[junctionist]

You guys should have taken some photos during this ride.

 

[SimonP]

I've crunched the numbers we gathered for each route. These are speeds based from the time we got on to the time we got off. This meant that some routes are a bit skewed by waiting onboard at the start of the route. Harbourfront's low number has a lot to do with that.

These are also times for a snowy Sunday afternoon, and I'm sure rush hour on a weekday would be very different.

St. Clair - 15.3
Queen - 15.2
College - 15.9
Dundas - 15.8
Spadina - 14.7
King - 15.7
Harbourfront - 12.0
Bathurst - 15.8

 

[Chuck]

Streetcars: great for exploring the city, even better for out of towners, absolute nightmare for daily commuters.

 

[Dan416]

Streetcars: great for exploring the city, even better for out of towners, absolute nightmare for daily commuters.

You said it gurl

 

[Therion]

Streetcars: great for exploring the city, even better for out of towners, absolute nightmare for daily commuters.

True that. Anyone take the King st. car in the morning? Used to be that getting on at 7:30 at Spadina heading east was no problem. 8:30 was usually trouble. These days I can rarely get on the first car that comes along at 7:30, and more than once I resigned myself to walking to University. This change happened only since the summer of last year. I wonder why the sudden crowding.

 

[Edward Skira]

This change happened only since the summer of last year. I wonder why the sudden crowding.

A lot more people living in the west end with no addition to transit. CityPlace, Freedville, Liberty Village and more must be dumping a lot more riders on the King line.

 

[waterloowarrior]

Torontoist article on the journey

 

[BentTent]

Someday I'd like to just go down queen with a metropass and stop at cool stores and such. That would be a day well spent.

 

[LAz]

Omg, the vehicles are so fast!

 

[kettal]

that's why it's called high speed rail

 

[LAz]

Never heard of sarcasm huh?

 

[Observer Walt]

I suspect that he has heard of sarcasm, and maybe is offering a bit of his own.

The city is paying the price for 20 years or longer of little improvement to transit in the downtown area. Thousands of people live downtown in areas that used to have almost no population. Think King and Spadina, especially. Hard to remember that it used to be close to a wasteland.

We also need the downtown relief line, but it doesn't seem to be on the TTC radar. We may need to start implementing things like all day no parking on King Street, although store operators on the street will (rightly) complain.

And so on ... it's been said before, I know.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Looking at Steve Munro's article on Streetcars for Toronto: 1952, as well as the report in question, we have reduced the frequency or headway on the streetcar lines, based on the number streetcars we have.

My comment:

I find it interesting using the streetcars numbers with the existing (non-truncated) streetcar lines:

Carlton 101
King 88
Queen – Kingston Rd. 152
----
Total 341
​

Comparing those numbers with a current service summary, shows that the service has gone greatly downhill (Allowing for an ARLV to be 1½ CLRV or PCC). The service on Queen should have the same headway as the service on the HRT subways, 5 or 6 minutes in the non-rush hour.

 

[Chuck]

The role that streetcars have played in the development of this city is rather interesting. I'm quite sure that if it weren't for the "save our streetcars" movement of decades past, the downtown area would be a lot worse off than it is today. However, the city has now matured to the point that arguably, streetcars are among the top 3 factors most detrimental to future growth of the inner city. Providing people with a 30+ minute rush hour commute from Bathurst to Yonge isn't a great enough incentive to encourage many more new residents to the area.

 

[kettal]

1. Why don't they run ALRV on King?
2. There is a shortage of working streetcars. I suggest they switch Bathurst to a bus, at least until new streetcars start arriving.