http://stevemunro.ca/?p=8964
The big surprise is that there is almost no difference between the total demand with or without the Richmond Hill extension. Indeed, most changes are re-assignments of trips from GO lines and the University subway in the “reference” network to the Yonge subway in the “reference + YSE” network.
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Why would we spend billions of dollars building a subway to Richmond Hill to carry no more total riders on the network than we do without it?
There are two obvious responses to this question:
Some of the new trips have destinations at or north of Bloor Street and therefore they do not contribute to the count of riders into the core area.
In the model’s world, the subway extension does not attract any net new trips beyond what would occur simply with better service on the subway to Finch and enhanced GO services (i.e. with the reference network).
Man...I feel like myself and others have answered this 50X on this thread but I'll try one more time to provide the obvious responses you missed.
First, and most superficially, the reason there is almost no difference right now is because most of the riders are coming from up north anyway. So, by building the subway you are taking thousands of cars and hundreds of buses per hour off of Yonge Street. Given the infrastructure, traffic and GHG impacts, that alone justifies the extension for me. to argue otherwise is to argue that there is no advantage to bringing transit closer to where its riders actually live.
I'll also add that this substantiates, for the umpteenth time, that the system will NOT be immediately overburdened if it is built before the DRL. Given that the EA is done, it is ridiculous that York Region should have to wait years for Toronto to go through the whole process of building and planning the DRL. The system can handle the minimal impacts for the few years between when Yonge and DRL are built, assuming there is an actual transit/revenue plan in place for the GTA. I guess we'll know that soon enough.
Secondly, everyone talks about ridership and capacity and totally ignores the relationship between transit and land use. The question is, "Why would we spend billions of dollars building a subway to Richmond Hill to carry no more total riders on the network than we do without it?" and the answer is that the subway terminal is a planned transit node that will house 50,000 people and 30,000 jobs. Without the subway you'll be lucky to get half of that and all the people who are still coming to Markham, Richmond Hill and Vaughan will go live in sprawling subdivisions etc. THAT is why you would spend billions: to stop unsustainable development in the suburbs. It seems obvious to me but it keeps coming up here every 10 pages or so.
Ignoring the connection between land use planning and high-order transit is how you get dumb plans like the Scarborough subway (which will probably do more to overload Bloor-Yonge in the short term than this extension would).
The idea that there is no business case by 2031 strikes me as absurd. The ridership is
already there, they're just driving to Finch or crowding onto buses. you could
maybe make an argument for LRT (not a good one, but you could make one) but BRT on Yonge up to Highway 7? That's just absurd. I'm not going to go look up the numbers now but the number of buses that cross the Yonge/Steeles border now every day is literally over 100 per hour. Thinking that moving those buses faster is a solution is just nonsensical.
Also for the 50th time, the GO line only goes to Union Station. It doesn't help people get from Thornhill to Eglinton or St. Clair or Sheppard or, indeed, anywhere else whatsoever in the GTA. What we're
trying to do is build an actual, interconnected transit network and intensify development in the suburbs. Expanding GO but not the subway is just encouraging more people to live out in the sprawl and haul into downtown every day. I don't see the future in that, personally.