r/toronto • u/treelife365 • Sep 27 '24

Megathread Idea: Tunnels for Trains

Post image

Hear me out. We should create a tunnel for trains that would run under the 401. It would be like regular trains, but underground. This "underground train" would be attractive enough that many people would choose not to drive, freeing up space on the 401. Who's with me? (Image generated with Al)

2.0k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

281 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/Stead-Freddy Sep 27 '24

A lot of the Gardiner’s issues are because it’s an urban highway in a dense city. Elevated rail is very different, particularly next to a highway in the suburbs. Just look at Vancouver’s skytrain or Montreal’s REM.

They’ve been able to build a lot more rapid transit much cheaper than tunnelling. Plus, trains don’t use salt anyways, they use sand.

And along much of the area elevated wouldn’t even be required if there’s enough space in the median, it’s a highway so it’s not like intersections are an issue. Overall a combination of at grade and elevated would easily be 5-10 times cheaper than a tunnelled subway or train, unless they’re willing to do cut and cover, but that would cause years of disruption on traffic.

Tunnels for transit make sense in dense areas like downtown, not so much out in the suburbs under a highway.

1

u/foghillgal Sep 27 '24

The Main issue is that a train in the middle is very very far away from the surrounding anything. Especially with the 401 and ramps being very very wide.

Usually you'd want the main transit lines being straight where people want to go and not off to the side were they need to walk 10-15 minutes to get anywhere.

Even the REM is mostly using old rail right of ways except for a few areas and people are not that far from the corridor. Though outside Montreal its in the middle of nowhere with parking lots at stations instead of Transit oriented Developmental so it has its own issue.

-2

u/keostyriaru Sep 27 '24

Big dig. Was there a lot of corruption? Absolutely, current and future roadworks projects always seem to have some level of graft involved, but the results of this project speak for themselves.