Except the transportation department here just suck. Even when I rode on the ION, I wasn't please and felt like the 501 Queen streetcar moved faster with ALRVs.
I visited friends in Kitchener/Waterloo three weeks ago, and as a railfan I obviously rode it. Even though my friends live a block a block away from it, they find it's not that useful:
- It makes a lot of twists and turns, which makes it slow. I get the feeling that the tracks were spread out to provide "coverage" or to avoid disrupting traffic too much on one street. There are buses on parallel routes which seemed to have more passengers, which would overtake the LRT.
- It avoids going through King street, either because of parking concerns or because of the yearly street festival. But that makes it further away from destinations.
- All the one-way looping means that a round trip requires extra walking (since the same stop isn't used for both directions.)
In general it seemed to be like some compromises were made with the routing of it which reduces its transportation value. But at least it was used to catalyze zoning changes and implement some TOD, so it seems successful in terms of the condos that I could see under construction near the route.
The airport won't have much ridership thanks to UPX. I would agree with you if that was the only way to get to the airport and there was an ability to have a bus terminal on Kipling or Martin Grove.
Renforth station, one stop west of Martin Grove, will be a major bus terminal for connecting with the Missisauga transitway. The "Airport Employment Area" is a massive sprawl about the size of the entire old City of Toronto, so it would need to be serviced by a major bus depot, not just from the Terminal 3 UPX station. Personally, I used to work on the west side of the airport and got their along Eglinton but couldn't feasibly get there by transit.
I see EWLRT as being the main TTC connection to MiWay.
Yes, and they either A) Don't use it as a backbone to their transportation system, or B) are much much smaller cities like Portland or Sacramento. We're not Portland or Sacramento, we're the 4th largest city on the continent with a booming and vastly expanding population. LRT simply doesn't cut it for our major corridors.
There is
this interesting article comparing Portland and Vancouver, which are about the same size. Portland has spent a lot on extending its MAX system over the last few decades, but has been running hard to stand still in terms of ridership/mode share, whereas Vancouver has consistently improved its transit mode share. The article makes the point that speed and grade separation of Skytrain is what made Vancouver's system successful.
In general, when designing our transit network we need to
look at increasing the percentage of population/jobs/attractions accessible within 45 minutes by transit, not just at increasing track mileage. Fast transit displaces car trips, slow transit displaces walking/biking trips.
That being said, it could be argued that GO RER should be our "backbone" with LRT acting as a local distributor. But the GO network is radial from the core, and Eglinton is more like a circular complement to that, connecting at Mt. Dennis, Caledonia, Cedarvale, Yonge-Eglinton, Kennedy.
IMO, the original design concept - tunneled in the middle and at-grade in street median everywhere else - made sense at the time. Back in mid -200x, the province was not eager to borrow for transit expansion, and the assumption was that transit construction will be funded from the current taxes. In that situation, a fully grade-separated crosstown line with a sticker price of 12-15 billion would be either "postponed" indefinitely, or truncated to the central section only, perhaps Black Creek to Don Mills.
In a way, ECLRT got its funding partly because each political group found some of its features attractive. The LRT proponents welcomed the light rail vehicles and the network opportunities, the subway proponents welcomed the central tunneled section.
But if it was known in advance that the Eg West extension is going to follow a totally different design concept and be completely grade-separate, then it would probably be better to make the eastern section completely grade-separate as well. The technology and rolling stock similar to those proposed for OL, would be a good candidate for Eg Crosstown as well.
You're describing the only sane solution to the whole Scarborough transit mess, doing Eglinton as a westward extension of the SRT and upgrading the SRT to use the newest driverless ICTS vehicles (instead of spending $1.8 billion on a technology change to LRT.)
It's disappointing to know that
this used to be preferred option until Karen Stintz decided she wanted to be Mayor. Imagine a 100% grade-separated, continuous line from the airport to Malvern (once extended.) Elevate instead of tunneling for Eglinton east/west and you get it for significantly less money than we are spending on SSE + EWLRT + ELRT.
