[URBAN NOTE] My poor TTC

[rfmcdonald]

After some sort of security-related incident at Spadina station, the westbound subway cars were halted one station east, at St. George. Fortunately 26 Dupont westbound leaves from that station, and even more fortunately, it arrived at the station just a couple of minutes after I arrived on the platform. When I got off the bus, dropped off a couple dozen metres from my doorway, I reflected on my love for the TTC, how it helps knit Toronto together, collapsing distance and letting all sorts of non-geographically defined communities formed.

That is part of why these two news items, reported by Torontoist, make me so unhappy. Is the TTC never going to be what it can be?

Transit Stuff, the official TTC merchandising shop in Union Station, is closing down.

Transit Stuff was opened in 2006 by Legacy Sportswear, a Woodbridge-based apparel outfit, to better make use of the company's TTC merchandising contract, which it was first granted in 2000.

Since then, it's received mostly negative attention over the years (if it's received any attention at all). After it opened, Eye called the shop "a sort of CNE-grade t-shirt store"; BlogTO referred to the merchandise as "ugly, boring, bland and painfully unfashionable"; and former Torontoist contributor Kevin Bracken wrote that "you wouldn't be caught dead wearing it."

In four years, nothing changed. In its dying days, Transit Stuff’s shelves were still stuffed with cheap apparel with designs that looked like they were stolen from the 1980s (not in the good way), with knick-knacks, and sweaters for the Leafs, Raptors, and Blue Jays. Perhaps the most authentic part of the store was its grimy interior and utilitarian layout, which managed to perfectly capture the worst of the TTC's aesthetic.

TTC chair Adam Giambroneseems to have confirmed that the Downtown Relief Line, a subway line that would helpd ivert traffic from the main east-west Bloor-Danforth line by tracing an arc southwards towards Toronto Harbour, is going to be trapped in study hell.

Seeing the current and future challenges at Bloor-Yonge station, on the Yonge line, and perhaps eventually also the Bloor-Danforth line, the TTC recently restarted studies on the Downtown Relief Line. The study will cost three million dollars, and is being broken down into two phases. Phase 1, which will be completed by the end of this year, will look at ridership, capacity, and transit policy issues for serving the downtown core. Phase 2, which will be completed by the end of 2011, will consider rapid transit needs up to 2031; it will look at different technologies, possible routings, and possible station locations. And, importantly, it will let the City know what property must be protected so that future construction may be considered.

At the current $300 million per kilometre cost for subway construction, this is anywhere from a three billion– to eight billion dollar–line, depending on how long it is. Due to the large amount of big buildings in the downtown core, this will be a very challenging project and, unlike the 1980s, when surplus industrial land was available in the east end for a new car-house, today much of that land is already spoken for.

[. . .]

There will be public meetings late this year and early next year, and the study will be done by the end of 2011. While the DRL is in the twenty-five-year funding plans, the last few months have shown there is little appetite financially at the Province for large projects, so it will be interesting to see if the DRL is ever built.

So. The TTC is no longer going to have much of a material existence in popular culture--no shirts, hats, badges--and it isn't going to be expanding its critical subway routes significantly. I mourn.