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There is *no* reason it couldn't have been on the surface at Yonge, the street is plenty wide.
There are reasons:
1. It is not as wide as required. On St.Clair and Eglinton East in the Golden Mile you can fit four lanes, plus left turning lanes, plus transit ROW, plus sidewalks. On central Eglinton you would need to sacrifice something because only five lanes fit and many properties will be using the curb lane for pick-up/drop-off... something that definitely doesn't happen in the Golden Mile.
2. Intersections that can't be closed are closer together. This means more stopping and slower service. The service starts to be more like a St.Clair streetcar than an LRT service.
3. Risk of pedestrian conflicts and congestion impacts. There are far more people walking around near Yonge and Eglinton and that means the drivers need to operate slower. Traffic congestion is higher increasing the likelihood of delay getting through intersections.
 
The central track requires "dedicated" left turn cycles - i.e. a specific advanced left then when the general green phase is activated left turns are prohibited.

So if you don't provide the dedicated left turn cycle to prioritize LRVs, you basically force the left turn cycle to wait an entire signal cycle as they can't be shifted to the "end" of the cycle.

To provide greater priority to LRVs, you would have to figure out an alternative method of accommodating left turns. If the city was smart they would have investigated Michigan lefts or provided a right turn then U turn movement at major intersections to remove the left turn cycle at major roadways.
Remember when they were recommending Michigan Lefts for the Eglinton Line when they first started the outreach program and public meetings in, oh, 2007 or so?

The funny thing is that at the 3 or 4 meetings I went to, I didn't hear a lot of static about them. The staff took the time to explain to everyone why they felt that it was the right idea at that time. It was only once those plans got published and more widely disseminated to the public that the councillors from the outlying wards started making noise about them.

Dan
 
The problem is that the unreliability of the surface section will affect how the underground section operates. For this amount of time and money it could have been designed properly.
It's a little early to conclude that it will be unreliable. Waterloo has kept their service very reliable through worse conditions (though I admit service there is relatively infrequent).

The Leslie intersection could certainly been better designed - why they didn't go for a south-side alignment through that area I don't know. I'm not sure it would have even cost more money - perhaps less with the simpler arrangement. It's almost like someone was trying to protect a future Leslie extension to the south.

Tunelling from Don Mills to Kennedy would have added a lot more cost. Though perhaps elevated might have been a better compromise - and a lot quicker to construct.
 
Tunelling from Don Mills to Kennedy would have added a lot more cost. Though perhaps elevated might have been a better compromise - and a lot quicker to construct.

Elevated lines are hideous. Even the RT is only elevated where needed and only because you cannot have heavy rail interacting with traffic if you want to keep it at subway speeds..

As someone who lives near and travels through the Golden Mile regularly I would be vehemently against Elevated lines. This is Toronto, not Chicago.
 
Elevated lines are hideous. Even the RT is only elevated where needed and only because you cannot have heavy rail interacting with traffic if you want to keep it at subway speeds..

As someone who lives near and travels through the Golden Mile regularly I would be vehemently against Elevated lines. This is Toronto, not Chicago.

Hideous for Toronto but not hideous for Amsterdam, Sydney, or even Montreal which look miles better than Toronto.
 
Hideous for Toronto but not hideous for Amsterdam, Sydney, or even Montreal which look miles better than Toronto.

Those cities actually spend money on public infrastructure. Can you imagine what elevated transit lines would look like in Toronto after years of debate like they had with the Gardiner? Not to mention how cheaply they would be built.
 
It's a little early to conclude that it will be unreliable. Waterloo has kept their service very reliable through worse conditions (though I admit service there is relatively infrequent).
The question of course is at what cost? First, yes its infrequent. When you have a train running every 10-15 minutes, having strong TSP to make sure your trains run on time is incredibly easy. The problem is standards. The Eglinton Crosstown was an EXPENSIVE project, mainly because a good chunk of the line was bored and tunneled - that already puts the price of the central section at Subway level costs, and when you take the cost of the project into account, you begin to run into problems. Immediately, any notion of headways approaching 90s that would be permitted via ATC and full grade separation is shot out the window. While in isolation we can theoretically run 90s headways between Mt. Dennis and Laird, we would also have to somehow integrate a train arriving from a surface section where even if we short turn half of the trains, the chance that the train will always arrive in a precise 90s window to uphold high frequencies is effectively null. So that's already wasted cost. Next, the existing subway network constantly has emergency shutdowns for various reasons - people walking on the tracks, someone threw something on the tracks, someone jumped over a fence, but now we have to deal with a surface section where the trains have to worry about pedestrians crossing the street and aggressive drivers forming a conga line across a red light due to traffic. This is on top of not having TSP (thanks local councillors) so the trains will casually be stopped at red lights which will absolutely lead to risks of bunching or unusual train patterns.

Now if this was a streetcar line, all of this would be fine, but remember - Prices Set Expectations. When the central section has the same cost as your generic subway line (and especially when you market your line as "Line 5"), I and everyone else have the right to expect subway level reliability and service, no less. This is further exacerbated by the planned eastern extension of the Line. A surface extension all the way to Malvern is absolutely great, until you realize that you are dealing with the Line 1 problem but exacerbated. Now some incident or delay at UTSC will have knock-on impacts and will affect the service that someone at Martin Grove will face, and this is bigger because the risk of impacts is so much larger.
Elevated lines are hideous. Even the RT is only elevated where needed and only because you cannot have heavy rail interacting with traffic if you want to keep it at subway speeds..

As someone who lives near and travels through the Golden Mile regularly I would be vehemently against Elevated lines. This is Toronto, not Chicago.
Elevated Lines just like anything else are only hideous if built that way. There are plenty of cities that have built Elevated Lines where they look perfectly find and nice: Toyko, Sydney, Montreal, Vancouver, Paris. Modern day elevated lines look absolutely nothing like NYC or Chicago. Looking at Chicago and pointing at that as an example as why Elevated Lines are hideous is the equivalent of pointing at NYC and using that as an example for why Subways are hideous and we shouldn't build them.

Paris Line 6 for Reference:
1636475554221.png
 
Elevated lines are hideous. Even the RT is only elevated where needed and only because you cannot have heavy rail interacting with traffic if you want to keep it at subway speeds..

As someone who lives near and travels through the Golden Mile regularly I would be vehemently against Elevated lines. This is Toronto, not Chicago.
Almost as if a massive area of parking lots, 6-lane roads, strip malls, and big box stores, like say, the Golden Mile, is not hideous…
 
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honestly most large metro areas have elevated lines as part of their infrastructure. its almost a prerequisite for quality transit as you cant just bury everything at will.
shanghai has several elevated lines. Theres obviously ways to construct it that makes it look more pleasing to the eye, but to just blanket label elevated lines
as the scorn of society is incredibly naive and shortsighted. anti elevated line people really need to travel outside of north america to see what actually is happening
in the more developed side of the world.
 
It's a little early to conclude that it will be unreliable. Waterloo has kept their service very reliable through worse conditions (though I admit service there is relatively infrequent).

The Leslie intersection could certainly been better designed - why they didn't go for a south-side alignment through that area I don't know. I'm not sure it would have even cost more money - perhaps less with the simpler arrangement. It's almost like someone was trying to protect a future Leslie extension to the south.

Tunelling from Don Mills to Kennedy would have added a lot more cost. Though perhaps elevated might have been a better compromise - and a lot quicker to construct.
If you read my post again you'll notice that I didn't say anything about tunnelling from Don Mills to Kennedy. They could have built a mostly at grade LRT with frequent trains and full priority over other traffic, just like other Canadian cities already have. An LRT doesn't have to be fully grade separated to operate like a metro. Elevated would probably be better though, I agree with that.

Elevated lines are hideous. Even the RT is only elevated where needed and only because you cannot have heavy rail interacting with traffic if you want to keep it at subway speeds..

As someone who lives near and travels through the Golden Mile regularly I would be vehemently against Elevated lines. This is Toronto, not Chicago.
Modern elevated metros and LRTs don't look like the Chicago L if that's what you're implying. The L is about as relevant to a new elevated rail line as the Model T is to Tesla.
 
Almost as if a massive area of parking lots, 6-lame roads, strip malls, and big box stores, like say, the Golden Mile, is not hideous…

True. For some reason we think it's a great idea to build a subway extension to one of those places. :p

I would've had no problem with an elevated line here, but I understand why they decided to build a street level solution. A little surprising people still have so much of a problem with it. We can certainly point to a lot of cities with elevated rail, but there also many cities that have street level LRTs. I'm sure people will find this line quite convenient.
 
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