Ignore all the examples I posted, that's okay.

Trams are great for local transit, but when that is all you have to cover a sprawling city of 800,000 that is not great. How are you supposed to get across the city quickly when your on a tram?



I guess Vancouver is just better then us... 😭
Mississauga is built differently then Toronto. It’s significantly harder to serve people who all live in McMansions. The houses are further apart which means getting to a transit stop is going to be a longer walk. There may be some areas which will never fully get good transit. But hurontario has a chance.

800k sounds like a lot but if you compare cities of that size it isn’t exactly like Mississauga is behind. Quebec City has 600k and is building a row lrt. Hamilton at 600k is building a row lrt. Cambridge/Kitchener/Waterloo has a 600k population and is a building a lrt. Edmonton and Calgary has 1 million- 1.3 million and has more of a system you are suggesting. But guess what those systems are funneling it into their own centres. You seem to be focused on getting people from Mississauga into Toronto. That’s vastly different.

Side note Vancouver, Montreal and calgarys systems were partially helped financially by Olympic bids.

Also if you build more expensive on hurontario you do realize you have less to spend on other places like dundas, eglinton, mavis. I forgot to mention in my earlier post that on street row is also beneficial because it’s relatively cheap and quick to install. You get one line up, the people can judge, then you propose the next line.

Finally people here know about vancouvers system because we’re transit nerds. You have to get the average Joe to see your vision and buy in. Good luck with that.
 
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The constant discourse about whether a line is grade separated or not strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. Provided no asinine TTC style operating procedures are introduced, even a non grade separated line is going to be much faster than the bus lines it's replacing running in mid traffic. And I don't know of any Hurontario-style line in Europe, situated in the middle of a stroad, that artificially imposes speed limits because of frequent pedestrian crossings.
Eglinton East LRT is projected to be slower than the existing RapidTO bus lanes (this is in the city's own words), St. Clair LRT is slower than the mixed traffic line, Spadina LRT is slower than the preceding bus service.
 
Yes, the service model for HuLRT is publicly available. The frequency will be 7.5 minutes on peak, 10 minutes off peak initially.
That doesn't tell us about what the travel times are, which I assumed "LemonCondo" was referring to.
glinton East LRT is projected to be slower than the existing RapidTO bus lanes (this is in the city's own words), St. Clair LRT is slower than the mixed traffic line, Spadina LRT is slower than the preceding bus service.
St. Clair and Spadina are slowed down by the inane stop spacing and the TTC's own paranoia about speedy streetcars. The average stop spacing on the Hurontario LRT is 850 metres so the comparisons are not 1:1.
 
How can you be so certain, before the service has even started up, that you are asking the question "How are you supposed to get across the city quickly when your on a tram?" Do you know about artificial speed limits or nonsense operating procedures that will kneecap the line and prevent it from running at full speed?

All the stops are known and the travel time end to end is 40 minutes.
Seems like a pretty reasonable travel time for an 18 km long line to me.
 
Mississauga is built differently then Toronto. It’s significantly harder to serve people who all live in McMansions. The houses are further apart which means getting to a transit stop is going to be a longer walk. There may be some areas which will never fully get good transit. But hurontario has a chance.

Also if you build more expensive on hurontario you do realize you have less to spend on other places like dundas, eglinton, mavis. I forgot to mention in my earlier post that on street row is also beneficial because it’s relatively cheap and quick to install. You get one line up, the people can judge, then you propose the next line.

Finally people here know about vancouvers system because we’re transit nerds. You have to get the average Joe to see your vision and buy in. Good luck with that.

Hey guys! It's expensive to build any sort of rail transit infrastructure, so lets lock in one of our main arteries with LRT and we will never ever be able to upgrade it to grade-separated! (Unless you then tunneled.... god help us.)
 
How can you be so certain, before the service has even started up, that you are asking the question "How are you supposed to get across the city quickly when your on a tram?" Do you know about artificial speed limits or nonsense operating procedures that will kneecap the line and prevent it from running at full speed?

Because it's a tram.
Because we don't use aggressive transit signal priority.
Because you can't go as fast as possible through intersections since there is always a threat of collision.
Have you been on a TTC separated streetcar?
 
Hey guys! It's expensive to build any sort of rail transit infrastructure, so lets lock in one of our main arteries with LRT and we will never ever be able to upgrade it to grade-separated! (Unless you then tunneled.... god help us.)
I see you joined in the year of our lord 2022. Yes God help us. This is literally why we haven’t built things here in decades. Thank God something is being built. Instead of fantasizing perhaps just say a word of thanks for the rails being installed.
 
Because it's a tram.

That tells me nothing about the speeds it is and isn't capable of doing. I can easily discredit any choice of grade separated transit by pointing at how slowly trains run on the University-Spadina lines (think Museum - Eglinton West) and then comparing with an LRT doing full speed and making the argument that LRT is actually the faster mode of the two.

The Flexity streetcars operating at the TTC are capable of running at 70 km/h. There is nothing inherent to trams that makes them slow. You need a more compelling argument than this.

Because we don't use aggressive transit signal priority.

Care to source your claim? As far as I know, this is a feature (or lack thereof) of Eglinton Crosstown. Metrolinx suggests Hurontario (which, last I checked, is the topic of discussion) will actually use signal priority.


Because you can't go as fast as possible through intersections since there is always a threat of collision.
This is not true in any caacity. Any kind of operating procedure that prohibits entering an intersection at full speed due to the risk of a collision is one that is self imposed and NOT in any way a necessity of operating trams. They do it all over Europe and there hasn't been a bloodbath on the streets anywhere from LRTs entering an intersection at full speed, and this argument doesn't account either for the fact that buses also can enter an intersection at full speed, and there is nothing in such a nonsensical SOP that would in any way account for possible collisions (involving either a bus or an LRT) for midblock collisions.

Have you been on a TTC separated streetcar?
I thought this was a discussion about Metrolinx, so discussion of the TTC and their inane streetcar network is not in any way pertinent. I've also addressed these points above, if the Spadina or St. Clair streetcar had stops every 850 m and didn't have to stop for every faintest possible hint of a threat, do you still think they'd be so maddeningly slow?
 
How can you be so certain, before the service has even started up, that you are asking the question "How are you supposed to get across the city quickly when your on a tram?" Do you know about artificial speed limits or nonsense operating procedures that will kneecap the line and prevent it from running at full speed?


Seems like a pretty reasonable travel time for an 18 km long line to me.

You can take the entire Line 1 Subway for 1 Hr and 19 min. So it would theoretically do this route in 37 min.

And Line 1 can still be made faster.

And its old timey heavy-rail subway, not a automated light metro.

The Millennium Line in Van goes 25.5 km in 37 min. So that line in this context would theoretically take just 26 min!
 
You don't need grade separation to go at a good speed. I know because I lived in a city that had good tram service. Separated ROW, prioritized signals, and reasonable stop spacing (which I think this LRT has) equals convenient, comfortable and fast travel. Faster than a car? Probably not. But it's a good deal for people who don't want to worry about driving, or simply can't.

I'm not a fan of grade-separating everything, unless there is a major lack of space on the surface. Having to walk up or down stairs, or take elevators, is a barrier, both physical and psychological. I, and many people, would rather just hop on at street level. Hurontario is a stroad not lacking in space (except at a couple of choke points). Its space just needs to be better used, which is what the LRT does.

I'm baffled by the comments which say the LRT isn't "good enough" or we should be building "something better". Good enough for what? Better how? Every proposal for so-called improvement comes with its own drawbacks.
 
You don't need grade separation to go at a good speed. I know because I lived in a city that had good tram service. Separated ROW, prioritized signals, and reasonable stop spacing (which I think this LRT has) equals convenient, comfortable and fast travel. Faster than a car? Probably not. But it's a good deal for people who don't want to worry about driving, or simply can't.

I'm not a fan of grade-separating everything, unless there is a major lack of space on the surface. Having to walk up or down stairs, or take elevators, is a barrier, both physical and psychological. I, and many people, would rather just hop on at street level. Hurontario is a stroad not lacking in space (except at a couple of choke points). Its space just needs to be better used, which is what the LRT does.

I'm baffled by the comments which say the LRT isn't "good enough" or we should be building "something better". Good enough for what? Better how? Every proposal for so-called improvement comes with its own drawbacks.

It's not good enough because it's a huge city without any rail transit at all. Sure, if they had one or two highest order lines then providing more local services with trams on connecting lines would be great.
 

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