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 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.
