This summer’s derailment of the Scarborough RT is underscoring the need to get serious about replacing subway cars on one of the city’s busiest transit lines, but despite the fact it will take years an order hasn’t been placed.
The TTC’s Bloor-Danforth is regarded as the backbone of a the city’s transit system, helping shuttle hundreds of thousands of commuters. But where its counterpart, the Yonge-University Line, has a modern fleet of vehicles, Line 2’s trains will begin reaching the end of their design life in 2026.
“It would be devastating to lose that service,” said Matti Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute at U of T’s School of Cities. “We have experience and we know what it would look like when we have to run shuttle bus service when the subway’s out of,” he said.
Transit users don’t have to look very far into their collective memories to find recent, chaotic experiences when Line 2 goes down. Siemiatycki points to the amount of shuttle buses needed to ferry people short-term to pick up the slack and said replacing the line’s trains needs to be considered.
“If you stretch the lifespan on something beyond what it was made for, it starts to become brittle, it starts to become fragile, and you do start to see some more issues of breakdowns and reliability,” said Siemiatycki.
Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow is beating the drum to get a deal signed to secure funding.
“I am very concerned about the lifespan of the Bloor subway cars, it is getting very old and it takes a while for us to get new ones and for new ones to get constructed,” she said.
Chow said the city had to recently cancel plans to order new trains, when no other levels of government came to the table with a secure funding plan.
“We have one-third of the funding ready now,” said Chow earlier in the week.
TTC spokesperson Stuart Green said in an email to Global News based on past experience, it typically takes about 3-4 years to see trains delivered from the point they’re ordered.
“We’re in active discussions with the Federal and Provincial Governments about funding the remaining two-thirds of the cost,” said Green said.” “We know they both are aware of the economic and social benefits transit brings and they regularly fund large-scale capital projects and vehicle purchases. We’re optimistic they will be partners on this program as well.”
But the province’s Ministry of Transportation said Toronto officials didn’t include them in planning for new trains and it found out about the request for proposals only after they were submitted by the city.
Ministry spokesperson Dakota Brasier said in a statement that the province is investing $70.5 billion over the next decade to transit projects and nearly half of that has been allocated to the City of Toronto.
Siemiatycki underlines the need to sort out funding sources and soon, noting a key part of transit management is ensuring existing lines are kept up to standard to ensure they can operate for decades to come.
“The TTC has already said they won’t put an unsafe service out there, but we have had a derailment on the SRT,” he said. “We have seen issues with the subway system over the years, and this is something we really need to make sure these systems can be operated in a safe and reliable manner.”
Comments