With hundreds of thousands of people living and working downtown, there’s no reason (besides our lack of will) why a very significant portion of downtown trips shouldn’t be completed by bike.
GO absolutely is going to be increasing service, it’s been planning to ramp service over time for years.
So we ... close the streets to cars? I'm fairly sure I said somewhere that transit lanes would be a good solution.
I'm a pessimist.
Can we do that everywhere?
Yes!
There's a fairly substantial body of research showing that closing streets to cars will increase business. In an environment like DT, I think we should implement some more King St Pilots.
I don't see a reason for this to be true; you don't need to pay a fare, and they move people with much less road space than cars.
Transit ... lanes?
Let's hope so.
I’m, yea. I was gonna say that the TTC wanted a Queen Street transit priority system, similar to what we want on King, and they were looking to implement it at the same time period anyways. Get on with it.
Unfortunately, when Doug Ford "cancelled" the Downtown Relief Line" and replaced with his Ontario Line, that added several years (and money). To "cancel" his Ontario Line and put in your napkin drawing (that's the stage your proposal is at now) would mean adding more years (and more money). Don't want to wait any more, just build "something", even if it is not "great".
The reason it's on Queen is because it's closer to the midway point between union station and Bloor.
We need "streetcar malls" on the streetcar detours. Maybe even "bus malls" where appropriate. Putting the streetcars and buses on and around the construction in "right-of-ways" would be better than having transit vehicles in mixed traffic detours.
It was put under Queen Street for a multitude of reasons. 1) It was cheaper and easier. 2) They wanted to better serve the northern part of downtown, instead of duplicating the Union Station Rail Corridor. This also meant better serving locations of interest namely ryerson students. Since the line will be travelling between the Financial District and the University, they can better convince both groups to use the DRL rather than going through Bloor-Yonge.
Toy trains? Do not compare the Ontario Line with the SRT. The Ontario Line isn't some new fangled technology, its extremely standard metro technology that is being used in Paris, Sydney, and will be used in Montreal and Honolulu; amongst a ton of other cities. It is far more standard than the TR. If we're being objective for a moment, the existing TTC Subway system is more of a snake oil toy train system than this line.
The moment they decided to tunnel the DRL directly underneath a Rail Corridor they should've triggered a full holistic review of the entire thing, which they did and the result is the Ontario Line, a far more reasonable use of money for a service that will be just as good if not better than the original DRL plan in terms of alignment (no more going down 4 storeys just to get to the station platform).
Who is doing this? Reusing the stupid tiny streetcar stations (and by reusing what they actually mean is the section will be reconfigured to a new concourse level, so nothing is actually being "reused") is more of a "haha check out what we're doing with this cute piece of Toronto History" rather than actual policy that politicians are bending over for. Do you seriously think someone at the highest level is going "We have this tiny streetcar station under Queen, we must do everything we can in order to reuse this segment for our station"? Of course not.
This is a subway, full stop. This isn't light rail, this isn't light metro, this is a metro/subway. This is standard Metro technology that will have more capacity on opening day than Line 1 has today. Sure there could be an argument for wanting to make this line compatible with the rest of our network, but that doesn't mean this is some cheap toy train. This is as Subway as you can possibly get. As for why its under Queen Street, I already explained why.
The TRs have become another great example of "Toronto Exceptionalism", in that some people believe this city is somehow so unique and different we can't possible use the same solutions as other places (City Council perpetuates this constantly though, with their need for time-wasting "Made In Toronto" approaches to even the smallest problem, to be fair). For once we're actually looking at what works in other places and implementing it, which seems like a pretty solid plan.
Also, in addition to the station depths, the DRL station alignments were often incredibly bad. All the subway transfers were somehow even worse than Bloor-Yonge is, especially Queen. Plus the total insanity of putting Queen and Osgoode's platforms both inside the Line 1 U, as if the only place anyone would ever go to on the subway was City Hall. It was like the line was only invented to ferry people from Pape to City Hall and back again, and they didn't consider any other uses for it (the absurd Queen transfer would have been really annoying for anyone trying to go from Line 1, to the DRL, to go work at East Harbour, for example). For the many issues there can be with Metrolinx, they've done a much better job designing a subway that actually works as part of a user-friendly network of transit (at least in terms of transfers anyway) than the DRL would have been.
The passengers may not all "transfer" to or from the Ontario Line to Line 1 at Osgoode or Queen stations. Why should they? When they can walk the last blocks to the office buildings where they work, or shop at Eaton's Centre. They are not like Bloor-Yonge or St. George Stations, which was NOT their final destination.
Would've been really convenient for the City Hall bureaucrats! I admit that it is kind of romantic to have a "City Hall Station", but it makes no sense and it would've just bypassed two important subway stations! Honestly, what were they thinking?
Yes, but not everyone wants to walk such a long distance. Doesn't seem like a good argument, considering how many people commute to the Financial District and how important Union Station is as a transportation hub. The fact that this is of the most important employment hubs in the entire region means that we can't dismiss the convenience of hundreds of thousands of people. Some people like to walk, but many are commuting in from faraway suburbs and the last thing you want to do is make their journey even more tedious.