aquateam
Active Member
Here's the thing though: Queen and Osgoode won't be huge interchange stations. They're destinations. Bloor-Yonge is a major pinch point because most people's trips go through it to get somewhere else. For most people getting off trains at Queen or Osgoode, their next move is to head for the exits, not the other platform. Where the exits are located is far more important than where the platforms are relative to each other.
Then why build on Queen, disrupting the second busiest surface transit line, when we could just build on Richmond or Adelaide and actually be closer to the final destinations of more people?
There is no singular destination, not city hall, not the four season centre, not the Shangrila, which is going to be the destination of as many riders as Line 1 will be. So the station box can go east or west of Yonge/University, but it still needs to overlap the station boxes of the transfer stations. There's still plenty of room to play around with the exit locations, so I don't think this is an extreme constraint.
The idea that transfers aren't important goes back to how the DRL has been marketed in order to win suburban support (and Steve Munro is partly responsible for perpetuating this): the idea that this is only a north-south line TO downtown instead of also an east-west line THROUGH downtown.
The original conception of the DRL as a downtown east-west trunk line is not politically marketable because: 1) it means that we are spending money on subways downtown instead of in the 'burbs when downtown "already has enough subways", 2) transit advocates who romanticize streetcars like Steve Munro are afraid with how a full "downtown U" will cannibalize streetcar ridership, which is why they gerrymander their fantasy alignments to avoid stealing streetcar riders and 3) it will enable and perpetuate densification of the "shoulder areas" of downtown, when downtown homeowners are already fighting development tooth and nail and when suburban municipalities want some of that development in their floundering downtowns (like STC or NYC.) City planning is firm on making sure that development peters out west of Spadina, and having rapid transit continue west of University would undermine that.
Any idea to extend the first phase construction west of University will not happen. Save these ideas for phase 3/4 of the Relief Line.
That's really unfortunate, considering the value that the western section has. According to TTC demand projections in the DRTES, the western section of the DRL has more non-transfer ridership than the eastern section. Spadina and Liberty Village would be two of the most heavily used stations on the line. This also has the potential to relieve Union by getting riders from the western GO lines to transfer to the DRL.