Opinions vary, but a TTC subway extension northbound was needed yesterday, or 5+ years ago (and don’t get people started about the extension to York University). If we’re lucky, we’ll see an extension to the Yonge line north to Highway 7 in eight years (see second last page), of which only five are actual construction.
And if you look at page 7, you’ll notice that this extension is only 6.5 kilometers. So 6.5 km in 8 years. If you believe in Wikipedia, this is something amounting to an improvement over the last extension — the Sheppard line — which was 5.5 km in 8 years.
I don’t know about you, but this seems downright atrocious. To put things in a bit of perspective, construction on the Chunnel was completed in 6 years. So in the time it takes to extend the Yonge line 6.5 km, plus one more year, others have built roughly 50 km of track underwater. Should we, perhaps, be embarrassed?
Okay, so maybe that was a bit of an apple to oranges comparison (and only because the Chunnel is way cooler than a middling subway extension). Comparing subways to subways, in the time it would take to construct our subway extension, the Chinese built an entire line. Line 5 of the Beijing Subway, to be exact, spanning 23 stations and 27.6 km.
In 5 years, the Chinese have also built the first phase of Line 10, and this phase alone is 22 stations and 24.68 km in length.
I mean, come on.
But if there’s a silver lining to all this, is that in their latest expansion, the STM took 5 years to extend their Orange Line 4 km and build 3 new stations. So I guess we can laugh at them for being slow?
Tags: logistics, misadventures, ttc
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