GO-Urban
Encyclopedia
GO-Urban was a major mass transit project planned for the Toronto
area which would have been run 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.
entered a period of urban sprawl
that, like most other North American cities, 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.
A plan developed
through the 1950s to greatly expand the highway network within the city, and it became part of the Official Plan in 1959. Construction of some portions of the network had already started at this point, including the Gardiner Expressway
along the lakeshore and the Don Valley Parkway
on the eastern side of the downtown area. These two highways were developed in areas that were formerly industrial or undeveloped, although the Gardiner required the destruction of some houses in the downtown area.
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 U.S. cites 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 3 June 1971 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.
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 operate with the speed 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 people-per-hour-per-direction (PPHPD), and subways, at 25,000 PPHPD and over. The result was the Intermediate Capacity Transit System (ICTS) 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
.
(AGT). 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
, the Transurban
, the Ford ACT
, and a 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 fans in the air conditioning. 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".
(CNE), just west of the downtown core. The system would open for riders around the park for the CNE show in August 1975, with stops at the GO station on the northern edge of the fair, the large parking lots on the west end, at the gates of Ontario Place
, and the eastern end at the Princes' Gates. It was originally planned that this track would later be extended to Union Station
, downtown, but these plans were dropped.
Within the transit world, excitement about the system was widespread. GO-Urban would be the first production installation of what was then widely believed to be the next wave in mass transit. In 1973 Bill Davis won the transit "man of the year" in the U.S. in a presentation in Florida.
Toronto became a common destination for urban transit planners to meet. An IEEE meeting was held at the CNE in 1973, where a speaker suggested that the federal government should also turn to Krauss-Maffei for inter-city train service between Toronto and Montreal. He suggested that building such a line would eliminate the need for the expensive airports being built in those two cities - Pickering Airport in Toronto and Mirabel
in Montreal.
(TTC) was in the midst of its own route planning. Having concluded that most routes suitable for subway service were already built, they too were looking for some sort of intermediate vehicle. Their search led them to select new streetcar designs as the appropriate solution. A network of road-level, semi-separated and full-separated routes were being planned around the city, and UTDC had been selected to build the vehicles that would run on them.
The small test track at the CNE would not be useful for a full-scale prototype system for GO-Urban, however, and the planners started looking for a suitable location for a short system that could be used in a full production setting. Their attention quickly settled on one of the TTC's planned streetcar routes, extending from the existing subway lines into Scarborough. When these plans were announced, a flurry of press releases from both parties denouncing each other appeared in the press. William Bidell, an assistant deputy minister, said after the CNE test project was half-finished: "I don't care what anybody says – for the kind of environmentally clean and virtually noiseless rapid transit system we want in Metro, there's just no way streetcars can do the job."
The public reaction was negative as well. The mood was downright chilly when the planners held an open house to help choose a route through the Scarborough area, where citizens took the opportunity to blast the system.
and Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm
, and their funding was dropped. The ICTS project plan did not provide enough funding to develop both the vehicle and the underlying maglev technology, and the Ontario government was not interested in taking over the entire project.
There were also technical problems; in testing, the complex systems needed to switch trains on the magnetic tracks froze up in cold weather, and would require a re-design. A US report also noted that the system was surprisingly loud and had poor ride quality. With Krauss-Maffei's financial support gone, and daunting technical problems remaining to be solved, the maglev project died. The test track at the CNE was abandoned in place, with the foundations and a few support pillars already constructed. Krauss-Maffei continued development of the original inter-city Transrapid, but at a very slow pace and through a series of mergers with other companies involved in maglev technology. The first Transrapid system did not enter service until 30 years later.Harald Maas, "Schanghai stutzt den Transrapid", Tagesspiegel, 1 February 2008
and automated train control system remained the same. Instead of the maglev suspension, however, the vehicle would use rubber wheels. It also lost the ability to automatically form into trains, and operate in high-speed/low-speed situations. In most respects it was a much more conventional design than the original Transurban. A new consortium of Ontario companies was formed to take over development, and the newly rechristened UTDC
purchased a parcel of land in Kingston, Ontario
as a testing facility.
In testing it was found that the linear motor that powered the vehicle only worked efficiently if the vehicle was a set distance from the track, and the small amount of play in the tires was enough to upset the system. The rubber wheels had to be replaced by steel ones, but this re-introduced the problem of squealing as the train rounded bends. In order to solve this problem, UTDC purchased several articulated bogie patents from a US developer. Articulated bogies steer each wheel around bends, avoiding the rubbing that makes the sound. With these changes in place, development proceeded quickly.
on the eastern side of Toronto, and another in Hamilton
, to the west. Hamilton eventually backed out in 1981.
The Scarborough route had already been laid out as one of the TTC's new streetcar route, and the TTC was uninterested in switching the service to the ICTS. However, the province was paying 75% of the capital costs for the line and threatened to refuse it if the did not make the switch. A deal was eventually worked out when the province agreed to pay for any cost overruns if the new tracks cost more than the original system. The province briefly proposed that the ICTS also be used between the end of the existing subway line to a new Warden station
, a plan that the TTC said was a waste of money as previous studies had already clearly demonstrated that the ridership levels were already high enough that an extension of the subway was more appropriate.
Construction eventually started in 1981, modifying the work already done on the streetcar route to allow it to run the ICTS, as well as adding a new maintenance yard at McCowen. Required changes to the tracks and stations and delays building the new system meant the route didn't open until 1985, three years after the original plans. Cost overruns ran to $100 million, and even after opening the system ran into many difficulties and the TTC received another $27 million to fix the problems.
government balked at the GO-Urban system and the Toronto subway plan, Network 2011
. Plans were seriously curtailed, and GO-Urban disappeared.
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
area which would have been run by GO Transit
GO Transit
GO Transit is an inter-regional public transit system in Southern Ontario, Canada. It primarily serves the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area conurbation, with operations extending to several communities beyond the GTHA proper in the Greater Golden Horseshoe...
. The system envisioned the use of automated guideway transit
Automated guideway transit
Automated guideway transit is a fully automated, driverless, grade-separated transit system in which vehicles are automatically guided along a "guideway". The vehicles are often rubber tired, but other systems including steel wheels, air cushion and maglev systems have also been used in experiments...
vehicles set up in hydro corridors
Electric power transmission
Electric-power transmission is the bulk transfer of electrical energy, from generating power plants to Electrical substations located near demand centers...
and other unused parcels of land to provide rapid transit
Rapid transit
A rapid transit, underground, subway, elevated railway, metro or metropolitan railway system is an electric passenger railway in an urban area with a high capacity and frequency, and grade separation from other traffic. Rapid transit systems are typically located either in underground tunnels or on...
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
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Conceived by George Hamilton when he purchased the Durand farm shortly after the War of 1812, Hamilton has become the centre of a densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe...
and Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
.
The planners initially selected the Krauss-Maffei Transurban
Krauss-Maffei Transurban
Krauss-Maffei's Transurban was a 12-passenger automated guideway transit mass transit system based on a maglev guideway. Development started in 1970 as one of the many AGT and PRT projects that followed in the wake of the HUD reports of 1968...
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
SkyTrain (Vancouver)
SkyTrain is a light rapid transit system in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. SkyTrain has of track and uses fully automated trains on grade-separated tracks, running mostly on elevated guideways, which helps SkyTrain to hold consistently high on-time reliability...
system and several shorter lines in cities around the world.
Expressway plan
During the 1960s, TorontoToronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
entered a period of urban sprawl
Urban sprawl
Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a multifaceted concept, which includes the spreading outwards of a city and its suburbs to its outskirts to low-density and auto-dependent development on rural land, high segregation of uses Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a...
that, like most other North American cities, 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
Lake Ontario
Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is bounded on the north and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario, and on the south by the American state of New York. Ontario, Canada's most populous province, was named for the lake. In the Wyandot language, ontarío means...
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.
A plan developed
Municipal expressways in Toronto
The cancelled expressways in Toronto were a planned series of expressways in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that were only partially built or cancelled due to public opposition...
through the 1950s to greatly expand the highway network within the city, and it became part of the Official Plan in 1959. Construction of some portions of the network had already started at this point, including the Gardiner Expressway
Gardiner Expressway
The Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway, colloquially referred to as "the Gardiner", is a municipal expressway in the Canadian province of Ontario, connecting downtown Toronto with its western suburbs...
along the lakeshore and the Don Valley Parkway
Don Valley Parkway
The Don Valley Parkway is a controlled-access six-lane municipal expressway in Toronto connecting the Gardiner Expressway in downtown Toronto with Ontario Highway 401, the Macdonald–Cartier Freeway. North of Highway 401, it continues as Ontario Highway 404. The parkway runs through...
on the eastern side of the downtown area. These two highways were developed in areas that were formerly industrial or undeveloped, although the Gardiner required the destruction of some houses in the downtown area.
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
Urban decay
Urban decay is the process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude...
seen in U.S. cites in the 1950s. A report by the planning association admitted this in 1961.
As the debate intensified, the Spadina Expressway
Spadina Expressway
The Spadina Expressway was a proposed north-south freeway in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was only partially built before being cancelled in 1971 due to public opposition. It was proposed in the mid-1960s as part of a network of freeways for Metropolitan Toronto. Its cancellation prompted the...
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
Forest Hill, Toronto
Forest Hill is an affluent neighbourhood in central Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Along with Lawrence Park, Rosedale, and The Bridle Path, it is one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhoods.-History:...
. Adding to the debate was the recent arrival of Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs, was an American-Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States...
, a tireless campaigner who had managed to end construction of the similar Mid-Manhattan Expressway
Mid-Manhattan Expressway
The Mid-Manhattan Expressway was a planned but never built expressway that would have crossed Midtown Manhattan in the vicinity of 30th Street, connecting the Lincoln Tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey to the Queens Midtown Tunnel between Manhattan and Long Island.- Initial proposals :Plans...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. She was able to bring the same organizational powers to the Spadina debate, twice arrested in the process.
On 3 June 1971 Premier Bill Davis
Bill Davis
William Grenville "Bill" Davis, was the 18th Premier of Ontario, Canada, from 1971 to 1985. Davis was first elected as the MPP for Peel in the 1959 provincial election where he was a backbencher in Leslie Frost's government. Under John Robarts, he was a cabinet minister overseeing the education...
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 hiway, 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 operate with the speed 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 people-per-hour-per-direction (PPHPD), and subways, at 25,000 PPHPD and over. The result was the Intermediate Capacity Transit System (ICTS) 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
Finch Avenue
Finch Avenue is an arterial thoroughfare and concession road which travels east–west through the city of Toronto. The road also has short extensions into Peel and Durham Regions as Peel Regional Road 2 and Durham Regional Road 37.-History:...
and Jane Street, running down Jane to Eglinton Avenue
Eglinton Avenue
Eglinton Avenue, originally known as the Richview Sideroad within Etobicoke, is an east-west arterial thoroughfare in Toronto and Mississauga, in the Canadian province of Ontario. Within Toronto, Eglinton Avenue is the only road which crosses through all six former boroughs...
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
Don Valley Parkway
The Don Valley Parkway is a controlled-access six-lane municipal expressway in Toronto connecting the Gardiner Expressway in downtown Toronto with Ontario Highway 401, the Macdonald–Cartier Freeway. North of Highway 401, it continues as Ontario Highway 404. The parkway runs through...
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
Scarborough, Ontario
Scarborough is a dissolved municipality within the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Geographically, it comprises the eastern part of Toronto. It is bordered on the south by Lake Ontario, on the west by Victoria Park Avenue, on the north by Steeles Avenue East, and on the east by the Rouge River...
and beyond in the east.
Similar systems were planned for Hamilton
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Conceived by George Hamilton when he purchased the Durand farm shortly after the War of 1812, Hamilton has become the centre of a densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe...
and Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
.
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 transitAutomated guideway transit
Automated guideway transit is a fully automated, driverless, grade-separated transit system in which vehicles are automatically guided along a "guideway". The vehicles are often rubber tired, but other systems including steel wheels, air cushion and maglev systems have also been used in experiments...
(AGT). 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
Space Age
The Space Age is a time period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events. The Space Age is generally considered to have begun with Sputnik...
" maglev entry from Krauss-Maffei
Krauss-Maffei
The Krauss-Maffei Wegmann GmbH & Co KG or simply Krauss-Maffei is an injection molding machine manufacturer and defence company based in Munich, Germany...
, the Transurban
Krauss-Maffei Transurban
Krauss-Maffei's Transurban was a 12-passenger automated guideway transit mass transit system based on a maglev guideway. Development started in 1970 as one of the many AGT and PRT projects that followed in the wake of the HUD reports of 1968...
, the Ford ACT
Ford ACT
Ford's ACT, short for Automatically Controlled Transportation or Activity Center Transit, was a people mover system developed during the 1970s. One interesting feature of the ACT is that it allowed bi-directional travel on a single rail—cars passed each other by switching onto short bypass lanes on...
, and a 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
Space Age
The Space Age is a time period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events. The Space Age is generally considered to have begun with Sputnik...
maglev concept quickly caught the attention of everyone involved. It had only two major moving parts on the vehicles, the doors and the fans in the air conditioning. 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".
Prototype
A test track for the system started construction in late 1974 on the grounds of the Canadian National ExhibitionCanadian National Exhibition
Canadian National Exhibition , also known as The Ex, is an annual event that takes place at Exhibition Place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada during the 18 days leading up to and including Labour Day Monday. With an attendance of approximately 1.3 million visitors each season, it is Canada’s largest...
(CNE), just west of the downtown core. The system would open for riders around the park for the CNE show in August 1975, with stops at the GO station on the northern edge of the fair, the large parking lots on the west end, at the gates of Ontario Place
Ontario Place
Ontario Place is a multiple use entertainment and seasonal waterfront park attraction located in Toronto, Ontario, and owned by the Crown in Right of Ontario. It is administered as an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Culture. Located on the shore of Lake Ontario, just south of...
, and the eastern end at the Princes' Gates. It was originally planned that this track would later be extended to Union Station
Union Station (Toronto)
Union Station is the major inter-city rail station and a major commuter rail hub in Toronto, located on Front Street West and occupying the south side of the block bounded by Bay Street and York Street in the central business district. The station building is owned by the City of Toronto, while the...
, downtown, but these plans were dropped.
Within the transit world, excitement about the system was widespread. GO-Urban would be the first production installation of what was then widely believed to be the next wave in mass transit. In 1973 Bill Davis won the transit "man of the year" in the U.S. in a presentation in Florida.
Toronto became a common destination for urban transit planners to meet. An IEEE meeting was held at the CNE in 1973, where a speaker suggested that the federal government should also turn to Krauss-Maffei for inter-city train service between Toronto and Montreal. He suggested that building such a line would eliminate the need for the expensive airports being built in those two cities - Pickering Airport in Toronto and Mirabel
Montréal-Mirabel International Airport
Montréal-Mirabel International Airport, originally called Montréal International Airport and widely known simply as Mirabel is an airport located in Mirabel, Quebec, Canada, northwest of Montreal and was opened October 4, 1975...
in Montreal.
Scarborough route
While GO-Urban was being planned, the Toronto Transit CommissionToronto Transit Commission
-Island Ferry:The ferry service to the Toronto Islands was operated by the TTC from 1927 until 1962, when it was transferred to the Metro Parks and Culture department. Since 1998, the ferry service is run by Toronto Parks and Recreation.-Gray Coach:...
(TTC) was in the midst of its own route planning. Having concluded that most routes suitable for subway service were already built, they too were looking for some sort of intermediate vehicle. Their search led them to select new streetcar designs as the appropriate solution. A network of road-level, semi-separated and full-separated routes were being planned around the city, and UTDC had been selected to build the vehicles that would run on them.
The small test track at the CNE would not be useful for a full-scale prototype system for GO-Urban, however, and the planners started looking for a suitable location for a short system that could be used in a full production setting. Their attention quickly settled on one of the TTC's planned streetcar routes, extending from the existing subway lines into Scarborough. When these plans were announced, a flurry of press releases from both parties denouncing each other appeared in the press. William Bidell, an assistant deputy minister, said after the CNE test project was half-finished: "I don't care what anybody says – for the kind of environmentally clean and virtually noiseless rapid transit system we want in Metro, there's just no way streetcars can do the job."
The public reaction was negative as well. The mood was downright chilly when the planners held an open house to help choose a route through the Scarborough area, where citizens took the opportunity to blast the system.
Cancellation
Soon after construction started at the CNE, in November 1974 Krauss-Maffei announced that they were forced to withdraw from the project. The underlying maglev technology was being developed as a part of a wider project on the part of the German government that was providing funding for a number of different maglev systems. A project review that year concluded Krauss-Maffei's system was less interesting that ones from Thyssen-HenschelThyssen-Henschel
Thyssen Henschel was a German industrial firm and defense contractor. Its products include the TAM medium tank for Argentina, the Mexican Henschel APC and the Marder infantry fighting vehicle....
and Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm
Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm
Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm was a German aerospace company formed as the result of several mergers in the late 1960s. Among its best-known products was the MBB Bo 105 light twin helicopter...
, and their funding was dropped. The ICTS project plan did not provide enough funding to develop both the vehicle and the underlying maglev technology, and the Ontario government was not interested in taking over the entire project.
There were also technical problems; in testing, the complex systems needed to switch trains on the magnetic tracks froze up in cold weather, and would require a re-design. A US report also noted that the system was surprisingly loud and had poor ride quality. With Krauss-Maffei's financial support gone, and daunting technical problems remaining to be solved, the maglev project died. The test track at the CNE was abandoned in place, with the foundations and a few support pillars already constructed. Krauss-Maffei continued development of the original inter-city Transrapid, but at a very slow pace and through a series of mergers with other companies involved in maglev technology. The first Transrapid system did not enter service until 30 years later.Harald Maas, "Schanghai stutzt den Transrapid", Tagesspiegel, 1 February 2008
Rebirth
Although the province was not willing to take over the maglev system, they did want to continue with the development of the ICTS concept. The basic vehicle chassis, linear induction motorLinear induction motor
A linear induction motor is an AC asynchronous linear motor that works by the same general principles as other induction motors but which has been designed to directly produce motion in a straight line....
and automated train control system remained the same. Instead of the maglev suspension, however, the vehicle would use rubber wheels. It also lost the ability to automatically form into trains, and operate in high-speed/low-speed situations. In most respects it was a much more conventional design than the original Transurban. A new consortium of Ontario companies was formed to take over development, and the newly rechristened UTDC
Urban Transportation Development Corporation
The Urban Transportation Development Corporation, or UTDC as it was commonly known, was an Ontario, Canada, Crown corporation created in the 1970s as a way to enter what was then expected to be a burgeoning market in advanced light rail mass transit systems...
purchased a parcel of land in Kingston, Ontario
Kingston, Ontario
Kingston, Ontario is a Canadian city located in Eastern Ontario where the St. Lawrence River flows out of Lake Ontario. Originally a First Nations settlement called "Katarowki," , growing European exploration in the 17th Century made it an important trading post...
as a testing facility.
In testing it was found that the linear motor that powered the vehicle only worked efficiently if the vehicle was a set distance from the track, and the small amount of play in the tires was enough to upset the system. The rubber wheels had to be replaced by steel ones, but this re-introduced the problem of squealing as the train rounded bends. In order to solve this problem, UTDC purchased several articulated bogie patents from a US developer. Articulated bogies steer each wheel around bends, avoiding the rubbing that makes the sound. With these changes in place, development proceeded quickly.
Scarborough RT
By 1979 the system was nearing completion and a sales effort started. The larger vehicle, however, was no longer suitable for the original demonstration system at the CNE and a new real-world test site was needed. The company set its sites on two systems, one in ScarboroughScarborough, Ontario
Scarborough is a dissolved municipality within the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Geographically, it comprises the eastern part of Toronto. It is bordered on the south by Lake Ontario, on the west by Victoria Park Avenue, on the north by Steeles Avenue East, and on the east by the Rouge River...
on the eastern side of Toronto, and another in Hamilton
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Conceived by George Hamilton when he purchased the Durand farm shortly after the War of 1812, Hamilton has become the centre of a densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe...
, to the west. Hamilton eventually backed out in 1981.
The Scarborough route had already been laid out as one of the TTC's new streetcar route, and the TTC was uninterested in switching the service to the ICTS. However, the province was paying 75% of the capital costs for the line and threatened to refuse it if the did not make the switch. A deal was eventually worked out when the province agreed to pay for any cost overruns if the new tracks cost more than the original system. The province briefly proposed that the ICTS also be used between the end of the existing subway line to a new Warden station
Warden (TTC)
Warden is a station on the Bloor–Danforth line of the subway system in Toronto, Canada. It is located at 3276 St. Clair Avenue East, on the southeast corner of the intersection with Warden Avenue....
, a plan that the TTC said was a waste of money as previous studies had already clearly demonstrated that the ridership levels were already high enough that an extension of the subway was more appropriate.
Construction eventually started in 1981, modifying the work already done on the streetcar route to allow it to run the ICTS, as well as adding a new maintenance yard at McCowen. Required changes to the tracks and stations and delays building the new system meant the route didn't open until 1985, three years after the original plans. Cost overruns ran to $100 million, and even after opening the system ran into many difficulties and the TTC received another $27 million to fix the problems.
Disappearance
The experience soured the province on the ICTS. The original Transurban system was almost double its budget when it was cancelled, and the Scarborough line was about the same. When Davis announced his retirement in 1985, the new David PetersonDavid Peterson
David Robert Peterson, PC, O.Ont was the 20th Premier of the Province of Ontario, Canada, from June 26, 1985 to October 1, 1990. He was the first Liberal premier of Ontario in 42 years....
government balked at the GO-Urban system and the Toronto subway plan, Network 2011
Network 2011
Network 2011 was a plan for future transit expansion created in 1985 by the Toronto Transit Commission. It was centred on three proposed subway lines: the Downtown Relief Line, Eglinton West Line, and the Sheppard Line...
. Plans were seriously curtailed, and GO-Urban disappeared.