Although there are some things that need fixing, I was pleasantly surprised by what I encountered today. The professional kvetchers that were salivating at the thought of this line being an abject failure and condemning the LRT experiment to history must be devastated.
Some thoughts, in no order of importance:
-unlike the turtlebahn that was Finch West, this line absolutely flew when given the opportunity to, including on the surface section - the distance between Sloane and O'Connor, and Golden Mile and Birchmount, stood out to me in particular, it almost felt like riding a tram in Europe. That is, until we hit the lights. If we can get some signal priority going, we'll be in fine form.
-The 60 km/h speed limit in the tunnel section was barely a factor. It took in the neighbourhood of 15 minutes to get from Weston to Yonge, which is very good, and basically the same amount of time it takes the 2 to get from Keele to Bloor-Yonge.
-some of the dwell times, both above ground and underground, seemed excessive. Granted, there were a lot of people, but on one trip I stood in the front and watched in the driver's cab and could see on the cameras that there were no people left milling around, but still the doors didn't close. Even when the green light was given. This is unfortunate and is fairly reminiscent of opening day for line 6. The delayed reaction time for the doors opening, while nothing new (the downtown Flexity cars and TR trains also have this problem), was also unfortunate.
-there is a ridiculous amount of noise pollution at the terminals and inside the trains. You hear more pointless bullshit in the span of 30 seconds on this line than you do in a full year on line 2. It was bad enough on the 6, but it's so much worse on this line, now that some goon decided we need a) sensor triggered warnings to stay back from the yellow line, set off every time someone steps on the yellow line, announcements about the doors closing AFTER THE FUCKING DOORS HAVE CLOSED, and PSAs to sit or hold on while the train is in motion, after every goddamn stop. And the announcements about standing back from the yellow line don't have any kind of memory, so while people were congregating around the trains at the terminals, they were being set off every few seconds. How many times can you be told bilingually by the world's least pleasant TTS system to stay back from the yellow line before you need to be committed to an asylum?
-related to the above point, the speakers on the trains were all set brutally loud, so a) unless you have industrial grade noise cancelling headphones, there's no hope of being able to tune them out; plus, they were so loud the sound quality was extremely fuzzy. Unfortunately a common syndrome on Metrolinx vehicles, the double deckers are a full on assault on the ears.
-The underground stations all looked like someone copied and pasted a design. It's an okay looking one, but when every station looks so utterly nondescript... it's too bad we don't have enough pride in our public works projects to try to beautify them.
-The next train departure boards seemed to correspond to reality only incidentally. There were loads of instances where either a train approaching suddenly vanished from the board and now we're waiting for the next one, or a train not shown on the board appearing out of nowhere. Very hard to anticipate headway reliability when you have no real notion of when the next train is coming, and the headway levels today did not really seem to correspond to the level of demand there existed (most trains seemed to come every 8-10 minutes, which might suffice on a regular Sunday, but certainly not on a showcase day like today).
-the single doorways at the front and rear of every car seem unfortunate, they'll probably be a real chokepoint. Now granted, everyone and their dog was out today and had no sense of urgency in boarding, so it may be better in rush hour when at least some commuters are moving meaningfully and with purpose, but I have no idea why, considering there are no sharp turns like on the downtown network, they carried over this design. If every door was a double it would basically cut the loading time in half?
Still, despite all these concerns, the line seems fairly well done for the most part. It will definitely be transformational for crosstown travel and the ride comfort and capacity will be so much better than the buses that it replaced, or the BRTs that some of the anti-LRT crowd wants to see built in place of LRT instead. I'd give the project a 7/10, and hope that they can iron out some of these kinks in the coming months.
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