nfitz said:
I'm referring to those who use the TTC in Toronto. That extra fare only pays for the TTC service in Region of York. Essentially that is Region of York service being provided on contract by TTC. Personally I'd charge those not resident in Toronto a double fare, so those crossing Steeles on a TTC bus would pay triple fare.

Other alternatives would be if Ontario resumed it's operating funding of local transit.
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Well, if 905 riders are forced to pay triple fare, then lets see how well Toronto does when those riders refused to spend in Toronto or visit it.

You would see 3 things happen. (1) Business would close since they could not afford to cover the overhead from Toronto Residents alone. (2)TTC would see a huge drop in fare revenue when riders start looking for a new job in the 905, requiring 416 riders paying more at the fare box to cover that lost. With Toronto riders now having to pay more, more will opt out of using TTC, causing more service cuts as well higher fare. (3)Business would looked at moving out of 416 if they cannot attract the right personal from within 416 because of the higher fare put on 905. At the same time, higher property taxes will come into play causing them to move.

Bottom line, triple or double faring 905 has a greater impact on 416 as a whole than it is today.

416 would loose the 80% buying power I spent in it today and would likely see a 90% reduction of it at the end of the day.
 
drum118 said:
Well, if 905 riders are forced to pay triple fare, then lets see how well Toronto does when those riders refused to spend in Toronto or visit it.

You would see 3 things happen. (1) Business would close since they could not afford to cover the overhead from Toronto Residents alone. (2)TTC would see a huge drop in fare revenue when riders start looking for a new job in the 905, requiring 416 riders paying more at the fare box to cover that lost. With Toronto riders now having to pay more, more will opt out of using TTC, causing more service cuts as well higher fare. (3)Business would looked at moving out of 416 if they cannot attract the right personal from within 416 because of the higher fare put on 905. At the same time, higher property taxes will come into play causing them to move.

Bottom line, triple or double faring 905 has a greater impact on 416 as a whole than it is today.

416 would loose the 80% buying power I spent in it today and would likely see a 90% reduction of it at the end of the day.
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This sounds like the same kind of complaining you get from car drivers when someone suggests increasing parking rates.

By this logic, no one would ever use GO Transit from 905 to 416, whose fares are already triple that of TTC! And yet their ridership increases faster than TTC every year.
 
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The only way transit is going to work in the GTA, it has to be one system with no boundaries.

This city pitting is a waste of people time and money.

Mean while back onto the tread, the Yonge extension is a waste of money as it will never carry the ridership as plan.

Also, it cannot be built until the DRL is built first, as the existing station will never handle the ridership and will cause operation delays.

It is already forecast the TR will run out of room for riders by 2016 and you are back to Sq one.

I have stop taking trains north from Dundas at 5 pm since you have to wait up to 6 trains going by before you can try getting on one. Since I am only going to Bloor, I either take the Bay bus or go the opposite direction to St George.

I have seen trains taking 6 minutes coming from Queen when the next train saying its due in 1 minute these days.

Even if you put up the screens barriers, you will see more delay and overcrowding.

The DRL cannot stop at Danforth or Eglinton or Sheppard, or Finch, but at Steeles. By doing so, you are intercepting riders going to Yonge sooner and making the trip faster for them so long they are going to the core. Once this happens, you free up space for the Yonge Line, but it will be for a short time. You have 2 major hubs finally been built that will house 1,000’s of new riders at Eglinton and at Sheppard. The next area will be Bloor & Finch, then Steeles.

With these new riders coming on stream over the next 15 years, the Yonge line is going to collapse under the weight of the ridership within 416, let alone adding the 905.

Before we talk about expanding the line, we better figure how we are going to deal with the existing line problems first.
 
These political boundaries are obviously a ridiculous impediment to providing decent transit in the GTA. The idea that neighbourhoods on one side of Steeles are magically more suited to transit than those on the other side is absurd. The differences in ridership are clearly from different service levels and the double fare. The absolute first thing that should be done for transit in the GTA is full fare integration, including GO Transit routes, so that people can travel seamlessly from one system to another without noticing the difference. There'd have to be some kind of zone fare system to keep short-distance fares reasonable. I'd like to see a reduction for some short trips within Toronto, as well. I'd be fine paying a bit more when travelling from Downtown to Morningside if it meant a trip from Front and Church to College and Bathurst didn't cost three dollars.


The DRL cannot stop at Danforth or Eglinton or Sheppard, or Finch, but at Steeles. By doing so, you are intercepting riders going to Yonge sooner and making the trip faster for them so long they are going to the core. Once this happens, you free up space for the Yonge Line, but it will be for a short time. You have 2 major hubs finally been built that will house 1,000’s of new riders at Eglinton and at Sheppard. The next area will be Bloor & Finch, then Steeles.
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This is completely right. The DRL should be built as a first phase up to Danforth, then to Eglinton, and then to Finch. I'm not sure it's necessary to go up all the way to Steeles in the short term since Finch is a logical terminus with ample space in the hydro corridor for a bus terminal and park and ride plus a big built-in ridership at the Seneca campus.
 
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I take the Yonge subway down to work every day. Folks, the line is past capacity TODAY!!! The service on Yonge is absolutely horrific. Some days it takes 1hr to get to Bloor from Finch. There are delays every single day and guaranteed at rush hour. One minor hiccup, like the one we saw last week where a signal failure at Wilson prevented some of the trains onto the line on time. This created a 2 hour trip from Finch to Union. Does this sound like a line that has spare capacity to expand? The TTC and the politicians keep dreaming that the new trains will add 10% capacity. They claim that ATC will add even more. This is utter hogwash. The new trains will not add more capacity since the TTC did not order enough trains to replace all the trains on the YUS line. They ordered 10% less. ATC not increase the frequency of trains. The TTC cannot operate the current 2:20 min frequency, what makes us think they won't screw up the ATC somehow?

The current capacity is limited not just by the amount of trains that can be put through in a given hour. The main issue is the stations themselves. All the downtown stations are super narrow and get dangerously full at peak. The increased dwell times cannot be fixed without spending billions of dollars widening the downtown platforms of Union, King, Queen, Dundas, College, Wellesley and Bloor and Yonge. The next issue is circulation into and out of the station. There are currently not enough ways to quickly move people into and out of a station. Half the escalators are always broken and the stairs are very narrow!

Why does Toronto and the politicians keep wanting to squeeze more and more people along Yonge Street? This is sheer stupidity. No other city in the world tries to fit this many people along just one street. We should be discouraging development along Yonge and encourage more development along Bloor, and along the Spadina line, especially between Downsview and Highway 7. Next, we should focus development along Sheppard and along Eglinton. Yonge should be the lowest priority until we have made enough capacity available by diverting the midtown and downtown patrons to a DRL that runs to Eglinton.

For the York Region missing link: Expand GO from Richmond Hill by adding 15 mins service all day in both directions. The vast majority of people are heading downtown. The Yonge line extension will not shorten their commute, but an expanded GO can.

We should not be spending more money to support sprawl by building subways to the suburbs. Subways are for inner city or downtown travel. Any new subway project should focus on fixing the gridlock downtown where there current density can more than support the subway.
 
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lead82 said:
For the York Region missing link: Expand GO from Richmond Hill by adding 15 mins service all day in both directions. The vast majority of people are heading downtown. The Yonge line extension will not shorten their commute, but an expanded GO can.
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I agree with this with one caveat, York Region staff believe the majority of riders on this extension would be headed for North York and Eglinton. This is entirely possible as people tend to limit their commute to less than an hour on average and going from Highway 7 to King Street would be pushing that limit, particularly if they took a bus connection to get to the subway line.
 
Just for clarity, I wasn't trying to start a 905/416 debate. (Although I usually do!)
I merely misunderstood nfitz's point; some chose rude responses but nftiz cleared it up and I now understand his point.

With regards to the subject at hand, you'd have to agree that the extension makes sense. However, eventually it makes sense, meaning that this should be built after expanding and solidifying downtown transit. I am still going to support the Highway 7 extension as to me it's an extension to help alleviate traffic congestion by offering an alternative (and hopefully quicker) mode of transportation downtown. The same goes with the Richmond Hill extension, I think that's the point of these projects. However, after reading many opinions (not whining or complaining), I often wonder why the city of Toronto often neglects itself. Something should be done downtown; but at what cost and what are Torontonians going have to do to get their way? I never see resistance from the people, I often see them just lie down and accept their fate. (Cynicism perhaps?)

I know that 99 times out of 100 it's mostly political posturing and red tape, but when is Toronto, it's citizens, those that need public transit going to stand up and say enough? A city of our size with only 69 subway stations.. isn't going to cut it.
 
I don't have a problem with people saying that Yonge is over-capacity, but I have a real problem with people suggesting GO transit as an alternative, when quite obviously people who use the subway don't only use it to go downtown. the yonge extension offers a choice for intermediate trips. The GO stations are inconveniently placed, and are often disconnected from their neighbourhoods and surrounding areas. They are neither destinations nor points of interest. Ofcourse there are some exceptions.
 
lead82 said:
The TTC and the politicians keep dreaming that the new trains will add 10% capacity. They claim that ATC will add even more. This is utter hogwash. The new trains will not add more capacity since the TTC did not order enough trains to replace all the trains on the YUS line. They ordered 10% less.
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I might find this a little more believable if you could tell me:
- how many trains currently operate on YUS;
- how many Toronto Rocket trains were ordered;
- how many TR trains would be needed to run ATC.

Please cite city/TTC documentation.
 
JoeParez said:
Just for clarity, I wasn't trying to start a 905/416 debate. (Although I usually do!)
I merely misunderstood nfitz's point; some chose rude responses but nftiz cleared it up and I now understand his point.

With regards to the subject at hand, you'd have to agree that the extension makes sense. However, eventually it makes sense, meaning that this should be built after expanding and solidifying downtown transit. I am still going to support the Highway 7 extension as to me it's an extension to help alleviate traffic congestion by offering an alternative (and hopefully quicker) mode of transportation downtown. The same goes with the Richmond Hill extension, I think that's the point of these projects. However, after reading many opinions (not whining or complaining), I often wonder why the city of Toronto often neglects itself. Something should be done downtown; but at what cost and what are Torontonians going have to do to get their way? I never see resistance from the people, I often see them just lie down and accept their fate. (Cynicism perhaps?)

I know that 99 times out of 100 it's mostly political posturing and red tape, but when is Toronto, it's citizens, those that need public transit going to stand up and say enough? A city of our size with only 69 subway stations.. isn't going to cut it.
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In an ideal world, I'd agree. However, when playing the political game, I think the Yonge extension needs to happen first. This is what I think needs to happen in order for us to get BOTH the Yonge extension and the DRL:

1) Both projects are studied, planned, and get to the point where they're shovel-ready pending funding.
2) Funding comes through for the Yonge extension, which starts construction.
3) 6 months after the opening of the Yonge extension, everybody realizes that it has created a clusterf**k on the Yonge line south of Eglinton. This raises the eyre of citizens who scream "we need to do something!"
4) The DRL, with its shovel-ready plan sitting on the shelf, gets pulled off the shelf and in a haste to fix the problem, Queen's Park allocates funding to it, with the project being fast-tracked to fix the problem asap.
5) DRL gets built.
 
lead82 said:
The new trains will not add more capacity since the TTC did not order enough trains to replace all the trains on the YUS line. They ordered 10% less.
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Currently the TTC operates up to 48 trains on the YUS line. There are 70 trains (420 cars) ordered to be delivered by the end of 2013. 10 of these trains are for (and funded) by the Spadina extension, leaving 60 trains (360 cars) for the current service.

However the TTC will be disposing of 306 H4, H5, and H6 cars (51 trains). The net effect is that TTC will have 9 more trains than it used to have, and will have 60 trains available for the 48 currently in use. With the planned 13% spares, TTC should be able to run 53 trains instead of the current 48.

This does leave few extra trains for growth though, especially with the plan to extend short-turns from Eglinton West, to further north. Which is why if you look at the TTC capital budget, there is money there to order another 10 trains for delivery in 2015 (that would make 80 new trains).

I'm not sure where your getting your 10% less figure ... not only will there be more trains available than there is now, there are plans in place to order more trains for 2015 delivery.

Seems to me it's very sensible to delay the final 10 trains until 2015, as the Spadina extension trains will be available in 2013, but the extension doesn't open until late 2015 or early 2016. And also there's the lack of yard space to store them ... presumably this is why TTC is pushing ahead with the first stage of the Yonge Extension to Cummer (tunnel and track only), where they want to store 10 trains.
 
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