin and St. Clair, say the project is a great example of how not to build transit.
"The city was incompetent in managing this project. There's no reason for it to have taken this long,'' he says.
He believes about 50 businesses in his BIA, which represents about 200 in all, went down due to the construction. Though many have been replaced, about a half-dozen or so vacancies remain.
He's also annoyed no new Green-P parking lots were built in his area as part of the project.
Meanwhile, there will be five new parking lots when work in Mihevc's portion is complete, where before there was zero off-street parking.
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FAR fewer businesses on 10th however.
The thing is look how slow Granville is taking and then think if they were also installing LRT rails, reorganizing all of the utilities and building stations. It would be a mess that would also last years.
10th Ave vs 8th Ave
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