Scarborough Subway Project - Part 2

Part 2: The TTC-City Planning Proposal

Here is the TTC-City proposal endorsed by Council in June for further study. It’s at the “5%” stage of design. Council directed staff to continue working on this design and any other alternative design that would bring subway service to our Centre.

·     Station is shown as a blue rectangle

·         Work site is outlined in Yellow or Orange

·         Tunnel boring machine insertion shaft is beige hexagon.

The TTC-City Proposal
The McCowan Route

The TBM Launch Shaft: The City-TTC’s plan proposes to purchase/expropriate the Lazy-Boy store on the north side of Progress, demolish the store, excavate the launch shaft and start the tunneling from that site.

The Subway-Bus Terminal Station: The first and only station proposed by TTC-City Planning would be located on/under the east parking lot of the Scarborough Town Centre shopping mall…basically the whole parking areas east of the movie theatres. They would purchase or expropriate this land from the mall.

It’s not just a subway station: there are +\-14 TTC bus routes coming into Scarborough Centre Station today, plus several GO bus routes, plus long distance Greyhound and Megabus routes serving places as far away as Montreal, plus buses going to places like Casino Rama. The city proposes to relocate all of these to their proposed new terminal station in the east mall parking lot.

 To get this volume of buses into-out of their proposed station, TTC-City Planning staff tell us they will have to ‘rebuild’ roads like Progress Avenue and McCowan Road. We haven’t seen the plan. We haven’t seen the cost estimate. We don’t know how long this will take. We don’t know the impact on how you use these important roads.

The Work Site: TTC-City Planning staff propose to purchase-expropriate the gas station and the plaza on the south side of Ellesmere between Saratoga Drive and McCowan Road, and/or some of the homes on Stanwell that back onto McCowan for their work site.

They would demolish everything, excavate a huge hole down to track level and build the conveyors and cranes you can see in the picture below.

Two possible configurations of the Work Site:

Here is the work site on Eglinton west of Leslie for the Crosstown LRT:

This is where the conveyors bring the excavated material back from the TBM and lift it up to the surface. It’s dumped into the heavy trucks which will haul it away to the disposal site. There are tall cranes to raise and lower construction material into/out of the hole. There may be a concrete batching plant, basically very tall silos and other mechanical equipment to mix the huge amounts of concrete required.

The work site generates a tremendous volume of heavy truck traffic.

If the TTC’s work on the Spadina Vaughan subway is anything to go by, here’s our estimate of what has to be delivered to and lowered into the work site in our neighbourhood:

·         265,000 m2 of concrete

·         7,300 precast rail bed ties

·         47,000 tons of steel rebar

·         36 kilometers of rails

·         36,000 precast tunnel liners

·         And tens of thousands of fixtures and fittings.

We haven’t seen the staff plan to ‘manage’ this volume of heavy truck traffic. It is likely they would build a ‘temporary’ traffic signal on McCowan just south of the Ellesmere intersection to get heavy trucks off the work site and turned northbound on McCowan to the 401.

They may need a second ‘temporary’ traffic signal at the Saratoga-Ellesmere intersection for heavy trucks turning left into the work site.

The work site would be in operation 7 days a week for 5 years.

To get a sense of the size and nature of an operating work site, take a look at the video just released by Metrolinx, celebrating the delivery and installation of the last precast tunnel liners in a portion of the Crosstown LRT. The work site is on Eglinton just west of Leslie.

https://youtu.be/EvRuSYPNsyg

 Hours of Operation

 We haven’t heard anything from staff on the hours of operation of the work site.

 Here’s information from the people who are building the Crosstown LRT tunnels:

 In order to assist with keeping transit building projects on time and on budget, a special by-law was passed for major Toronto transit projects in 2010. The hours of work as permitted by the City by-law are between 7a.m. and 11p.m., 7 days a week. Some overnight work may be required and permitted. The contractor will not always work during the extended hours, but may do so at its discretion. These permitted hours of work will assist contractors to operate a double shift to keep construction moving. We recognize that this means lots of construction activities will take place, but noise and vibration monitoring equipment is in place to monitor levels and ensure that they are within acceptable legal limits.

 Eventually, once the tunnelling machines are in the ground, underground tunnelling and associated work may continue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Employee Parking

 It takes a lot of people to build a subway. 7 days a week. From 7 in the morning to 11 at night. Some work overnight in a double shift. We haven’t seen a plan for where these people will park.