[Woodbridge_Heights]

How does running Eglinton east of Kennedy not feed the Danforth line? The Morningside line has been shelved for now, so the busiest stretch of Eglinton is being ignored.

There's no desperate need for a crosstown line along Eglinton right now - extending the B/D line and Sheppard, as well as improving GO, would all be of far more use to far more people - but there's still benefits to running one long line on Eglinton. Having four transit lines terminate at Kennedy station is stupid when we should have two lines intersecting...people could then transfer from one to the other or stay on in a straight line. Besides, in the ideal future, we won't be forcing everyone to go through Yonge & Bloor...some people will find it useful to go along Eglinton and then down Spadina, or down the DRL. The central stretch of Eglinton is getting a tunnel because there's no reasonable way to improve transit over this stretch without a tunnel, but everyone knows that this should not be the city's first priority. It's not the busiest route and it has few regional consequences in the short term. For one thing, there's nothing on Eglinton between Yonge and the airport. In the future, maybe there will be more people and jobs and shoppers and students needing to travel along Eglinton. But Eglinton was scorned by Mike Harris and it "runs through all six boroughs" and it could become a nice, long, aesthetically pleasing line through the middle of our transit map and blah blah blah, so people fight for it and have made it a priority...though, ironically, in a way that kills all of its crosstown value.



Well, of course you didn't hear anything. If it had been made public, there would have been endless squabbling over how to spend the money and everyone would have fought for their pet projects. Yes, we ended up with pet projects, anyway, but our mayor supposedly speaks for everyone in the city. McGuinty would have also been criticized for throwing money around without a plan, and then would have been unable to change projects or budgets without getting slammed again. Yes, we know that the choice to build LRT or to not build subway or to decide on this or that technology anywhere else is entirely ideological and has absolutely nothing to do with budgets. The usual and pathetically lame counter-argument made by people in this and other threads is that we can't afford to build subways everywhere, which is a mind-numbingly stupid argument when we're spending more money on LRT on Eglinton than we've ever spent on any other project, and when there's only a few corridors and a few subway projects that anyone has any intention of supporting.

I think you have me mistaken for a Pro Eglinton LRT poster. On the contrary at the current cost structure I believe it is wise to re-evalute the entire project, it's assumptions, projections, etc. If we are spending subway type dollars than we should at least look at building a subway.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

I think you have me mistaken for a Pro Eglinton LRT poster. On the contrary at the current cost structure I believe it is wise to re-evalute the entire project, it's assumptions, projections, etc. If we are spending subway type dollars than we should at least look at building a subway.

No, I was taking you for someone who wasn't doing enough thinking. How does running Eglinton east of Kennedy not feed the Danforth line? Why would someone insist on subway or nothing for Eglinton yet also say it shouldn't include the busiest stretch of Eglinton? Why is looking at ways to increase the grade-separation of the LRT plan such an unappealing option?

The difference with [extensions of] Yonge, Spadina, Bloor, Danforth, and Sheppard is that they have subway lines that already exist, while a DRL would invariably need the capacity of a subway. Eglinton is a blank slate, but no matter what's built, it won't ever come close to moving the number of people that a subway can. It won't. That's just reality, and reality doesn't change even though they're spending a fortune and even though they should be studying other options, too.

If grade separation = better, and a subway line scored 100, a partially tunnelled LRT line might score about a 40. The real debate should be how much higher would the LRT score be before almost everyone's satisfied? How much more money would it take? Can we raise the score without spending much more money doing things like using the Richview corridor? If something successful like the C-Train - or almost any other light rail line in the world - scores more like an 80, should we aim for this?

 

[Second_in_pie]

If we've got the Richview corridor right there, we should be aiming for as high as possible. And if we could get an 100 with just a bit more money, that'd be a great investment in my books. And with Pearson-Don Mills being by far the biggest part of the line, might as well make it use existing subway technology and just not extend it East, where it'd be massive overkill for subway or LRT.

 

[Dan416]

If we've got the Richview corridor right there, we should be aiming for as high as possible. And if we could get an 100 with just a bit more money, that'd be a great investment in my books. And with Pearson-Don Mills being by far the biggest part of the line, might as well make it use existing subway technology and just not extend it East, where it'd be massive overkill for subway or LRT.

Agreed

 

[EnviroTO]

Real analysis would focus only on (a) does it meet the capacity requirements expected to be seen in the next 20-30 years, (b) does it meet certain criteria for speed, and (c) is it the cheapest solution to deliver those requirements. Some scoring system where subway gets 100 is simplistic. There is no way a non-arbitrary score would give subways 100 in all implementations. The subway network north of St.Clair would need to be scored higher from a speed perspective than along the Danforth. With true full signal priority there is nothing preventing the Eglinton LRT from achieving speed based scores as high as the Danforth line on Eglinton west of Weston Road. There would definitely be challenges on the Sheppard LRT where the stops are closer together.

 

[Filip]

The problem is it won't get signal priority - it's been proven on all the other 'LRT' lines in Toronto.. Also, please, don't say that it will, because we all know it won't. Note: if such high frequencies are to be used, and full signal priority is given - how in the world would you deal with north-south traffic? They would never have a long enough light to smoothly intersect Eglinton.

I'll just reinvent a famous saying by Bill Davis: "If we are building a transportation system to serve today's needs, the Eglinton LRT would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve the future, the Eglinton LRT is a good place to stop".

 

[EnviroTO]

The problem is it won't get signal priority - it's been proven on all the other 'LRT' lines in Toronto..

We have streetcars elsewhere on all the other LRT lines. They have small streetcars about 35 years old running down streets with frequent intersections. You can say we "won't get signal priority" but the fact is we "won't get a subway" so if you are going to talk about how we should have a subway I can suggest real signal priority.

I'll just reinvent a famous saying by Bill Davis: "If we are building a transportation system to serve today's needs, the Eglinton LRT would be a good place to start.

Good, we are in agreement on this point. We need the Eglinton LRT.

But if we are building a transportation system to serve the future, the Eglinton LRT is a good place to stop".

Why stop there? Who knows, maybe in the future you need more than the Eglinton LRT and you can re-purpose the LRT tunnel for a subway. Many people have tried to predict the future and many have been wrong.

 

[Filip]

So assuming one day Eglinton reaches subway capacity (I'm willing to bet it'll be in less than 10 years, as the TTC is outright lying on their projections).. You will have to disable the line for God knows how many years (this is the TTC after all) so these 30k-45k ppdh will go where? Remember, long gone are the days that you can expropriate the entire north section to cut and cover while street operations are kept, or the fact that the central tunnel is closed for work. That'll be a clusterfuck like Toronto has never seen.

 

[rbt]

So assuming one day Eglinton reaches subway capacity.

This, of course, is impossible. There will not be 15,000 pphpd transferring onto a southbound Yonge subway line and there are not enough destinations on Eglinton to bring ridership up to that level. Hitting this would require 20Million sqft of commercial added at some point along Eglinton which is not near Yonge (I.e very large numbers transferring off Yonge onto Eglinton during morning rush).

With the DRL built to Eglinton, overloading Eglinton LRT is even more unlikley as now there are more intercept points for people to transfer onto going south which increases turn-over and reduces ridership at any point along the line -- more total passengers, fewer at any given point.

 

[W. K. Lis]

This, of course, is impossible. There will not be 15,000 pphpd transferring onto a southbound Yonge subway line and there are not enough destinations on Eglinton to bring ridership up to that level. Hitting this would require 20Million sqft of commercial added at some point along Eglinton which is not near Yonge (I.e very large numbers transferring off Yonge onto Eglinton during morning rush).

With the DRL built to Eglinton, overloading Eglinton LRT is even more unlikely as now there are more intercept points for people to transfer onto going south which increases turn-over and reduces ridership at any point along the line -- more total passengers, fewer at any given point.

It should be remembered that Eglinton will not be the only east-west rapid line being built. There will also be the Finch West and Sheppard East being built around the same time. That means not everyone will start to use the Eglinton to get to the 1 Yonge-University-Spadina to get downtown. Depends on which line is closer: Finch West/Sheppard East or Eglinton. If they have a choice, they may choose a more northerly line so they can get a seat on the 1 Y-U-S. And of course, the 2 Bloor-Danforth will still be around. (And if predictions of the price of gasoline skyrocketing in the years to come, buses and streetcars on the other routes could have an easier time with less single-occupant automobiles sharing the road.)

 

[Second_in_pie]

Why stop there? Who knows, maybe in the future you need more than the Eglinton LRT and you can re-purpose the LRT tunnel for a subway. Many people have tried to predict the future and many have been wrong.

But in case you haven't noticed, almost every single piece of transit built in this city has had it's projected ridership way underestimated. So the trends would say that if people's predictions are wrong, it's probably because they underestimated.

 

[SlickFranky]

But in case you haven't noticed, almost every single piece of transit built in this city has had it's projected ridership way underestimated. So the trends would say that if people's predictions are wrong, it's probably because they underestimated.

So I guess they should stop running projections and jst 'go with their gut'? Or they should just assume 35k for each line? Or maybe run their projections, then arbitrarily double them?

 

[EnviroTO]

But in case you haven't noticed, almost every single piece of transit built in this city has had it's projected ridership way underestimated. So the trends would say that if people's predictions are wrong, it's probably because they underestimated.

So the obvious solution when they were considering building the Yonge subway was to cancel the project until a proposal which could handle all possible future loads was developed. The people who built the Yonge subway were too short sighted as they should have cancelled the project to await funding for a double decked subway with express tracks.

 

[fanoftoronto]

So the obvious solution when they were considering building the Yonge subway was to cancel the project until a proposal which could handle all possible future loads was developed. The people who built the Yonge subway were too short sighted as they should have cancelled the project to await funding for a double decked subway with express tracks.

No, the Yonge subway planners did the absolute right thing. They decided to build a subway even though the ridership on the line was estimated to be very low, maybe even comparable to the Eglinton LRT estimates BUT, they built a subway since they anticipated a growth that would justify a subway in the future. That growth happened much earlier than they predicted but they had the extra capacity of a subway. The same cannot be said for the Eglinton LRT.

 

[rbt]

So the obvious solution when they were considering building the Yonge subway was to cancel the project until a proposal which could handle all possible future loads was developed. The people who built the Yonge subway were too short sighted as they should have cancelled the project to await funding for a double decked subway with express tracks.

With station boxes long enough for 10 car trains.