TTC relief line: ‘Most us will be dead’ when it happens

Eric Morse —

A full St Lawrence Hall and a distinct air of skepticism tempered by curiosity greeted organizers of a public consultation on the potential form and route of the relief (subway) Line, formerly known as the Downtown Relief Line, on March 9. It was one of a series of four consultations held between March 3 and 12; the others were in Deer Park and two locations in the Danforth area. In addition to the four public meetings, public on-line feedback was enabled until March 27 at the project’s website, www.reliefline.ca.

The skepticism is understandable given that the (D)RL has been around in one form or another since 1910 (54 years before Toronto’s real subway opened), is only one of three major visions now being juggled by the city, and that the concept presented this month is at best described as inchoate. The other two concepts in play are the Scarborough Subway and Mayor John Tory’s SmartTrack proposal, which are considered by insiders now to have the inside track among the three. A melding of the SmartTrack and Relief Line propositions is apparently not being excluded at the moment.

A city member of the City Hall/TTC team told The Bulletin that the city is pulling together a task force that will attempt to coordinate the three project evaluations. (There is also involvement by the Province’s Metrolinx, which seems to favour SmartTrack. Metrolinx was not involved in the current round of public consultations although there have been parallel consultations going on between Metrolinx and City Hall.)

Toronto is still at the point of trying to do studies that would try to estimate the relative impacts of all of the plans on each others’ and on the existing transit network’s ridership. It is currently estimated that the Yonge subway line will be over-capacity by 2031; an assertion which on its own evoked some incredulity among those who wait several trains northbound every day at evening rush hour.

The thrust of this round of consultation was to try to obtain a sense of what the public feels should be the route of the line, along with some indication of favoured (or disfavoured) station locations. The organizers displayed three clusters of potential station locations, one Downtown (the western end), one east of the Don representing the potential midpoint stations, and one along the current Danforth line representing possible eastern terminal stations. The current concept visualizes an eastern terminus somewhere between Broadview and Coxwell. There will have to be a junction to the Yonge line at the western end, but at which station is not yet in consideration. So far, all the potential intermediate stations on both sides of the Don are south of Gerrard.

Given that there might be at most two stations between the Don and Yonge, the sense of the hall was that there would be little direct impact on Downtown. Edward Nixon of South East Downtown Network Alliance (SEDNA) suggested that the greater impact might be indirect, by alleviating pressure on the King and Queen streetcar lines. Nixon also thought that the idea of separate right-of-ways on King and Queen Streets ought to be in play. (A question also came from the hall as to whether the there was any proposal to run the Relief Line west of Downtown to relieve pressure on the east-west streetcars).

It was noted by the presenters that the proposal, formerly called the Downtown Relief Line, is now called simply the Relief Line, as the “Downtown” modifier seemed to evoke visceral opposition from anyone who did not live in the centre of Toronto.

In response to questions, the presenters made it clear that there is no funding in place for the proposal, that the question of funding and the sourcing of funding is at some remove in time from the current evaluation and public consultations process, and that the best estimate of a completion date as things stand might be in the neighbourhood of 15-17 years.

A further step in the process will take place with a meeting of stakeholders on March 24, followed by another round of public consultations planned for late spring of 2015.

Both Nixon and a source in a councillor’s office expressed the view–which seemed to have some currency among attendees—that despite all of the imponderables in play and the evident air of “transit fatigue” among both public and media, the consultation was something worth doing. “If something like this had been done some time back,” the source close to council noted, “It might not have been quite so easy to derail one transit plan after another in the past few years.”

The Keynesian final word of the final question of the public session fell to Judith Nagata of SLNA: “In 15 to 17 years, most of us in this hall will be dead.”