GO-Urban
GO-Urban was a planned mass transit project for Greater Toronto to be operated by GO Transit. The system envisioned the use of automated guideway transit vehicles set up in hydro corridors and other unused parcels of land to provide rapid transit services without the expense of constructing tunnels. GO-Urban would serve high-density areas in the downtown core, but also be able to accelerate to high speed between distant stations in the outskirts of the city. Similar deployments were planned for Hamilton and Ottawa.
The planners initially selected the Krauss-Maffei Transurban maglev system as the GO-Urban vehicle, but this ran into serious technical and funding problems and was eventually cancelled in 1974. A new vehicle, known today as the Bombardier ART, was introduced to fill the niche for the Transurban. However, by the time it was ready for service in the early 1980s, changes in the provincial government ended official support for the entire GO-Urban concept. Only a single short demonstration line was built in Toronto, the Scarborough RT.
Although GO-Urban was never built as envisioned, the ART vehicle has seen use in other cities. Today it forms the basis for the majority of the Vancouver SkyTrain system and several shorter lines in cities around the world.
History
Expressway plan
Following World War II, like most other North American cities, Toronto entered a period of urban sprawl that was fed by the creation of large highway systems. The highways were built by the province, not the city, and did not enter the city core. Commuters could approach what was then the outskirts of the city, but getting to work in the business areas on the shore of Lake Ontario was extremely time-consuming. As more and more of the population moved into the suburbs, an efficient transit system that served these users became increasingly important.Starting in the 1940s, various plans were developed to greatly expand the highway network within the city. In 1954, the new regional government of Metro Toronto was formed to serve the growing area. Its priorities were infrastructure, including water systems and transportation so as to develop the suburbs. The highway plans to serve the suburbs were adopted into the Metro Toronto Official Plan. Construction of some portions of the network had already started at this point, including the Gardiner Expressway along the lake shore and the Don Valley Parkway on the eastern side of the downtown area. There was initially little controversy as they were developed in areas that were formerly industrial or undeveloped, but as the Gardiner approached the downtown area it required the destruction of some houses.
By the late 1960s, the mood of the citizens had changed considerably. As the routes were extended, the number of houses that would have to be torn down increased dramatically. In addition, there was an increasing understanding that having more cars in the downtown area was not advantageous as the amount of gridlock and air pollution increased. There was also growing understanding that the construction of highways led to a flight of capital out of the city cores that caused the rapid urban decay seen in US cities in the 1950s. A report by the planning association admitted this in 1961.
As the debate intensified, the Spadina Expressway became a focal point of citizen concern. The Spadina route ran directly through several densely settled neighbourhoods, including one particularly upscale area of the city, Forest Hill. Adding to the debate was the recent arrival of Jane Jacobs, a tireless campaigner who had managed to end construction of the similar Mid-Manhattan Expressway in New York City. She was able to bring the same organizational powers to the Spadina debate, twice arrested in the process.
On June 3, 1971, Ontario Premier Bill Davis rose in the Provincial Legislature and stated "Cities were built for people and not cars. If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop." The expressway plan was dead, and in its place was a new plan to develop mass transit systems instead.
ICTS concept
If a mass transit network was going to be able to replace a highway, the system would need to offer the convenience of a car. Chief among these considerations was the total end-to-end trip time. Although the vehicles did not have to travel as fast as cars, they did need to have clear right-of-ways that eliminated non-scheduled stops or slowdowns due to traffic congestion.Subways are the canonical example of a separated mass transit system that can outperform cars even though their inter-station speeds can be quite low. However, subways were expensive to build and demand high ridership levels in order to justify their capital costs. The sort of density needed to provide these levels were found in the downtown area, but the suburbs were too spread out. Buses could serve these areas, but were subject to the whims of traffic and were much slower than a car on the same route due to their frequent stops.
What was needed was a new system that could offer the trip times of a subway but with much lower capital and operational cost. Since a considerable portion of the capital cost of a subway is digging the routes underground, the new system could reduce this by operating aboveground, perhaps elevated. This meant that it had to be very quiet, as the main complaint about elevated railways was the sound of the wheels, especially as they rounded corners.
Another consideration was the cost of the stations, which was a factor of the size of the trains. In order to reduce station costs, and the cost of elevated tracks, the trains would have to be smaller than a normal subway. Finally, to reduce operating costs, the system should be completely automated and have as few moving parts as possible. The new system would be aimed at ridership levels above that of buses, about 5,000 passengers per hour per direction, and below that of subways, at 25,000 PPHPD and over. The result was the Intermediate Capacity Transit System concept, aimed at ridership levels between 4,000 and 20,000 PPHPD.
The ICTS would be used in a new network of three major lines in the Toronto area known as GO-Urban. GO-Urban's main line started at Finch Avenue and Jane Street, running down Jane to Eglinton Avenue where it bent into a U-shape passing through the downtown core, then started north again, hitting Eglinton again at Don Mills Road and continuing north along Don Mills to Finch. For a portion of the route, especially in the downtown areas, the route ran in existing rail corridors. A second line ran east-west across Eglinton, mostly underground, from the Malton Airport in the west to Finch and the Don Valley Parkway in the east. Here it joined the final line in the network, running in the hydro corridor along Finch from near the airport in the west to the distant reaches of Scarborough and beyond in the east.
Similar systems were planned for Hamilton and Ottawa.
Transurban
Toronto was one of many cities facing the same sort of transit problems, and companies around the world were already developing a variety of ICTS-like vehicles under the broad variety of approaches known as automated guideway transit. Although there had been considerable interest in AGT within industry, this had failed to translate into any major purchase agreements.When Ontario announced the GO-Urban plan, it quickly became the focal point for many of these efforts - whatever system Toronto selected would be a major "win" that would help future sales of that system. When a call for tenders was put out in 1971 there was widespread response from industry, and a process of selecting a single system started. The first selection process reduced the field to three; a "space age" maglev entry from Krauss-Maffei known as the Transurban, the Ford ACT, and a version of the Minitram system from Hawker-Siddeley Canada.
One feature of the ICTS requirements quickly weeded out many of the entries. Most AGT systems were designed to service denser areas of smaller cities, or less-dense areas of larger cities. In either case, the systems were envisioned to operate like small subways, with short inter-station distances and fairly low speeds. GO-Urban envisioned a single vehicle operating in these denser environments, then moving along the long-distance routes at much higher speeds.
Ford's ACT was fairly conventional and could not meet the requirements for the higher speed travel; they withdrew from the competition. The Transurban and Hawker-Siddeley entries both solved the speed problems in the same fashion; each vehicle in the system could operate at high speed individually, and when they approached the higher density areas they would automatically link together into multi-unit trains. That way they would still have the same, or greater, rider capacity even though they were travelling slower and stopping more often.
Another consideration for the project was that the system had to be built in Ontario, and additional work or sales from Ontario would be considered to be a major advantage. Hawker-Siddeley had an obvious advantage in this respect, but Krauss-Maffei agreed to move all testing and construction to Ontario, as well as using the Ontario office for all sales into North America. The US companies would not match this later requirement, preferring to make sales to the US from their US factories and offices.
In spite of being the outsider, the Transurban's space age maglev concept quickly caught the attention of everyone involved. It had only two major moving parts on the vehicles, the doors and the air conditioning system. In theory, this would lead to far lower operational costs than the rubber-wheeled and motor-driven design from Hawker-Siddeley. It was no surprise when the Transurban was announced as the winners of the contest on 1 May 1973. The company took a share in the Ontario Crown Corporation set up to run location development, the Ontario Transportation Development Corporation.