[BurlOak]

If you dig down deep enough to go under 6 level parking garages, It will be too deep to be desirable as an alternative to transferring on the Yonge Line. as I said, people complain about 3 flights of stairs, imagine 7 or 8.

I am sure that everyone has seen the TRZ proposal. http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=670156 . One thing I like about it is that the DRL goes over the Yonge and University subways. This makes it much more desirable to use since it is a simpler one-level transfer. It also would greatly reduce the cost of construction.

I noticed both maps above, plus the TRZ proposal, have some pretty tight looking curves - either weaving through downtown or making the curves on either end to head "north". I wonder if Mark III (SkyTrain) were used, it may be easier to navigate these curves (tighter radius allowed) - and it would require a somewhat lower tunnel height to assist in going over the two existing subway lines.

I also note the TRZ had 3 stations between Yonge and Don River and 2 between Don River and Pape.

 

[innsertnamehere]

Sky train would t have the capacity, and would require its own yard. For subway, if just the eastern portion was built, they wouldn't even need an expanded yard. With the western portion you would need to expand a yard (presumably Wilson, and shift the storage of trains around a bit to squeeze in the DRL trains somewhere closer). If you were to go with MKIII ICTS trains you would need a completely new yard somewhere with direct access to the line. Until the portion to eglinton is built, there is no place to put a new yard.

He had the same amount of stops I had... Hmmmm..

Also, I am fine with it being a level below the current yonge subway. It is just when you start to switch streets and need to dig under buildings with 5-6 level parking garages when you run into trouble. For St. Andrew and King it would have to be 3 levels down, but all the other stops could be 2 levels a is standard.

I seriously doubt there is enough space above the stations to fit the line either. I walk through St. Andrew every rainy day (taking the PATH to work) and there can't be more than 6ft between the stations ceiling and street level.

 

[gweed123]

Sky train would t have the capacity, and would require its own yard. For subway, if just the eastern portion was built, they wouldn't even need an expanded yard. With the western portion you would need to expand a yard (presumably Wilson, and shift the storage of trains around a bit to squeeze in the DRL trains somewhere closer). If you were to go with MKIII ICTS trains you would need a completely new yard somewhere with direct access to the line. Until the portion to eglinton is built, there is no place to put a new yard.

He had the same amount of stops I had... Hmmmm..

Also, I am fine with it being a level below the current yonge subway. It is just when you start to switch streets and need to dig under buildings with 5-6 level parking garages when you run into trouble. For St. Andrew and King it would have to be 3 levels down, but all the other stops could be 2 levels a is standard.

I seriously doubt there is enough space above the stations to fit the line either. I walk through St. Andrew every rainy day (taking the PATH to work) and there can't be more than 6ft between the stations ceiling and street level.

Under would be a necessity through the downtown. I don't think any of the stations have enough clearance to put the DRL overtop of the existing subway.

Also, with respect to technology for the DRL, I still believe that an express-local 4-tracked LRT DRL could be a good solution, especially if it's run along Queen. Run single or paired LRT vehicles on the local tracks, with stop spacing at Bloor-Danforth widths or less, and run express trains with 3 or 4 car LRT trains making only limited stops. The express tracks can curve north at whatever point is deemed relevant, eventually becoming the Don Mills and Jane LRTs. The local tracks can continue along Queen, and in the west eventually become the WWLRT.

Another similar option is to have the express tracks running GO REX instead of LRT, although the effect would be the same.

 

[innsertnamehere]

That sounds overly damn expensive. We are working within a budget here. (Admittingly 7.4 billion dollars haha) if it is going to be a grade separated LRT, you may as well go for HRT, especially if it is all underground. Also, express collectors systems are insanely expensive, especially considering the fact that stations wouldn't fit in regular Street ROWS. DEmolition would be required, or it would have to be 7 levels down through the core and be undesirable again. I just don't see the need to make things overly complicated like that either. If you can provide stop spacing required for local service but also provide stop spacing required for a functional DRL, why waste the billions on a 4 track system that adds relatively little to the service quality and would be much better spent somewhere else such as a B-D extension to Sherway or an Eglinton LRT extension.

 

[gweed123]

That sounds overly damn expensive. We are working within a budget here. (Admittingly 7.4 billion dollars haha) if it is going to be a grade separated LRT, you may as well go for HRT, especially if it is all underground. Also, express collectors systems are insanely expensive, especially considering the fact that stations wouldn't fit in regular Street ROWS. DEmolition would be required, or it would have to be 7 levels down through the core and be undesirable again. I just don't see the need to make things overly complicated like that either. If you can provide stop spacing required for local service but also provide stop spacing required for a functional DRL, why waste the billions on a 4 track system that adds relatively little to the service quality and would be much better spent somewhere else such as a B-D extension to Sherway or an Eglinton LRT extension.

Stack the tracks (local on top, express on the bottom) that way the width is the same. Many metro stations are pretty deep, just look at Berri-UQAM in Montreal. The bottom level is a loooong way down, yet it's still very widely used.

And the advantage of using LRT over HRT in this case is expandability into the suburbs. It would be a very difficult task to extend the DRL past Eglinton (or heck, even up to Eglinton may be a challenge). But if it's in-median LRT north of the Don Valley, the odds of it going up to Seneca increase exponentially. Ditto for Jane. You may lose a bit of capacity, but you gain a far greater suburban reach.

I'm not saying the cost of 4-tracking is insignificant, because it certainly isn't. But when you weigh the added cost of that vs the added cost of tunnelled vs in-median just from Thorncliffe Park up to Eglinton, nevermind beyond Eglinton, it starts to even out. Again, the same rationale holds true for the western leg of the DRL.

 

[innsertnamehere]

The cost of bringing the subway to Seneca is probably similar to the cost of 4 tracking it.

Also, deep stations are successful when people have no other option. This is what will go through people's minds:

Hmmm well I can go on the yonge line and walk up 2 flights of stairs, but it might take a minute longer riding, or I can take the DRL and climb 7 flights of stairs, and I can spend a minute longer climbing to the surface. I think I will take the Yonge line because I hate climbing 7 levels of stairs.

This is how the DRL stops becoming a DRL, as it remains more convenient to take the Yonge line.

 

[Wrenkin]

The cost of bringing the subway to Seneca is probably similar to the cost of 4 tracking it.

Also, deep stations are successful when people have no other option. This is what will go through people's minds:

Hmmm well I can go on the yonge line and walk up 2 flights of stairs, but it might take a minute longer riding, or I can take the DRL and climb 7 flights of stairs, and I can spend a minute longer climbing to the surface. I think I will take the Yonge line because I hate climbing 7 levels of stairs.

This is how the DRL stops becoming a DRL, as it remains more convenient to take the Yonge line.

Why stairs? Most of the very deep stations I've ever been in were served by (long) escalators.

 

[MisterF]

I'm pretty convinced that it can't be done. The instant you add enough stops for local service to eliminate streetcars, you've killed a lot of incentive to transfer.

To make Yonge reliable again, it needs to get below crush. If the only incentive for transferring is that Yonge is at crush capacity, then the Relief Line succeeds only in being a Line and not in providing any Relief.


We can and must provide transfer points from streetcar to the new subway line; but I don't see how subway can replace the streetcar and still provide relief for Yonge.

If it's not substantially faster, it won't provide Relief.

I really don't get this attitude. Even if a DRL took the same amount of time as Yonge, plenty of people would transfer. If a rider on Danforth is going downtown they're going to have to transfer regardless, and it only make sense to transfer at the first available station. Not to mention that a lot of bus and streetcar routes would be dropping passengers off. A new subway line doesn't have to be faster than the line it's relieving to do its job.

DRL whose primarily goal is local service, will not have ridership to justify its very expensive construction.

On the contrary, a subway line primarily in the central part of the city whose primary goal is local service (like the original Yonge and Bloor lines) would get the most riders per kilometre and be the most successful. Subway lines that try to reach far into the suburbs are the ones that don't have the ridership to justify their very expensive construction. Underground subways are really only justified in the a high density urban environment where the ridership exists to cover the costs. The suburbs are better served using surface rail corridors. The TTC made a profit until it started expanding into the outer suburbs.

The DRL primarily goal is to relieve Yonge subway congestion. It is not local service. In fact, current streetcar and bus services should remain to provide local service.

According to whom? Our most successful subway lines (the ones that need relief) were built for local service and replaced streetcar lines. They're the one mode of transport custom designed to provide local service in high density cities. That hasn't changed.

There's a lot of mangling of express/local going on here and how big of an impact it would have. We could serve both local and express demand reasonably well with a station spacing of ~700m through the E-W downtown section and >1km outside of that.

700 m station spacing would give us 3 new stations between Yonge and the Don or about 7 before the Danforth. About ideal to provide local service and still give a fast ride, IMO. That would leave fewer stations than the Bloor/Yonge combo and still more generously spaces than the central parts of the existing lines.

There's literally no reason to sacrifice local service in the name of speed. We can have both.

 

[Dan416]

I always liked TRZ's proposal. Some of his stations are in very similar places to mine. Main difference being I chose Front closer to downtown, while he used Richmond and Adelaide. I'd be cool with his getting built, I like the integration with Bloor-Danforth.

 

[BurlOak]

Sky train would t have the capacity, and would require its own yard. For subway, if just the eastern portion was built, they wouldn't even need an expanded yard. With the western portion you would need to expand a yard (presumably Wilson, and shift the storage of trains around a bit to squeeze in the DRL trains somewhere closer). If you were to go with MKIII ICTS trains you would need a completely new yard somewhere with direct access to the line. Until the portion to eglinton is built, there is no place to put a new yard.

Capacity
- I do not think there is any restriction on the SkyTrain technology that requires 2 or 4 car trains. You can use 5 or 10 if you want more capacity.
- I would also like the connection stations, Pape, St. James (Yonge), Financial (University) and Keele, having platforms on both sides to reduce dwell times. (I am still not certain if the TRZ routing west of Bathurst is the best option).
- Another thing is to have longer station platforms at these major interchange stations. So if you are running 8 car trains, the lesser used stations would only be 6 cars long - they would have 1 or 2 cars do not line up with the platform. This way the cost of more than half the stations is reduced with still the high capacity.

Subway Yard
- I agree it would need its own yard, but I am not sure that the it wouldn't need a new yard even with HRT. The current yards are pretty full aren't they. I am also picturing the ECLRT using this same technology so they could share a common yard. I think the DRL is needed up to Eglionton almost as urgently as to Danforth, so this would require the two to be built together. I will admit though that I have not found an ideal location for this yard.

I seriously doubt there is enough space above the stations to fit the line either. I walk through St. Andrew every rainy day (taking the PATH to work) and there can't be more than 6ft between the stations ceiling and street level.

I have no idea if the DRL would fit above the existing subways since I have not seen any drawings of this porion of subway. However, it was aknowledged that this was a concern and the proposed route was deliberately shifted south to Lombard St. to allow it to fit. Mark II vehicles are about a foot lower in height than our HRT, so this would help a bit more. I agree that this is an important point, but there are potentially huge savings in not having to go under the existing subway lines.

 

[BurlOak]

I always liked TRZ's proposal. Some of his stations are in very similar places to mine. Main difference being I chose Front closer to downtown, while he used Richmond and Adelaide. I'd be cool with his getting built, I like the integration with Bloor-Danforth.

I am of the camp that the DRL needs to be extended as far north as possible (i.e. Seneca College, or even York Region) to get as many of the transfering passengers to take it instead of Yonge. Although I, too, love the looks of this interlined solution, it would mean that service extending north of Danforth would only be a fraction of the line capacity - a good portion of the capacity would be taken up by the Bloor-Danforth subway using this alingment.

If our goal is to put as many people onto the Danforth Subway (which both the subway extension to STC, and the SRT as LRT terminating at Kennedy option both do), and to keep the DRL as short as possible and not extend it beyond Danforth (again something that seems to be favoured by TTC), then I could see merit in this interlining.
If the DRL is extended farther north, and if the SRT is connected to an elevated ECLRT through Scarborough, then I see it being much more efficient that this DRL be completely separate from the B-D line. It would actually do a heck of a job relieving Yonge.

 

[diminutive]

Right, and I'm pretty certain that the plan you mapped would not get through an EA without a number of additional stations being added particularly if you announce the removal of Queen/King streetcar service upfront.

Folks downtown have watched Weston complain and get more stuff, ditto for St. Clair and Eglinton and now the SRT.

This is ridiculous. On the one hand you're saying the public wouldn't accept insertnamehere's DRL routing due to insufficient stations, yet your alternative route apparently wouldn't stop at all downtown. It's completely contradictory. Politically, nobody is going to support a "downtown" subway which doesn't even stop downtown.

And now that you've got a subway line with 15 minute travel times from Pape & Danforth to downtown. Certainly not going to attract anybody who is destined to South Core or Queen with that service and I'm not certain what would attract someone who already has a seat on Danforth that is going to Yonge & King either. Not good enough to create spare capacity on the Yonge line. It needs to be substantially better than Danforth/Yonge to give breathing space.

Realistically, there's only one place you could even add a station to insertnamehere's route, around Broadview. Even if you added that it would be 7 stations from Pape/Danforth to downtown via the DRL versus 10 through the Yonge line, so it's ridiculous to suggest this route would somehow loose all 'relief value.' Particularly if the interchange at Pape was designed with better passenger circulation than Yonge/Bloor to eliminate bottlenecks, it would be substantially faster.

If it's not substantially faster, it won't provide Relief. Lines on a map are great but at some point psychology comes into play. The saving grace of your design might be a really great cross-platform transfer at Pape similar to Lionel-Groulx in Montreal. I don't think that can be built without shutting down Danforth line for a long time period though.

This really get's to AoD's point about just how stupid it is to treat the DRL as if its sole function is to relieve Yonge. There are other goals like improving transit downtown.

More over, you're getting into a case of majorly declining marginal 'relief' with faster and faster DRLs. The TTC estimated that a Eglinton-Dundas West DRL (w/4 stations between PapeStn & King Stn) would draw about ~6k people off of Yonge at it's peak AM point south of Bloor. About 2/3rds of that would come from roughly halving the Westbound BD to Southbound Yonge transfers. Of those 50% who wouldn't switch to the DRL, surely a good chunk have destinations at Wellesley, College, Dundas or parts of the Yonge line which the DRL would never be competitive with anyways. Ultimately, you're talking about orienting an entire, multi-billion dollar megaproject around poaching maybe two or three thousand riders during peak hours. It's completely unnecessary.

If those riders are really such a threat to the system just don't build the Yonge extension. Problem solved and we all save a few billion dollars. I'm usually quite in favour of the YSE, but better to abandon it than have some ridiculous DRL routing which doesn't stop downtown.

Please post the station layout you think ideal for a DRL. Earlier I pointed out that you seemed to be assuming the DRL would only stop once or twice between Pape station and King Station, but you never clarified if you actually thought this was a good idea.

 

[diminutive]

And now that you've got a subway line with 15 minute travel times from Pape & Danforth to downtown. Certainly not going to attract anybody who is destined to South Core or Queen with that service and I'm not certain what would attract someone who already has a seat on Danforth that is going to Yonge & King either.

Where do you come up with these numbers??? Using insertnamehere's route it's 3-3.5km from Pape Station to downtown (King Station). Even if the DRL only averaged 20km/h due to ridiculously tight stop spacing (esp given the paucity of N/S stations between Pape Station and Queen/Eastern), that's 10minutes.

EDIT: Actually, this is wrong. For some reason my measurement units had switched back to imperial units. Nonetheless, 15m travel times are unrealistic for that section unless you somehow built the line to be nothing but stations.

 

[innsertnamehere]

It would likely be closer to 35km/h, but the route is actually 5.7km long, so 9.77 minutes, or 10 with rounding. comparitively, the Yonge line route would take 13 minutes.

also, why would someone who already has a seat on the danforth not transfer? so they can pack into a Yonge car, where there are guaranteed to be no seats? Nope. they will get on at Pape, where the train will be empty (as it is the start of the line), and where they have a much better chance of getting a seat.

 

[rbt]

Where do you come up with these numbers??? Using insertnamehere's route it's 3-3.5km from Pape Station to downtown (King Station). Even if the DRL only averaged 20km/h due to ridiculously tight stop spacing (esp given the paucity of N/S stations between Pape Station and Queen/Eastern), that's 10minutes.

You've missed the time taken for the customer to make the transfer and exit the station at the other end. Normally I would measure from door to door (house to work) but those are variable, so you measure from train door to station door instead. It's part of the full trip.

Likewise, Pape to King via Yonge should include the time taken to transfer at Y&B and exiting King station.

Anyway, it's a great fantasy and hopefully Metrolinx investigates it and other options in an official capacity with a full network analysis. I'm pretty sure a compromise between local and express will do neither job well leaving Yonge over capacity for the foreseeable future; but I'll leave it to the professionals with the right tools for the job to answer that question.


Exit time is important. I've gone to stations adjacent to Penn Station a few times simply because it can take 5 minutes to get out of that damn station at the wrong time of day.