Amare
Senior Member
It does not.
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- Thread starter Monarch Butterfly
- Start date
urbanclient
Active Member
I swear it's the nitwits at the CBC that keep promoting the idea that the REM is an LRT. The CDPQ are at fault too. CDPQ knew that the public had an allergy to the word metro or subway, so they pulled a switcheroo and decided to call it "light rail" and 'LRT' to hide the true nature of the system back during the 2018 launch etc... The politics of ignorance made it necessary to fool the bureaucrats and the general public. https://www.cdpqinfra.com/sites/cdpqinfrad8/files/2019-10/rem_synthese_21112016_en_0.pdf
CDPQ don't call it LRT anymore, but the CBC keeps calling it that. Anyone would know this is nonsensical after riding the REM or looking up the Alstom Metropolis rolling stock it uses (like a nerd). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-montreal-ottawa-lrt-winter-snow-9.7047495
An automated metro in Montreal (not even light metro by global standards), a fully grade separated quasi-metro in Ottawa, a street running tram in Toronto. How can all 3 things be called an LRT? What kind of people are the CBC hiring if they can't even do the bare minimum research to avoid technical illiteracy? Calling all three systems an LRT ignores fundamental differences that are important for the public to understand. It leads to people unironically thinking the Calgary CTrain could've been built somewhere in the City of Toronto, even on Finch West.
On the flip side, if anything can be an LRT and so many people love how cheap and amazing LRTs are, then all Metrolinx needs to do for future project approvals is to call them LRTs.
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Westey
New Member
Steve X
Senior Member
It’s not as great as you might think. Yes it fills in the void but this is not likely the ridership’s travel pattern so telling them to wait 15-20 min for some of these routes so they can hop off a few stops later to connect to line 6 isn’t going to win any prizes. Plus the most vulnerable are the ones that need these stops cause they can’t walk far, suggesting they hop on and off to connect to multiple routes would just drive them away. They might as well take a taxi considering they need to get to these stops on the first place.
FW36
Active Member
Again by this logic you can justifying building more stations. Why not build one at Silverstone, Milady, Jayzel, Yorkgate, Romfield, why don't those people matter? The vulnerable population is small along to route, you probably loss more ridership from slow tranist than gain for additional stops. Also removing Stevenson, Duncanwoods, and Driftwood would only lead to additional 3-4 minute walk, nothing crazy long. The whole point of the LRT as sold the the community was rapid and convenient transit, but as planned its not designed for either. Also the majority of vulnerable people who live around Stevenson, for example, do most of there errands at Albion mall, so a safer crosswalk design is probably more needed than an LRT stop.
6ixGod
Active Member
If the benchmark for a global international city like Toronto is to compare itself to other recently built, failure prone Canadian systems, then expectations have already collapsed. Cities like Toronto should compare themselves to places with long winters and reliable operations such as Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm and Moscow, where snow is a design condition, not an operational excuse.
Everyone experiences delays from time to time. What they do not experience is entire lines shut down for days simply because it snowed. That is not “winter happens”…it is poor design, wrong tech and fragile operations. Using Ottawa and Montreal as comparators only lowers the bar for Toronto.
The mental gymnastics people are performing on here to defend this rubbish is quite something.
Dan416
Senior Member
In general, the Finch West LRT had a lot more support on Urban Toronto versus Eglinton, where LRT was more begrudgingly accepted, back in the day. However the line was built, LRT was always the technology that made sense for Finch, as it really doesn't justify a subway. And with the Sheppard line so close, if you want to build a subway, you should just extend that line.
So the fact that line 6 is performing so poorly is an absolutely massive red flag that something about how we have designed it has resulted in this operational catastrophe and the a huge harm to LRT's reputation. I've always been a big believer in trams being used in the appropriate context. But 100% if they're slower than the bus they replaced, that is NOT acceptable. We didn't spend billions of dollars to have WORSE service.
No matter what some people say, SPEED is important for public transit. Do I expect an LRT to be as fast as a GO train? Certainly not. But at a bare minimum it should be faster than the bus, considering it's in its own ROW!
So the fact that line 6 is performing so poorly is an absolutely massive red flag that something about how we have designed it has resulted in this operational catastrophe and the a huge harm to LRT's reputation. I've always been a big believer in trams being used in the appropriate context. But 100% if they're slower than the bus they replaced, that is NOT acceptable. We didn't spend billions of dollars to have WORSE service.
No matter what some people say, SPEED is important for public transit. Do I expect an LRT to be as fast as a GO train? Certainly not. But at a bare minimum it should be faster than the bus, considering it's in its own ROW!
Burnt creek
Active Member
I think that you are bang on. I joined this around 2015-16. This was a time when there was a lot on planning discussion on the future of transit. At that time, I advanced the same argument that transit city and the like was really about streetcars and that the term LRT was just a way "to sexy it" up politically and mislead people into thinking this is like the Confederation line in Ottawa or similar services in Calgary & Edmonton. I even recall one insightful contributor calling it "Streetcar city" and that's what it was, .
The problem (in Tor only) is transit has always been a political discussion rather than about logistics and serving the needs of the users. Yes, you should also consider ROI. Back then, I was politely advancing the identical arguments you are making and that several others like @urbanclient have made but you couldn't advance these notions without someone trying to stick a political tag on you, so i gave up. And, thought I would come back when we finally get to see the finished product. And now we have a finished product that proves everything I believed. My only focus was just better transit in this city and by that i mean being able to move commuters around in a timely, comfortable and convenient manner (e.g.: getting home from work faster). Politics shouldn't matter, but invariably too many people just blindly accept and believe everything that the politicians (that they support) say without without digging deeper .
Even now its still political, case in point, the mayor advancing the notion that signal prioritization will solve the problems. This is a perfect example of pure politics and smoke and mirrors, we don't know how many stops at traffic lights the tram will make on each trip but we do know how many station stops each trip will have. So logically, removing station stops make the most sense, plus she has not told us how signal prioritization will impact street traffic congestion. Again, wouldn't the easiest thing be to remove station stops? this is another example of the political smoke and mirrors game. Signal prioritization might chop 5-10 mins at most but its still too long. The specs way back then said it all: 10 Km, 18 stops, 33 minutes. That is way too slow
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6ixGod
Active Member
I think part of the problem is the way “LRT” is used. Someone mentioned it earlier too above. The term is so vague that it allows for massive overpromise without anyone being honest about what is actually being built.
Toronto already had established modes of transport: bus, subway, streetcar!
Metrolinx could have just been upfront….Finch West is essentially a modern streetcar on a mostly dedicated right-of-way. If they had, the outrage over Line 6 would likely have been much lower. The speed issue would still exist (and rightly so) but at least the bar we were comparing it to would have been realistic from the start. We would still be calling for Finch West, Spadina, Lakeshore and St. Clair to all be brought up to the standards expected of a serious rapid transit system.
On top of that, calling it Line 6 gives the impression it is equivalent to subway lines rather than a streetcar. Combined with the “LRT” label, it creates a double mismatch between expectation and reality. People naturally expect a rapid, high-capacity service when they hear “Line 6 LRT” and that is exactly why criticism is so intense. The branding set the bar far too high.
If it were up to me, Finch West with transit signal priority and full speeds would be the standard I would want St. Clair, Spadina and Lakeshore streetcars to follow. In fact, the entire streetcar system if I am being honest. I would also give them lettered line designations to clearly differentiate them from the subways and the legacy streetcar network (something some else mentioned earlier too….either here or on Reddit.)
Bordercollie
Senior Member
It's not the TTC's fault. Mosaic operates and maintains the line. If they don't know how to shovel snow, that's not a TTC problem.
Westey
New Member
I would add the SRT to the list. With a bit of promotion, Toronto did have an example of a mini-metro where passenger volumes are not as high but speed is important.
I am sure that most people in Toronto did not even know that Vancouver has elevated transit. It could have easily been argued that the SRT Mark I was equivalent to a Nokia Flip Phone while the Vancouver SkyTrain or Canada Line was the i-phone 5, or whatever was new at that time. Nobody cared how the vehicle got its power or that it was shorter or that it was elevated (the most popular part of the SRT was near Brimley where it's elevated), but they did care about speed and reliability.
PL1
Senior Member
Agreed, but the average person sees lines operated by the TTC not working, and they blame the TTC.
hw621
Senior Member
So who owns the line? Mosaic is just a vendor. Who keeps them in check if things are not working?
JSF-1
Active Member
Well to add to this, it is worth remembering the very first incarnation of Transit City in 2007 was literally just an expansion of the streetcar network. All the lines were supposed to use the same track gauge as the streetcars and use the at the time proposed Flexity Outlook LRV's. If I had to guess the reason for the shift to the current LRT standard was probably for two reasons:
1) Technical: Obviously the LRV's on Finch and Eglinton are larger then their downtown counterparts giving them a high capacity, although Low-Floor LRV's in general will never be able to compete with High-Floor LRV's in terms of capacity.
2) Marketing: Streetcar is unfortunately still a dirty word in North America and calling it a streetcar would have painted an image of downtown's streetcars operating on the road in the minds of our car owning overlords. It's actually the complete opposite of what happened on Spadina where local business owners wanted the 510 to be called a streetcar and not an LRT. The word streetcar apparently causes people to become incredibly irrational. (Also I wish we would stop calling the East Bayfront and Waterfront West Lines LRT's when they are just streetcar extensions, unfortunately North America's irrational hatred of Streetcars forces us to get creative with our marketing).
Metrolinx, so don't expect anything good to happen.
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ARG1
Senior Member
I'm not sure going back to the TTC being in charge of everything without other major reforms is a good idea. For all of Metrolinx' faults, the one thing the province got right in creating them is undertanding the need to have an overarching and centralized planning authority that can take into account the fact the GTA is in fact a collection of interconnected cities, and that the "city" doesn't truly end at the Toronto limits. What we had before was independent planning where agencies often forgot about other players, like how Transit City was planned without any consideration of the GO train network and any improvements it may bring to the table. Metrolinx may be a failed project, but that doesn't mean going back to the way it was before is the right answer either.