Midtown Urbanist
Superstar
This exactly. I hope DRL West gets attention long before an extension of Sheppard, Yonge North or Finch or any other suburban corridor.
- Thread starter JasonParis
- Start date
This exactly. I hope DRL West gets attention long before an extension of Sheppard, Yonge North or Finch or any other suburban corridor.
ksun
Senior Member
Given the traffic on King and Queen, rapid development on them and the lack of development on Bloor/Danforth, and the difficulty of building a DRL, can we say that it has been a mistake to build the BD line to replace the original Queen line back in the days?
The flaw of the BD line is that it doesn't really cut through downtown, particularly the financial districts where the jobs and morning rush are. If we had built the Queen line instead, we would have two lines cutting through the core instead of one.
Let's be honest, Yonge/Bloor is not comparable to Yonge/Queen (or King). There are very few office buildings near the former. Years after the opening of the green line, surrounding streets are still pretty much low rise in nature.
The flaw of the BD line is that it doesn't really cut through downtown, particularly the financial districts where the jobs and morning rush are. If we had built the Queen line instead, we would have two lines cutting through the core instead of one.
Let's be honest, Yonge/Bloor is not comparable to Yonge/Queen (or King). There are very few office buildings near the former. Years after the opening of the green line, surrounding streets are still pretty much low rise in nature.
I think that's a fair assessment. The 'Flying U' proposal would have been much more efficient. However, even with that proposal, the Yonge line north of Bloor would have still needed to be relieved.
I'd say the bigger mistake was not building the Spadina Subway up Dufferin as was initially proposed. The current alignment was chosen mainly to protect the ROW of the Spadina Expressway. It was a pretty big departure from building subways under routes that already had heavy surface traffic.
M II A II R II K
Senior Member
Perhaps one could add that U onto the existing Bloor line, and it would start off empty at both ends.
ksun
Senior Member
I think it would work better if the western leg of the U line goes along University until Queen St, then to Spadina between Queen and Bloor and along Bathurst/Dufferine north of Bloor.
MisterF
Senior Member
I'll add to the agreements with this. There's way too much emphasis on the DRL being only to relieve Yonge. Relieving surface transit and expanding subway coverage in the central part of the city are just as important. These are major goals in other cities but for some reason not so much in Toronto.
I wouldn't say that it was a mistake per se, although Queen would have been a better alignment. The problem is more that nothing else was built downtown after that. They should have kept building, moving ahead with the Queen line after Bloor was built. Instead the focus became extending the existing two lines farther and farther into the suburbs, leaving the core with an inadequate system.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
If they continued the push for downtown transit we would have likely lost our streetcar network. You have to remember the state of mind the city was in during the early 1970's to see why the queen line wasn't built.
ksun
Senior Member
I would definitely trade the 501/504 for a subway on Richmond/Adelaide say from Parliament to Dufferine.
To travel from say Yonge to Bathurst on the 501 can easily take 30 minutes or more on a busy day. You might as well just walk.
If we had a subway along Dundas, I wouldn't mind losing the 505 and 506 all together either. They should either cut stops (there should be only one stop between all the major stops as shown on the BD line), or make it not wait for the traffic lights. It is too slow and it is not working.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
but would you trade the 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 508, 509, 510, 511 and 512 for just the Queen line? that was the plan at the time. I'm fine with loosing the 504 for the DRL (I actually advocate for it) but all the other lines need to stay, which they weren't planning for in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The justification of the Queen line at the time was largely to allow for the removal of the streetcar lines. Bus feeder routes would run north south to get you to your mid-city destination, but you would have been expected to take a bus to the subway to get somewhere downtown. I'm happy that didn't happen, Streetcars are a huge asset for the city today.
Last edited:
W. K. Lis
Superstar
The TTC made a mistake by removing the streetcars and tracks from Yonge Street, Bloor Street, and Danforth Avenue. They should have kept them to provide local service. In addition, having streetcars would have provided better emergency service than the buses because of the streetcar's larger capacity.
This is why I say, when the DRL is ever implemented, use it for express service and leave the streetcars for local service. As well as to provide emergency service in case of incidents or maintenance issues on the DRL.
This is why I say, when the DRL is ever implemented, use it for express service and leave the streetcars for local service. As well as to provide emergency service in case of incidents or maintenance issues on the DRL.
nrb
Active Member
Then you're stuck maintaining expensive tracks and overhead wires for a service that's not really needed. It doesn't make much sense.
ksun
Senior Member
Yonge/University line downtown section and pretty much the entire BD line has 300-500M spacing. How much more "local" do you expect it to be, every 100 meters? What exactly is your concept of "local service"?
If you want to use the senior people as an argument, I think it is not brutal to ask them to walk for 5-6 minutes to a stop in any city on the planet.
Removing a streetcar service from a street only really makes sense if it follows one particular streetcar route for a significant length of the route. If the DRL alignment is such that it's under Front through the St. Lawrence area, Wellington through the core, and then jumps up to Queen after Spadina, no one streetcar route is significantly replaced. Yes, the frequencies may be able to be reduced (which would make the routes more reliable), but I don't think any of them could actually be removed.
salsa
Senior Member
A lot of people have to walk more than 5-6 minutes just to get to their local bus stop, and much longer to walk to the nearest subway station. You think that's easy for a senior to do?
denfromoakvillemilton
Senior Member
So this is what we are looking at by 2025, correct?