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This design is terribly pedestrian hostile. This bus terminal will be half a kilometre long; longer than the Toronto Eaton Centre. It'll take up to five minutes to walk to the end of the terminal from the subway station. Furthermore, Scarborough Centre Station is the deepest in the system, adding more minutes onto walking time. We're looking at six minute walking times from the platform to the end of the bus terminal.

Wilson Station is the most pedestrian hostile station I'm familiar with, but even that doesn't look quite as bad as this. At least that bus station as multiple levels, shortening walking times. The transfer time at Scarborough centre could very well be the longest in the city.

Two changes I'd make would be to move the bus terminal east so it is directly over Borough Road and the subway a station box. I'd also stack the terminals on top of each other, to shorten the walking time.
 
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TheTigerMaster said:
This design is terribly pedestrian hostile. This bus terminal will be half a kilometre long; longer than the Toronto Eaton Centre. It'll take up to five minutes to walk to the end of the terminal from the subway station. Furthermore, Scarborough Centre Station is the deepest in the system, adding more minutes onto walking time. We're looking at seven minute walking times from the train platform to the end of the bus terminal.
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I thought we were eliminating the transfer at Kennedy. Not merely replacing it with an even shittier one at Scarborough Centre.
 
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Yes. And all this progress in one shiny new station, which, as I've pointed out before, is costing more than the 40 km and 23 stations of Ottawa's stage 2 LRT expansion, which will carry more than twice as many people. World class.

Sorry, was I trolling, just being all mathy?
 
salsa said:
I thought we were eliminating the transfer at Kennedy. Not merely replacing it with an even shittier one at Scarborough Centre.
Click to expand...

To be fair, I don't think even opponents of the SSE dreamed that the subway-to-bus transfer would be so terrible.


I'd be more sympathetic to this design if it were forced due to physical constraints of the area. But Scarborough Centre has plenty of wide open space to work with. If we moved the terminal east over the station box (and Borough Drive) and stacked the terminal into two or three stories it would be far more pedestrian friendly. I suppose this wasn't done due to budget constraints, which is unfortunate. We're further soiling a nearly $4 Billion investment to shave millions off the cost of bus facilities.

I wonder how much this is going to impact the ridership of the line (not that anyone in City Hall cares). Walking times of up to six minutes is obviously going to apply significant downward pressure on SSE ridership.
 
Does anyone else get the feeling they are over complicating things on purpose so that the cost estimate becomes astronomical. At some point Tory will say this costs too much and will delay indefinitely? Obviously after the next elections
 
raptor said:
Does anyone else get the feeling they are over complicating things on purpose so that the cost estimate becomes astronomical. At some point Tory will say this costs too much and will delay indefinitely? Obviously after the next elections
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I don't think so. This obtuse design appears to be an extreme cost saving measure.

If there were any ulterior motives, I suppose the only plausible motive would be to leave SCC with an even worse transfer than the transfer the LRT would have delivered. But I don't for a second believe the engineers designing this would be so unprofessional. Furthermore, it's not as if normal people (aka people who don't spend hours reading about transit) give a hoot about the intricacies of transfer times - they just want a subway. So they'll be no political motivation to change this. It won't be until 2026 that the general public realizes how they've been swindled.

AlvinofDiaspar said:
There is a separate thread for LRT vs subway - keep the discussion in this one strictly about the proposed BD extension please, thanks.

MoD
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I'll move my previous post to the other thread.
 
At first blush I thought it was terrible. But the more I look at it, the less bad it looks. Most of the TTC buses will be near the stations core. That six minute walk will be reserved for DRT and GO users. While it sucks for them, that's a smaller proportion of riders having a 6 min walk .

I am curious why couldn't just ditch Triton and build a new bus terminal parallel to the station, or on top of the subway.
 
Roughly measuring on my computer, it looks to be around 211 metres from the stairs to the end of the bus platform. So at most a 3.5 min transfer for TTC customers, and 4.5 min for DRT and GO. This is assuming it takes one min to travel from platforms level to the bus terminal.

Still by no means pedestrian friendly, but not a disaster either.
 
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The last time we saw plans, I think the bus terminal did run north-south and the walks were less extreme. It could be this allows for more development.
 
A comparison of Scarborough Centre to an existing bus terminal: Wilson Station has the worst subway-to-bus transfer I'm aware of.

According to Google Maps, it's a 115 metre walk from the centre of the subway platform to the centre of the bus platform. Assuming walking speed of 5 km/h, it takes 82.8 seconds (1.38 minutes) to make that walk

Depending on which level of the bus terminal you're going to, you need to climb to or three sets of stars. Assuming each storey is 10 metres that's 5 to 15 metres of vertical elevation that needs to be climbed. Using basic trigonometry and assuming a stair angle of 33 degrees, that's 18.4 to 27.6 metres that need to be climbed. Escalators typically move at 0.5 km/h, so that'll take 36.8 to 73.6 seconds to climb.

So in total, the transfer from bus to subway at Wilson Station takes 119.6 seconds up to 156.4 seconds, or roughly 2 minutes to 2.3 minutes.

In comparison, the Scarborough Centre transfer looks to be at most 3.5 minutes for TTC customers at and most 4.5 minutes for DRT/GO customers (estimated in my previous post).

So Scarborough Centre look like it'll have the longest transfer in the system for TTC customers, by a very wide margin (assuming I'm right about Wilson having the longest bus-to-subway transfer).
 
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To be honest. At 3.5 minutes, not many people are going to care. That's still saving over the Kennedy + SC bus transfer today. Yes, we are basically replicating the crap transfer at Kennedy at SC. But overall? More convenient. I don't think many people are going to care as much as many here do.

And most riders won't be at 3.5 minutes. If they're smart, they'll plan the bus bay assignments so that the highest demand routes are closer to the escalators and stairs.
 
Another notoriously bad transfer is from Spadina Station (Line 1) to the 510 Spadina Streetcar. That transfer involves walking down a 150 metre tunnel and climbing 1 set of stairs. Using the same method I used to calculate Wilson's transfer time (assuming 5 km/h walking, 0.5 km/h escalator and 33 degree stair inclination), that's a transfer of 2.4 minutes. Curiously, this is the exact same length of time Spacing Toronto obtained in their real world walking test of Spadina Station transfer times:

Spacing: "I also walked back and forth between the platforms at Spadina Station where on average it took me 2 minutes and 24 seconds, measured from platform to platform. I walked with purpose but made sure to never run and I was carrying a bag."

urbantoronto-2216-6326.jpg
 
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kEiThZ said:
To be honest. At 3.5 minutes, not many people are going to care. That's still saving over the Kennedy + SC bus transfer today. Yes, we are basically replicating the crap transfer at Kennedy at SC. But overall? More convenient. I don't think many people are going to care as much as many here do.

And most riders won't be at 3.5 minutes. If they're smart, they'll plan the bus bay assignments so that the highest demand routes are closer to the escalators and stairs.
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I took the Line 1 to 510 Spadina Station transfer for years. Speaking from that experience, I can tell you that relatively few passengers are willing to make that 2.5 minute transfer (I always opted to do it). At this major interchange station, in the midst of rush hour, maybe 15 or 20 passengers would do the transfer per train load. Most of the passengers would rather detour to St. George Station. The Scarborough Centre Station transfer will be a whole minute longer. So yes, it does matter.

If you're travelling to STC, or using one of the many bus routes that currently departs from that station, it looks like it'll take more or less the same amount of transfer time as the very inconvenient Line 2 to RT transfer. Overall it'll be a little more convenient for these passengers since they still have one less transfer to make. However, their marginal convenience came at a cost of nearly $4 Billion, and deprives commuters who currently or would have used Lawrence East, Ellesmere, Centennial and Sheppard Stations of rapid transit. This is a shit deal for Scarborough commuters and Toronto as a whole.
 
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