For those that are interested, the EA for the Richmond Hill line expansion has been posted:
http://www.gotransit.com/PUBLIC/en/news/ea/richmondhill/ea_richmondhill.htm
TOS
Having read the EA, I have to say I’m pretty underwhelmed. It’s somewhat instructive to see how depending on the consultant involved, the sort of document that gets produced and labeled as an EA varies quite considerably in terms of content and scope. Compared to the Kitchener EA or the very early work that’s gone into the Bowmanville Extension, this is a very different-feeling creature.
Certainly, the level of detail put into Moraine-ish subjects like hydrology and aquifer recharge is absolutely first-rate. That’s the single most important aspect of the natural geography in this neck of the woods, and it’s heartening to see that a significant portion of the assessment team’s man-hours went into studying this, if the number of pages about soil type and coldwater fish habitat are any indications.
But reading the report, you get the distinct feeling that they could just as easily be talking about laying a natural gas pipeline and deciding where best to situate compressor stations. For a transit EA, there’s remarkably little said about transit. Literally zero attention is paid to putting oneself in the shoes of the future GO customer and providing a product that best meets their needs.
I think everyone can agree that a GO Station at Stouffville Road (
Gormley) is a home run. Access is great, the land is publicly-owned already, and the neighbours have been aware of it being on the books for 20 years now. The EA makes it quite clear the site has by far the fewest environmental hangups. Finally, the West Gormley secondary plan means that several thousand units are going to be going in within walking/cycling distance in the coming year.
Also, the proposed layover site north of Gormley and south of Bethesda Sideroad is a pretty straightforward best-option pick from an environmental perspective. The other sites further north would all seem to involve filling wetlands or clearing forest.
So yeah, bring on the extension to there post-haste.
But having read the report, I have to say I’m astounded that it carries forward with the recommendation to build a second station at Bloomington Road “soon†after the extension of service to Gormley. If anything, the EA builds the case that a station in that location would involve drastic impacts on the natural environment and would cost way more than is justifiable. What the EA fails to even attempt to address is whether that station would attract ridership. There’re supposed to be 700 parking spots there on opening day. For the life of me, I can’t find 700 commuters—current or future—that would use it. 700 field mice, maybe. Not 700 delightful fare-paying customers.
First of all, let’s look at
the site. It is quite emphatically the definition of B.F. nowhere. Draw a 1 km radius circle around it and by my reckoning you include two houses. Kick that out to a 3 km radius and you’re still only collecting several dozen farms and country estate homes. Forget pedestrian or cyclist traffic to it. Forget local bus routes. In fact, it’s so far out of the way from the core of Richmond Hill, Oak Ridges or Aurora that you can probably forget kiss n’ ride traffic. (You really have to love your spouse to voluntarily go 25 minutes out of your way from your usual commute from suburban Richmond Hill to Magna or Woodbridge etc. so you can swing by the GO Station and drop them off.)
So we’re left with park and ride. No worries, you might think. That was always going to be the big draw for this line. And it’s right on the 404! Thousands of cars whiz down it every morning and now they’ll just pull off and park here instead. Perfect.
Except nobody evidently gave any thought to where those cars are coming from. They’re not spontaneously coming into being 400m north of the Bloomington Road offramp. They’re not, by and large, coming from farmlands to the east. They’re starting their morning commutes by pulling out of suburban driveways in Aurora, Newmarket, East Gwillimbury and Georgina. If they’re driving under the Bloomington Road overpass today, chances are good they could easily have driven to one of several GO stations on the Barrie line but chose not to. And in most every case, driving to a GO station on the Barrie line would be a faster option for these people than catching the train from Bloomington Road.
To travel between Richmond Hill and Old Cummer—11.1 km with one intermediary stop—it takes 12 minutes. I’m going to work from the assumption that to travel between Bloomington Road and Richmond Hill—12.6 km with one intermediary stop—it would take 13 minutes. If you’ll forgive the cliché, this gives us the following scenario: two GO Trains pull out of Union station at 5 in the evening going opposite directions at full speed. The train on the newly-extended Richmond Hill line comes to a stop at Bloomington Road station at 5:54. The train on the Barrie line, however, has already pulled out of Aurora station, having arrived there at 5:53, and is already heading on to Newmarket.
In other words, the commuter in suburban Aurora who chose to take the Barrie line home is not only in his car a minute sooner, but he’s also considerably further north and almost certainly closer to home. I ran an admittedly-unscientific round of experimentation with Google Maps and found that there are only a tiny handful of addresses in Richmond Hill or Aurora—we’re talking in the order of 100 homes, tops—where any time savings whatsoever might be accomplished by going to Bloomington Road. And so long as there isn’t complete gridlock on the roads between Bloomington Rd. and Stouffville Rd., it stands to reason that every one of that tiny cohort of commuters could get those same 1 or 2 minutes of time savings by driving a bit further and using the Gormley Station instead. If you want to really improve their commutes, along with a fair few people further west, build a Bloomington Road station all right, but not on the Richmond Hill line… do it as an infill stop on the Barrie line somewhere around
here.
Indeed, the Barrie line has a couple more things going for it. For one, the line will see counterflow off-peak service far sooner than Richmond Hill, which will make ditching the car at a park and ride on it that much more appealing. As two of the four trips per day are at capacity, I also think it’s realistic that we’ll see express service bypassing stops south of Aurora in the near future. That would widen the speed gap between Bloomington Road and Aurora/Newmarket/East Gwillimbury even more. (For those of you wondering why exactly the Barrie line is blessed with a speed edge, consider the low operating speed of GO trains winding up the Don Valley relative to the Barrie line’s straight climb.)
What I find frustrating is absolutely none of this sort of thinking found its way into the EA. There’s no effort taken to substantiate the benefits a Bloomington Road station would offer, no forecasts for ridership, not even a stab at costing it out (unlike the Kitchener EA, which has nice little cost estimates for each station). Bloomington Road would require rebuilding the 404 onramp, constructing a grade separation for the entry road, and spending who knows how much extra money mitigating its environmental impact. And every single one of those dollars could be better spent elsewhere on the system to improve GO’s appeal to York Region commuter.
Seeing as I’m not Steve Munro and this isn’t my personal blog, I’m going to stop here for a sec. There’s more where this ire came from.
