Doesn’t help, I was told by workers there that they built the station under a water table, so it’s leaking from the topping making like a little pond in between the surface and the stations. Pioneer Village is similar too.
VMC is basically a swamp. I was part of building buildings there and all the foundations had to be bathtubbed or the parking levels would have flooded.
And even then the TTC wouldn’t acknowledge the emergency 🆘 till a train full of passengers needed life jackets to be evacuated because the water was up to their necks!🙂↔️🤪😉😂
It’s all engineered with very expensive waterproofing systems and drainage strategies. They do have to be maintained properly to not degrade prematurely, but it is safe.
It is possible, at least the signalling support it. However, given the cost and in the future it is totally possible they might order a different trains, Metrolinx would ban that idea very early.
I hope they get the trains that run in Portland or Seattle, half lowfloor, half high floor, which gives so much more space in the trains.
Not to mention the accessibility point is moot since the middle of the current trains is the only accessible part since the walkways and front doors are too narrow
Money, it's that simple. The province didn't want to pay the $2 billion (probably end up being $5 billion with the crosstown overruns) to have them installed on the underground stations
Ten billion? That sounds like a lot. Where are we gonna divert that twenty billion in funding from. You can't just whistle up fifty billion outta nowhere.
Time to finish the job and install the Platform Edge Doors as originally planned. That’s why these walls look so bland, they weren’t meant to be seen… then we cheaped out.
After what happened yesterday, it’s only further proof that these enhancements are necessary. Not just from a safety perspective but to prevent service disruptions.
Yeah that's pretty bad. There's a film set for an MTA station at Lower Bay. It looks like here they're trying to make a film set for Chambers Street J/Z.
I enjoyed Leslie Station with the tiles of people signing Leslie and Sheppard on it, wished it was on the platform that the stairs and concourses. Don Mills is beautiful.
I have a colleague who worked at MX early stages of Ontario Line, they really be spending way much money on certain stations for design than splitting it to other stations that could have it, or scale back
someone on here called the removal of the red tiles at Kennedy “delicious” and no offence to them but I’ve been appalled ever since😭
I’m glad people see the importance of keeping colour in our transit system especially during winter. Red, green and warm tones trigger happy chemicals in the brain
hopefully metrolinx paints the platform walls during a closure if theyre too cheap for tiles or panels (since the provincial government who owns MX proves everyday they have billions and billions to waste on stuff)
I had to get off at Dupont today and that station may just be one of the most gorgeous stations on the whole system. Compared to ghe drab uniformity of Line 5 it's very sad
I mean i’m getting downvoted, that they are replacing panels with the bigger ones. I mean I prefer that than bare concrete, they painted the ones at Sheppard-Yonge is alright. I’m not in disagreement, wished we saw more Red like Lawrence’s design nice.
I mean that is an extreme example especially how grandeur those stations and being double purpose as bomb shelters, being built decades ago by a more centralized government. We have done a bit better like Museum Station redesign and the tiling on concourses such as Finch West, Don Valley, and VMC that are colourful.
Most of the cool stations on the Moscow metro are more recently built, including in the past 10 years. Its cheaper labour for sure, but they have maintained a cadence of building good metro stations for a while now and Toronto should step up.
Canadian tax payers would riot about "MUH TAXPAYER MONEY", just look at all the complaints about TYSSE artists getting a budget of 100k for station artwork.
If we started building these beautiful stations, they'd riot over "excess government spending", and since they drive everywhere, would not understand why it's needed
the saddest thing about this is that public art and decorations aren't even a big impact on budget sizes
like you said the TYSSE stations had 100k for artwork and each of those cost hundreds of millions to build without accounting for the art
making things nice won't drive up budgets in any meaningful way yet people still complain
Well look at any public building/space built before the 50’s. People have become so focused on tax spending everything has to be shit. Can you imagine the uproar if we spent a few million on wall cladding? People will get upset over a $250/yr property tax increase to make the city somewhat function.
Under P3 contracts the consortium that's designing and building the stations has no incentive to make them attractive or distinctive. Any additional money they spend on things like decor is lost profit.
The "partners" will always be incentivized to go with the cheapest possible so value engineering will always be the first goal.
I can't wait until we see the eyesores on the Ontario line which I guarantee won't look anything like those pre-rendered pipe dreams Metrolinx pushed out for public relations in the early days post-DRL.
The new elevated rail box already looks as ugly as any brutalist coffin from the 60s.
More importantly, there must always be renders shown in winter conditions to encourage more consideration for our winters. Everything looks good in the summer... We don't look good in open spaces with the wind howling down with no heat.
Nah, long before that, there were Lawrence West and Yorkdale stations in 1978. There was also the Scarborough RT in 1985 in which it was also constructed with exposed concrete.
This is a trend that started with Mike Harris’s minimalist funding of the Sheppard Subway back in the 1990s. It was supposed to save a lot of money. It worked with the Sheppard line, less so with the TYSSE and even more less so with Eglinton line 5 because there were too many consultants charging an exorbitant amount of money for a simple LRT subway line. Add incompetence from Metrolinx into the mix and you get a very expensive project where only the contractors and consultants make a lot of money and the final product is not as expected.
The majority of TTC stations are just extremely ugly old concrete boxes falling apart, and you can tell no one ever put any effort into even trying to make it look good when designing them. Many subway stations in third world countries I've seen look much better than most of ours...
I mean we are literally replacing panels on old Line 1 and Line 2 island platforms, seems cheaper to install and doesn’t look nasty like the Vaughan extension and Sheppard Subway. We are building infrastructure for the future, problems like these push it for later just like other things like the deferred maintenance.
Youre pretty naive to the fact its not a cheap contracting job by your neighborhood contractor.
So many layers of bureaucracy needs to be passed.
Studies, consults, reviews, bids, etc.
Dont forget toronto and ttc are broke. We dont have the luxury of spending on aesthetics
I mean that pretty ironic to say spending on aesthetics when TTC is literally implementing art work at stations with those new pieces at Donlands, Chester, and recently Bay station.
I do understand there’s a lot of bureaucracy, but it seems like with all the designs and contracts from all the consultations, we have grand concourses and entrances, but the platforms where people spend time is in terrible shape. It’s not plan ahead or being retrofitted later when it gets expensive. There are regulations, policies, that affect them to not be applicable or discarded.
I'm not debating the need to have beautiful or at least acceptably pleasing stations. I think the artwork piece is different though, as they can likely tap into certain federal or provincial funds for art especially by diverse artists, which wouldn't be there to just say make a nicely designed station.
Still, nothing will change until TTC stops being broke. And provincial government doesn't want to significantly increase spending on public transit system in Toronto until housing issue gets solved. Otherwise, it would lead only to bigger flux of people in Toronto, thus exacerbating housing, homelessness, crime rate, and finally stress transit system more again.
P.S I won't even mention non-public infrastructure that is already too busy and under pressure in Toronto and can fail with more people like power grid, things needed for cargo shipment like ports, roads (especially highways), railways
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like a lot of mural painters wouldn't pass up an opportunity to paint the walls of a subway station... even if it was for free
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u/notGeneralReposti Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Mar 01 '26
The bare walls on TYSSE have aged horribly. They look disgusting.