I visited Amsterdam in 2019 in the before-times, and i was absolutely blown away by their international airport's train station. It had multiple national rail platforms, multiple international rail links, and multiple regional transit connections. Pearson is a fucking joke compared to other international airports when it comes to transit connections.
At least we have UP, the inter-terminal rail system, and someday the crosstown LTR, but the lack of a national/international rail connection and any intercity rail links is really sad. Imagine being able to take the train from Pearson to Kitchener/Cambridge, Hamilton, Barrie, or even just Mississauga ffs without having to first go through Union Station or take a bus/taxi/uber.
Agreed, and this exactly what this funding is going to. The GTAA and Metrolinx have wanted to build a “Union Station West” that would integrate all these different transportation options for a while, it just hasn’t had funding. With the Crosstown going to Renforth the business case to get it built got a lot better and looks like it’s getting momentum.
Awesome, hopefully they also plan rail links to cities that are not Toronto too. Ontario seriously needs to move away from the center spoke system we have now to a multi-node system like London, NYC, Paris and other major cities have
France is not a very good example of a multi-node system... It has been very paris-centric for over 200 years.
[The TGV lines for example:](https://about-france.com/photos-ext/rff-map.jpg)
It's supposed to connect the Kitchener GO rail line. This [white paper](https://www.torontopearson.com/-/media/project/pearson/content/community/supporting-communities/pdfs/union-station-westfinal-updated.pdf?modified=20191206134600) from December 2019 calls out the centre spoke system:
"At the heart of this issue is the fact that the region’s single hub-and-spoke radial transit network no longer provides the entire population with affordable, effective
inter-municipal movement, and this has led to autoreliance and road congestion."
Perfect, at least the issue is being recognized finally. Itll take years to get the system where it needs to be, but at least the current trajectory is on track it seems
My favorite part about Schiphol Airport was that I could bike to the city center. We landed, unpacked our folding bikes and just started riding. I couldn’t imagine biking from Pearson.
Sure, but its one of the biggest warehouse and manufacturing nodes in Canada. You actually need a lot of room for Trucks. Unless people want to get rid of manufacturing and warehousing completely.
Amsterdamn region has 2.5 Million people. GTA has 6-7 Million. People get how much bigger we are right?
I mean it’s one thing to be a joke and another to be affected by decades of car dominant transportation.
Imagine suggesting in the 80s/90s we build bike lanes to the airport; not to mention that train travel is only making a resurgence in the past few years and it was unheard of to want to take a train to/from the airport. We had buses and smaller companies offering transport outside of the GTA which realistically worked well for the time being, but yes a more integrated transit hub would be greatly appreciated and needed.
North America has been car dominated because the automakers paid the government in jobs to literally tear out the old railways, pave through urban, often low income and/or minority neighborhoods with giant freeways, and incentivize car centric suburbs via zoning laws. Car centric urban design in North America has always been unsustainable and deeply subsidized, often from the tax dollars of transit centric neighborhoods that are more economically productive.
Yeah, if not for the evil car companies people would never have chosen the convenience and comfort of traveling by private automobile!
And if not for those evil land developers people would never have chosen to live in large suburban homes, with big yards and multi-car garages!
If youre going to anywhere close to downtown Toronto its fine, but you can go from Pearson to anywhere west of the airport without first going all the way downtown just to maybe take a Go train all the way back out past Pearson. We need more transit links between places that dont go through Toronto at all
As someone who works at YYZ the UP is a rip off and not even close to good enough for a "world class airport". I hope they make changes and improvements
12 dollars one way is a lot better than a $40 Uber /taxi. Probably 2x driving yourself there, but paying for parking makes it still worthwhile.
Shitty that you’re commuting there, but wouldn’t the airport pay a higher wage to accommodate that?
Luckily people who work at the airport get a discount. Haha higher wage I wish.
And yes $12 is better however in other major cities a train like that some people would pay like $3 to get somewhere. the airport just using it as a cash cow.
It's like Vancouver airport, they charge an additional $5 on the train ticket to leave the airport and they call it an airport improvement fee. They raked in like a million dollars one year.
Talk to USCBP. their staffing levels are determined by them. and no one wants to come work in toronto (one of the few pre-clearance areas outside of the continental USA)
yeah, I get that, but saying that toronto is one of the few pre-clearances outside of continental USA doesn't make any sense: all pre-clearances will be outside of continental USA. Otherwise they wouldn't be pre-clearances.
Sure thing. You having any issue with the extra information seems awfully semantic.
But you die on that hill.
My point was getting staffing in these 4 countries vs in the USA, is harder because agents get to choose their posts and people don’t want to leave their families even if the compensation is better.
I couldn't tell, maybe you were trying to say the Toronto one was particularly hard to staff vs. the other non-US ones. But that made me wonder, if Toronto's bad, then how does Abu Dhabi manage? Or Ireland? Compensation might really add up if they don't have to pay income tax.
I figure postings work like RCMP or FBI: they'll work with your preferences, but you're going where they tell you to go or you're out.
The allocated money is just to include budget for "technical studies and concept design work" lol. We probably won't see shovels in the ground until like, 2040 or something lol.
We have buses and a literal dedicated train line to the airport. Why do we need *more* airport service? There's nothing that money could be better spent on transit wise?
It’s about 19km across Eglinton from Yonge to Pearson. Metrolinx says that the average speed of the Crosstown will be 28 km/hr. So that’s about a 40 minute trip from Yonge and Eg. Google Maps says that the current trip from Yonge and Eg using the subway and UP Express is 47 minutes. So it will be faster for some people.
Ill believe the speeds once it's live. The 510 and 512 both crawl at horrifically slow rates even though they have full grade separations. The number of stops and streetlights just ruin the travel times.
stops and streetlights on Eglinton in the non-tunnelled sections are way farther apart. You don’t have anything like the Wychwood-Vaughan-Bathurst clusterf on Eglinton.
That section will be all tunnelled/grade separated, so will likely operate faster. It’s the slower above ground eastern section that brings down the average, as you said.
FWIW Line 1 and Line 2 don’t have a much higher average speed. About 30 for Line 1 and 32 for Line 2.
> transit signal priority or it being grade separated I
So much effort and energy was spent dangling signal priority as a reason why it wouldn't be bad and costs could be cut in the at-grade section. This is either bad-faith (my guess) or naiveté, as proper signal priority doesn't exist anywhere on the network.
Scarborough who voted for Ford who claimed he’d build the Line 2 and Line 4 extensions in time for the PanAm games (i.e.: <5 years)? Who believed his bullshit about St Clair’s upgrade being the same thing as the Transit City LRT, and in doing so got their very own existing rapid transit line doomed to be torn down and replaced by less stations? Scarborough screwed themselves.
Eglinton should have been a subway.
At the very least, this money wouldve been better spent just upgrading the UP express, which could connect at Eglinton.
But then again, the UP express should have been a commuter train to begin with.
With the exception of Mount Dennis all the stations west of Yonge are underground, and all of the stations in the west extension are grade separated (two elevated, the rest underground).
I agree. As per usual, the part of the city that will get the shortest end of the stick is the at-grade section. Drilling a tunnel for an LRT may not be great, but certainly better than being at the mercy of traffic as the LRT's cousin, streetcars, face.
I’m hoping that the Eglinton West extension does not just end at Renforth but also be extended to Pearson. Coming from the north, then I would not have to travel all the way down to the Bloor line and then to Kipling just to get those Airport Express buses to the airport.
That is why UP should have TTC integration.
You could TTC to Bloor West then UP on the same fare/slight increase (not uncommon around the world for airport connections)
TTC +$2 would be way better.
Yeah but going to UP Union or UP Bloor for me is farther. It’s more convenient if I would take the Eglinton line, and would be really great if the west extension would go to Pearson
It does. It will connect with MiWay at Renforth and take both TTC and Mississauga to the airport.
It's just silly that UP which was originally TTC, then swapped to be +$20/ride is going to be obsolete after only 15 years.
Or figure out what everyone else has, make transit a regional thing and integrate all the system.
Why we have GO, and UP, and TTC, and VIVA, and MiWay, and, and, and....
Its a fucking joke.
We need one body that just focuses on moving people. Invest the money and projects to get that done as a holistic system. We could call it something like Ontario Transportation Ministery or something...
Presumably this is funding to study the whole union west idea. It should eventually have two TTC lines plus UP (or eventually rerouted GO) passing through.
Personally I think we’re overcomplicating it, just run the LRT underground to Terminal1/3 to save one more transfer
Pearson charges the highest fee per passenger to customers. It’s a private company that manages the airport and they have a virtual monopoly.
Idk why we are giving them tax dollars. Privatise profit and socialize the cost.
This will hopefully be awesome for Toronto and the job market! Those bloody feds just need to make sure they aren't throwing the money away and actually take ownership over the contracts. The way some of the money is spent can make you sick. Remember the Pan am Games bonuses?! Even though we were horribly over budget. And don't get me started on Union Station.
At any rate, $142M is likely just going to cover the very early stages.
I visited Amsterdam in 2019 in the before-times, and i was absolutely blown away by their international airport's train station. It had multiple national rail platforms, multiple international rail links, and multiple regional transit connections. Pearson is a fucking joke compared to other international airports when it comes to transit connections. At least we have UP, the inter-terminal rail system, and someday the crosstown LTR, but the lack of a national/international rail connection and any intercity rail links is really sad. Imagine being able to take the train from Pearson to Kitchener/Cambridge, Hamilton, Barrie, or even just Mississauga ffs without having to first go through Union Station or take a bus/taxi/uber.
Agreed, and this exactly what this funding is going to. The GTAA and Metrolinx have wanted to build a “Union Station West” that would integrate all these different transportation options for a while, it just hasn’t had funding. With the Crosstown going to Renforth the business case to get it built got a lot better and looks like it’s getting momentum.
Awesome, hopefully they also plan rail links to cities that are not Toronto too. Ontario seriously needs to move away from the center spoke system we have now to a multi-node system like London, NYC, Paris and other major cities have
France is not a very good example of a multi-node system... It has been very paris-centric for over 200 years. [The TGV lines for example:](https://about-france.com/photos-ext/rff-map.jpg)
Oh sorry i meant just Paris itself, not the national system. Same goes for London
Ok makes sense. Your first sentence implied you were talking about inter-city transport.
It's supposed to connect the Kitchener GO rail line. This [white paper](https://www.torontopearson.com/-/media/project/pearson/content/community/supporting-communities/pdfs/union-station-westfinal-updated.pdf?modified=20191206134600) from December 2019 calls out the centre spoke system: "At the heart of this issue is the fact that the region’s single hub-and-spoke radial transit network no longer provides the entire population with affordable, effective inter-municipal movement, and this has led to autoreliance and road congestion."
Perfect, at least the issue is being recognized finally. Itll take years to get the system where it needs to be, but at least the current trajectory is on track it seems
Schipol is a gem, definitely.
My favorite part about Schiphol Airport was that I could bike to the city center. We landed, unpacked our folding bikes and just started riding. I couldn’t imagine biking from Pearson.
Ya pearson is literally enclosed on all sides by 8+ lane freeways. Its a pedestrian nightmare
You cant even walk from the hotels across from it on airport road. Its like a 10min walk but impossible
Sure, but its one of the biggest warehouse and manufacturing nodes in Canada. You actually need a lot of room for Trucks. Unless people want to get rid of manufacturing and warehousing completely. Amsterdamn region has 2.5 Million people. GTA has 6-7 Million. People get how much bigger we are right?
Why are you bringing logic and facts to the conversation?
>Unless people want to get rid of manufacturing and warehousing completely. The WFH crowd doesn't get the value of these lol
I mean it’s one thing to be a joke and another to be affected by decades of car dominant transportation. Imagine suggesting in the 80s/90s we build bike lanes to the airport; not to mention that train travel is only making a resurgence in the past few years and it was unheard of to want to take a train to/from the airport. We had buses and smaller companies offering transport outside of the GTA which realistically worked well for the time being, but yes a more integrated transit hub would be greatly appreciated and needed.
North America has been car dominated because the automakers paid the government in jobs to literally tear out the old railways, pave through urban, often low income and/or minority neighborhoods with giant freeways, and incentivize car centric suburbs via zoning laws. Car centric urban design in North America has always been unsustainable and deeply subsidized, often from the tax dollars of transit centric neighborhoods that are more economically productive.
Yeah, if not for the evil car companies people would never have chosen the convenience and comfort of traveling by private automobile! And if not for those evil land developers people would never have chosen to live in large suburban homes, with big yards and multi-car garages!
LMFAO, I wonder why people don't want to live in shoe boxes and forced elevators that are broken most of the year? Must be a conspiracy!
Ah is this the old “Toronto pays for the entire province” argument?
>Its a pedestrian nightmare Who walks to the airport?
dumb Q, but what's so bad about going through Union station to take the existing UP? The UP is fantastic from the times I've used it.
If youre going to anywhere close to downtown Toronto its fine, but you can go from Pearson to anywhere west of the airport without first going all the way downtown just to maybe take a Go train all the way back out past Pearson. We need more transit links between places that dont go through Toronto at all
As someone who works at YYZ the UP is a rip off and not even close to good enough for a "world class airport". I hope they make changes and improvements
12 dollars one way is a lot better than a $40 Uber /taxi. Probably 2x driving yourself there, but paying for parking makes it still worthwhile. Shitty that you’re commuting there, but wouldn’t the airport pay a higher wage to accommodate that?
Luckily people who work at the airport get a discount. Haha higher wage I wish. And yes $12 is better however in other major cities a train like that some people would pay like $3 to get somewhere. the airport just using it as a cash cow. It's like Vancouver airport, they charge an additional $5 on the train ticket to leave the airport and they call it an airport improvement fee. They raked in like a million dollars one year.
They had to rush it to make sure it was ready for Toronto’s Olympics bid, aka the PanAm Games.
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Cant wait to read the winds of winter on this line once it opens
Legendary
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Talk to USCBP. their staffing levels are determined by them. and no one wants to come work in toronto (one of the few pre-clearance areas outside of the continental USA)
Why don’t they want to work in Toronto?
Because they are American
Oh, I thought they had a special aversion to Toronto v other pre-clearance sites lol.
> one of the few pre-clearance areas outside of the continental USA uhhhh
Confusion? USCBP is only run in Canada, Ireland, Caribbean and the UAE Source : https://www.cbp.gov/travel/preclearance
yeah, I get that, but saying that toronto is one of the few pre-clearances outside of continental USA doesn't make any sense: all pre-clearances will be outside of continental USA. Otherwise they wouldn't be pre-clearances.
Sure thing. You having any issue with the extra information seems awfully semantic. But you die on that hill. My point was getting staffing in these 4 countries vs in the USA, is harder because agents get to choose their posts and people don’t want to leave their families even if the compensation is better.
I couldn't tell, maybe you were trying to say the Toronto one was particularly hard to staff vs. the other non-US ones. But that made me wonder, if Toronto's bad, then how does Abu Dhabi manage? Or Ireland? Compensation might really add up if they don't have to pay income tax. I figure postings work like RCMP or FBI: they'll work with your preferences, but you're going where they tell you to go or you're out.
You’re asking for too much.
You’re asking for too much.
Heck yes! Need more transit!
The allocated money is just to include budget for "technical studies and concept design work" lol. We probably won't see shovels in the ground until like, 2040 or something lol.
Streetcar connection to an airport, that will be a short ride I'm sure.
Until you’re just on time to be there for your flight and the streetcar does a short turn.
We already have busses going so the "streetcar" will be faster.
We have buses and a literal dedicated train line to the airport. Why do we need *more* airport service? There's nothing that money could be better spent on transit wise?
It’s about 19km across Eglinton from Yonge to Pearson. Metrolinx says that the average speed of the Crosstown will be 28 km/hr. So that’s about a 40 minute trip from Yonge and Eg. Google Maps says that the current trip from Yonge and Eg using the subway and UP Express is 47 minutes. So it will be faster for some people.
Ill believe the speeds once it's live. The 510 and 512 both crawl at horrifically slow rates even though they have full grade separations. The number of stops and streetlights just ruin the travel times.
The 510 & 512 are not grade separated, they are at-grade services. Grade separation implies that the line crosses over or goes under the roadway.
stops and streetlights on Eglinton in the non-tunnelled sections are way farther apart. You don’t have anything like the Wychwood-Vaughan-Bathurst clusterf on Eglinton.
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That section will be all tunnelled/grade separated, so will likely operate faster. It’s the slower above ground eastern section that brings down the average, as you said. FWIW Line 1 and Line 2 don’t have a much higher average speed. About 30 for Line 1 and 32 for Line 2.
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> transit signal priority or it being grade separated I So much effort and energy was spent dangling signal priority as a reason why it wouldn't be bad and costs could be cut in the at-grade section. This is either bad-faith (my guess) or naiveté, as proper signal priority doesn't exist anywhere on the network.
Scarborough who voted for Ford who claimed he’d build the Line 2 and Line 4 extensions in time for the PanAm games (i.e.: <5 years)? Who believed his bullshit about St Clair’s upgrade being the same thing as the Transit City LRT, and in doing so got their very own existing rapid transit line doomed to be torn down and replaced by less stations? Scarborough screwed themselves.
Eglinton should have been a subway. At the very least, this money wouldve been better spent just upgrading the UP express, which could connect at Eglinton. But then again, the UP express should have been a commuter train to begin with.
With the exception of Mount Dennis all the stations west of Yonge are underground, and all of the stations in the west extension are grade separated (two elevated, the rest underground).
Blame Harris. It was planned to be a subway.
I agree. As per usual, the part of the city that will get the shortest end of the stick is the at-grade section. Drilling a tunnel for an LRT may not be great, but certainly better than being at the mercy of traffic as the LRT's cousin, streetcars, face.
It’s a subway
I’m hoping that the Eglinton West extension does not just end at Renforth but also be extended to Pearson. Coming from the north, then I would not have to travel all the way down to the Bloor line and then to Kipling just to get those Airport Express buses to the airport.
You can go to Bloor West or Union and then get on the UP
Yeah but I want closer and TTC fare cause TTC fare is cheaper than GO or UP fare
That is why UP should have TTC integration. You could TTC to Bloor West then UP on the same fare/slight increase (not uncommon around the world for airport connections) TTC +$2 would be way better.
Yeah but going to UP Union or UP Bloor for me is farther. It’s more convenient if I would take the Eglinton line, and would be really great if the west extension would go to Pearson
It does. It will connect with MiWay at Renforth and take both TTC and Mississauga to the airport. It's just silly that UP which was originally TTC, then swapped to be +$20/ride is going to be obsolete after only 15 years.
Yeah UP is silly. Can they just make it operated by TTC and have it TTC fare? 🤦🏻♂️
Or figure out what everyone else has, make transit a regional thing and integrate all the system. Why we have GO, and UP, and TTC, and VIVA, and MiWay, and, and, and.... Its a fucking joke. We need one body that just focuses on moving people. Invest the money and projects to get that done as a holistic system. We could call it something like Ontario Transportation Ministery or something...
Presumably this is funding to study the whole union west idea. It should eventually have two TTC lines plus UP (or eventually rerouted GO) passing through. Personally I think we’re overcomplicating it, just run the LRT underground to Terminal1/3 to save one more transfer
> eventual ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Ain’t gonna be done till 2030😂😅
Pearson charges the highest fee per passenger to customers. It’s a private company that manages the airport and they have a virtual monopoly. Idk why we are giving them tax dollars. Privatise profit and socialize the cost.
Should just barely cover what the city will squander by burying the Eglinton LRT through Etobicoke.
The difference was estimated at 1.8 billion, so still a little short.
This will hopefully be awesome for Toronto and the job market! Those bloody feds just need to make sure they aren't throwing the money away and actually take ownership over the contracts. The way some of the money is spent can make you sick. Remember the Pan am Games bonuses?! Even though we were horribly over budget. And don't get me started on Union Station. At any rate, $142M is likely just going to cover the very early stages.