[Forgotten]

But if the main goal of this, or any, "relief" line is to move people in and out of downtown while taking the strain off of (ie relieving) the existing network, are we not better off with a station that draws people away from the existing lines totally?

So that station at Bay King with pedestrian/path access from all corners of that busy employment node could take people off of YUS via foot and whisk them E-NE or W-NW without them ever touching the other lines. I am not sure that you would lose many (any) riders from, say, King and Uni if they had to walk (above or below ground) to get to King and Bay...if that new subway could get them out to their destination area faster and with greater comfort.

Which is why having one box under Bay street to save money is stupid. Lower coverage in the densest part of the city with highest traffic. Cramming all foot traffic and passengers for this line into one station. What happens if there's a "personal injury at track level" and everyone has to walk to one stop west or east because there's no place to reverse? It sounds a lot like false economy and recipe for disaster.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

But if the main goal of this, or any, "relief" line is to move people in and out of downtown while taking the strain off of (ie relieving) the existing network, are we not better off with a station that draws people away from the existing lines totally?

So that station at Bay King with pedestrian/path access from all corners of that busy employment node could take people off of YUS via foot and whisk them E-NE or W-NW without them ever touching the other lines. I am not sure that you would lose many (any) riders from, say, King and Uni if they had to walk (above or below ground) to get to King and Bay...if that new subway could get them out to their destination area faster and with greater comfort.

I think we need to be careful - relieving Yonge is only the most obvious aspect of this line and not the sole reason for having it. What would definitely be wrong in the long run would be to design this line without a local transit component - and the only reason why I suggest Bay is cost and buildability issues - and it would offer opportunities to add a stop to the east (and perhaps west) closer to the central area than you'd otherwise be able to if you have station at Univ. Avenue and Yonge. If the only thing want to do is to whisk someone away from the financial core as fast as possible, limited stop trains (e.g. GO) is probably your best bet.

Which is why having one box under Bay street to save money is stupid. Lower coverage in the densest part of the city with highest traffic. Cramming all foot traffic and passengers for this line into one station. What happens if there's a "personal injury at track level" and everyone has to walk to one stop west or east because there's no place to reverse? It sounds a lot like false economy and recipe for disaster.

See above re: lower coverage - not if you have the intent of extending coverage by adding an additional station for future core expansion. Besides, if there is a personal injury at track level the entire section of the line is likely going to be shutdown anyways, one station or two wouldn't have made much of a dif.

AoD

 

[M II A II R II K]

Union could be the main hub, and have several sub-hubs in the vicinity with a looping subway line to connect all the hubs together.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Mark:

That depends on how far these sub-hubs are and how time-competitive it is (walking to the station proper, wait, walk to the hub) relative to just walk to the main hub in a climate controlled environment.

AoD

 

[W. K. Lis]

At Pearson Airport (YYZ), it will be more than a 500 m walk from the proposed Union Pearson Station to a gate, more to the furthest gate. Not including the detours for checking in, security, customs, duty-free, etc. Maybe longer if one is transferring flights, and having to walk from one gate to another gate.

Airport terminals can be very spread out, in general. Superimposing just Pearson Airport entrances and gates on top of Union Station, can serve as a guide at how wide spread the DRL's downtown station could be from Union.

 

[M II A II R II K]

Mark:

That depends on how far these sub-hubs are and how time-competitive it is (walking to the station proper, wait, walk to the hub) relative to just walk to the main hub in a climate controlled environment.

Actually the riders that aren't going to around Union should not have to go there as the only transfer hub. A Gerrard Square GO stop could serve the Eaton Centre, the hospitals, Chinatown, Ryerson, U of T, and many more if there were a downtown Dundas subway line cutting across.

 

[CDL.TO]

On the other hand CDL Tokyo's circle of interconnected rail stations is perhaps the most brilliant transportation solution I have ever experienced (I'm a naive non-transit geek). I admit to being confused when I was there. Because of my subway bias I was always trying to take the subway to get to my destination which was a bad idea. Tokyo's subway system is non-sensical and a poster boy for arguments against privatization in my opinion. However, I guess in Tokyo they are dealing with people movements that dwarf anything we have to deal with here or in European cities for that matter.

I'll admit I'm not as familiar with Tokyo, but I do know that there is currently a project underway to build a new line (partially on viaduct) so that three lines can directly serve Tokyo station rather than requiring a transfer at Uneo station which is required today. Wiki gives the cost as $420 million to "reduce travel time by 11 minutes" by eliminating the transfer.

While I'm sure Tokyo is never going to have a single central station, even today they're spending big bucks to reduce the number of central terminuses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tōhoku_Jūkan_Line

 

[gweed123]

The only catch of course is that the interchange with St. Andrew and King is going to be inefficiently organized with a Wellington alignment (though conceivably cheaper), which is something to think about as well. I tend to favour efficient interchange with said stations more than distance to Union myself.

Another way to go about it might to build the station at Bay underneath King St. instead, and that could benefit from multiple PATH access points while connecting to both King and St. Andrew station at either end while saving the trouble of having to build two stations for such a short distance.

AoD

How many people will actually be interchanging though? Downtown is the origin or the destination for most of those trips. Bloor-Yonge is busy because it in itself isn't a destination.

The more important aspect is to provide convenient connections from the subway platforms to the street level, in places that make sense. That to me matters way more than the configuration of the interchange. The only transfer that's a "gateway" transfer is the transfer from TTC to GO at Union. The connections to King and St. Andrew are "in case you need them" transfers, not high volume transfers.

 

[M II A II R II K]

They may say that the costs of building a subway and it's operating costs after the fact are not worth it, but short range subway lines that have destinations, and act as convenient connectors, and of course in the pre-war dense areas where cars and transit don't mix very well.

 

[diminutive]

Regarding how a DRL would intersect with the YUS line, it's difficult to say without more detailed cost and ridership numbers.

I don't think Union is at risk of some kind of crowding disaster. King and St. Andrew Stations were expected to get ~20k alighting in peak hour (assuming fully built out DRL). Assuming a Union-DRL interchange would get the same number, that's not particularly unwieldy. Many would undoubtedly opt to simply walk to their destination, which would limit stress on the Union TTC station.

Though, if a more northerly route was selected, I always thought the front of Nathan Phillips Square and Old City Hall could be used to construct a very large station with connections to Queen n maybe Osgoode. Assuming the station started around James Street that would be ~150m to Queen, which is quite acceptable. It would be quite a bit further to Osgoode, so it may be more practical to have a second station around McCaul-Simcoe-Osgoode, but a 300m transfer isn't unheard of. That could be done without royally screwing up surface transit on Queen since most of the box could go on the front lawn of Old City Hall and NPS. Not sure how difficult dismantling the parking garage would be, but surely doable.

Again, all of the E-W routes through the core will have their ups and their downs. City hall should issue an RFP for some kind of vague E-W corridor through downtown with given capacity and speed goals and let various P3 consortia present alternative proposals. Since Queen's Park and Ottawa will be funding >90% of this anyways it will be some kind of euphemism for a P3 anyways. Why not be proactive and try to let various people put forth competing ideas?

There's no one line through downtown which is obviously superior.

 

[diminutive]

On the other hand CDL Tokyo's circle of interconnected rail stations is perhaps the most brilliant transportation solution I have ever experienced (I'm a naive non-transit geek). I admit to being confused when I was there. Because of my subway bias I was always trying to take the subway to get to my destination which was a bad idea. Tokyo's subway system is non-sensical and a poster boy for arguments against privatization in my opinion. However, I guess in Tokyo they are dealing with people movements that dwarf anything we have to deal with here or in European cities for that matter.

Again, there's a 'yes, but..."

Yes, Tokyo does not have one centralized hub like Toronto. Though, like I said earlier, all of those hubs are highly interconnected with most services running through two or more said hubs.

The big but there is that Tokyo is freaking huge. That makes it both uniquely sprawly and still being dense enough to support a ton of rapid transit. It is a very multi-nodal city, which makes a Union station impractical. While there are multiple nodes, those nodes are about as well connected as practical. Just look at a map of rapid transit in the GTA; it's geometrically impossible that you won't have multiple relatively large transfer points.

Also, when I made my earlier point, I was responding to the notion that 'other cities have multiple train stations, so why not Toronto' to point out that all of those cities, including Tokyo, have made huge investments to connect as many of those terminals as possible. I didn't mean to give the impression that all cities however should strive to have their entire network converge on one transfer station. That would be impractical and unwise. I'd say the ideal network topology would look like Washington's Metro system; radial lines jinking around the center to create multiple opportunities for transfers to balance loads and provide better coverage.

Really, I don't think where a DRL intersects YUS (and by proxy, the CBD) will have any huge impact on the overall network. At the end of the day it's only 700m between City Hall and Union Station, so, not worth getting to fussed over.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Why isn't the Bay Station as busy as the Yonge-Bloor Station (Bloor specifically)? Because there is no transfer-free connection between Bay Station and the Bloor Station. There is an underground connection, but it is outside the paid zone.

Any DRL Station will need to have a transfer-free connection with the Yonge-University lines. Maybe with multiple egress and ingress points, not just above or next to the stations themselves. With stores, of course, within the paid zone.

 

[gweed123]

Why isn't the Bay Station as busy as the Yonge-Bloor Station (Bloor specifically)? Because there is no transfer-free connection between Bay Station and the Bloor Station. There is an underground connection, but it is outside the paid zone.

Any DRL Station will need to have a transfer-free connection with the Yonge-University lines. Maybe with multiple egress and ingress points, not just above or next to the stations themselves. With stores, of course, within the paid zone.

But again, there's one key difference there: for most people, Yorkville isn't their final destination. That is just a forced transfer on the way to their destination. For most DRL riders, their final destination will be the CBD, or the direct surrounding area.

The only trip that's going to see a significant transfer volume is people using the DRL to connect to the services at Union (GO, VIA). Very few people heading westbound on the DRL are going to transfer at King to go northbound on Yonge, unless they're really really lazy. Think about it, if someone from the east end of the Bloor line (say from Victoria Park), wants to go to Yonge and Dundas, why would they transfer at Pape onto the DRL, just to transfer again at King to go north by 2 stops. Wouldn't it just be easier to stay on Bloor-Danforth and transfer at Bloor-Yonge? Of course it would.

This volume can be easily estimated today. Just watch during AM rush hour how many King Streetcar riders get off at Yonge, go down into the subway, and then head for the northbound platform (or heck, even the southbound platform). For northbound, I would venture to say maybe a couple riders per car? For the vast majority of the King car riders, the moment they stop off that streetcar, that IS their final time on a TTC vehicle for that trip.

As for current B-D riders, I would venture to say that only a handful of people are going to walk more than 1 stops worth north or south from the DRL. So if it's under King or Wellington, down to Bremner or up to Queen is about as far as most people will walk. Specifically northward, if it's along Wellington, anyone bound for a stop at Dundas northward will probably continue to transfer at Bloor-Yonge instead of using the DRL.

Of course, because I'm me, I need to point out that a decoupling scenario renders this whole "which street is the best cross street" debate moot, because the DRL East would become the University line, so if someone coming from Riverdale wants to get to Dundas, all they have to do is ride the same line up to St. Patrick. Even if they're going to Dundas and Yonge, that's still a shorter walk from St. Patrick than it is from pretty much every "traditional" DRL alignment except Queen.

 

[innsertnamehere]

What about yonge riders transferring to the DRL? Not bloor, who would already have had that chance, but yonge?

Another key here is to remember how complicated already existing infrastructure is in the core. Because of skyscraper foundations you can't switch streets. (unless you want to dig down 30+ meters, which is way to far to be comfortably accessible by passengers) Because of the Royal York and RBC Plaza, a direct connection to a Wellington station is either difficult as you will have to dig up Bay or York, ( which is not preferable, as it seperates it from the TTCs Current main operations below front, meaning no fare paid transfers) or pointless if you opt out of that as you lose any advantages the Wellington alignment possibly had, which was the connection to Union.

To me, you either pitch out the big bucks and build a single station on front, ending up with a stupid western alignment, or forego a union transfer (which makes more sense to me anyways as my idea of the DRL is to eliminate the 504, relieving streetcar traffic, and act as a relief valve on the Yonge line)and build double stations on King. To me serving union is a secondary purpose, and in the end the several hundred million spent getting it to the station aren't worth it for the couple hundred people who will be transferring outside PATH hours.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

It should also be mentioned that one of the big problems with having the DRL at Union is that we will have the passenger load from two passengers (King and St. Andrew) going to Union station - A station that is already above capacity. Then there's the problem with the fact that the Union alignment means that the DRL will be relatively far from the major destinations along King and Queen. And we also have to consider how incredibly expensive retrofitting Union (TTC) Station will be. Say goodbye to the $200 Million station renovation that we're about to complete. Existing platforms will need to be widened, two new platforms will need to be added under the existing platforms (certainly not an easy engineering task) we'll probably need several new entrances and the mezzanine will have to be widened even further to accommodate more traffic. I'm not sure how much this will cost, but this project would almost certainly make the $1 Billion Bloor-Yonge renovation seem like a small project. We'll have to wait for some more reports to see if the Union alignment ends up being more expensive than King. I wouldn't be surprised if it was.


Now I'd be willing to support the Union alignment if there were great benefits to it. But as far as I can see, the negatives (even when ignoring costs & engineering challenges) far outweigh the benefits.

Like I said before, the only real benefit to the Union alignment is direct access to GO and others. The negatives are that the customers will be further from their downtown destination, the cost and the fact that Union very likely can't handle all the passengers.

This decision should be very easy.