unimaginative2
Senior Member
It would be extremely expensive to dig under Union to create another subway station, and likely the station would be at odd angles.
Epi, did you read what I just wrote? They studied it and found that a DRL station could fit directly south of the existing station on the same level at no odd angles.
A street like Adelaide is simply too far north, and the connections to the PATH are comparatively poor. Obviously there are advantages to both routes. People from Eaton Centre aren't going to walk south to Union and people from the ACC aren't going to walk north to Adelaide. The advantage of Union is that it would be a hub, it has good connections to the PATH, it serves the railway lands, and it serves many more development sites east and west of downtown than a northern route.
As for serving the people living around the rail lines, I'm not sure how you're proposing the subway stations will be built. Under the rail line? Over it? Any sort of option in this super busy stretch is going to be extremely disruptive to train traffic. As well, the waterfront is already going to get a lot of investment in transit with the new LRT lines.
What stretch are you talking about? If you're talking about the TTR corridor between Yonge and the Don, we've shown about a hundred times--as has the DRL study--that there is more than enough room to fit the subway in the existing rail corridor, stations included, on land that isn't being used.
It's better to create a DRL which also ends up serving the super overtaxed Queen and King corridors by putting it inbetween on Adelaide and Richmond, and which also ends up putting CBD commuters right in the middle of the CBD instead of even further south which makes it a much less attractive option then the current arrangement and thus will do even less 'downtown relief' due to longer walk times.
Well, they studied it in great detail and found that the most relief was provided with a southern route. A route near Queen was found to be the least effective. This was a very detailed and comprehensive study done by professionals, so I'd give it a fair bit of respect. The Queen and King streetcars serve completely different markets from the DRL, and they're busy because they're there. If the King streetcar were on Wellington or Front, it would be just as busy.