I wonder if reducing the number of stations may include combining Langstaff and Richmond Hill Centre into a single node, as is kind of already being done with RH GO platform and bus terminal. Sure it would be one of the lengthier stations in the system, but I don't think it's completely beyond reason and would certainly eliminate some redundancies. Passengers heading to RH Centre would gravitate to the north end of the train, and those heading to the Langstaff redevelopment would stick to the south end.

Of course, residents of the Langstaff redevelopment looking to grab a bus from RH Centre would be the biggest losers in that arrangement. But wasn't there a scheme for some sort of local electric transit limited within the Langstaff redevelopment when it was first proposed? Part of it being a car-free neighbourhood, if I recall correctly. Not sure if planning for that idea made it beyond the napkin.
 
ear2ear said:
I wonder if reducing the number of stations may include combining Langstaff and Richmond Hill Centre into a single node, as is kind of already being done with RH GO platform and bus terminal. Sure it would be one of the lengthier stations in the system, but I don't think it's completely beyond reason and would certainly eliminate some redundancies. Passengers heading to RH Centre would gravitate to the north end of the train, and those heading to the Langstaff redevelopment would stick to the south end.

Of course, residents of the Langstaff redevelopment looking to grab a bus from RH Centre would be the biggest losers in that arrangement. But wasn't there a scheme for some sort of local electric transit limited within the Langstaff redevelopment when it was first proposed? Part of it being a car-free neighbourhood, if I recall correctly. Not sure if planning for that idea made it beyond the napkin.
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There are plans to extend Garden Avenue from Yonge Street to Bayview Avenue and
Red/Cedar Avenue
from High Tech Road to Langstaff Road (preliminary design), both of these connections will make it easier for those in the Langstaff redevelopment area to get to Richmond Hill Centre. Whether or not there will be a bus running along is still unknown, but I think in the consultation there was a question about dedicated bus lanes thought hose may have been scrapped.

With regards to whether or not they should remove Langstaff Station from the plan, I don't think it would be a good idea unless the Richmond Hill Centre subway station directly replaced Langstaff GO Station's location. However, that would be a long walk to the bus terminal if they don't expand/move it south.

On the other hand, if the plan to change the alignment to use the rail corridor, the Langstaff Subway Station would be much better positioned as it would be within the redevelopment rather than right at the edge.
 
Yeah, well said, Leo.

As has been said before, the plan was always for RHC to be the "urban" station and for Langstaff to serve the end of the Markham side and also provide parking access.

We still haven't seen the Metrolinx report but in theory moving the Langstaff station to the centre of the development loses the parking aspect but provides the opportunity for greater intensification and transit access in the core of Langstaff Gateway. It's a very interesting opportunity but until we see the details, hard to say for sure. For example, the development phasing in Langstaff (and the first project submitted so far) starts at the Yonge end and works towards the middle. How do the plans change if there isn't going to be a subway station on Yonge anymore? Is that still going to be a major intensification node?
 
Reecemartin said:
Or they are just being smart? Building everything underground is really not necessary an when it involves bored tunnels it can actually be a negative.
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Hopefully they can also not have the storage tracks underground, which seemed quite silly originally. Should be possible to squish them in the CN corridor if CN allows or maybe next to the 407.
 
I know this is a random question, but what's the logistical issue with a very long subway line?
 
H4F33Z said:
I know this is a random question, but what's the logistical issue with a very long subway line?
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I can say for certain it affects travel time. A long line will have a longer travel time obviously, however a longer line will also likely have more stations and more stations means more stops which means more time to get from one end to the other. As well this can also affect the number of trains needed to effectively serve the line. Now having many stations on a line isn't bad so long as they are placed where they need to be; for example denser areas such as Downtown should have a denser consternation of stations on a line given the larger number of destinations. Less dense areas like suburbs should have fewer stations since the number of possible destinations is fewer and further between. Unless the line operates some sort of Express or Skip-Stop service a line can become long enough that any time savings a rapid transit line could bring would be quickly eaten up by time sitting on the train, and thus start to fall behind the convenience of driving. I'll give you two examples of this one of which is rather innocuous and the other quite apparent.

First of lets look at the SSE, the station at Lawrence East has relatively little effect on the commute time since it will add at best a minute to the journey time. The station does not change the fact that the journey time from STC to Kennedy is about 5 minutes even without the Lawrence East station. However it doesn't change the fact that having the line completely skip Lawrence East would be hilariously dumb since that would leave something like a 3km gap between stations (what is this the GO Trains?).

Now lets look at the A Train in NYC. This line has 62 stops and runs for 52Km (for comparison Line 1 here is only 38Km). A ride on the A Train from Far Rockaway to 207th Street (Terminus to Terminus) takes about an hour and half however that's because the service that runs this route skips multiple stops thus reducing the time to something more appropriate (I believe a ride from end to end on Line 2 takes about the same time give or take 10 minutes). The A Train does have a service that makes all 62 stops but that is only at night when the line has like a 20 minute headway; and it would take around 2 and half to 3 hours to run the full route. For comparison a VIA Rail train from Toronto to Ottawa takes around 4 hours (at least according to their website). However the difference here is one is a subway line that is meant for local travel while the other is a long distance train meant to connect towns and cities together. Nobody is going to take the subway if its going to take the subway alone 2+ hours to reach their destination before factoring in possible bus use.

The longer a line becomes the less efficient it becomes unless you have an express service running on the line for people who are travelling in from the more far flung areas of the line. Imagine if Line 1 went all the way to Newmarket but only operated local trains, why would anyone use that to commute downtown when the GO Train is faster and while Driving may not be faster it still has its own allure, people would rather be hold up in their own car for 2 hours then on a train that isn't even meant to be a long distance intercity train like VIA Rail or GO. Its the same deal with the idea of extending Line 2 or 4 into Pickering.
 
JSF-1 said:
I can say for certain it affects travel time. A long line will have a longer travel time obviously, however a longer line will also likely have more stations and more stations means more stops which means more time to get from one end to the other. As well this can also affect the number of trains needed to effectively serve the line. Now having many stations on a line isn't bad so long as they are placed where they need to be; for example denser areas such as Downtown should have a denser consternation of stations on a line given the larger number of destinations. Less dense areas like suburbs should have fewer stations since the number of possible destinations is fewer and further between. Unless the line operates some sort of Express or Skip-Stop service a line can become long enough that any time savings a rapid transit line could bring would be quickly eaten up by time sitting on the train, and thus start to fall behind the convenience of driving. I'll give you two examples of this one of which is rather innocuous and the other quite apparent.

First of lets look at the SSE, the station at Lawrence East has relatively little effect on the commute time since it will add at best a minute to the journey time. The station does not change the fact that the journey time from STC to Kennedy is about 5 minutes even without the Lawrence East station. However it doesn't change the fact that having the line completely skip Lawrence East would be hilariously dumb since that would leave something like a 3km gap between stations (what is this the GO Trains?).

Now lets look at the A Train in NYC. This line has 62 stops and runs for 52Km (for comparison Line 1 here is only 38Km). A ride on the A Train from Far Rockaway to 207th Street (Terminus to Terminus) takes about an hour and half however that's because the service that runs this route skips multiple stops thus reducing the time to something more appropriate (I believe a ride from end to end on Line 2 takes about the same time give or take 10 minutes). The A Train does have a service that makes all 62 stops but that is only at night when the line has like a 20 minute headway; and it would take around 2 and half to 3 hours to run the full route. For comparison a VIA Rail train from Toronto to Ottawa takes around 4 hours (at least according to their website). However the difference here is one is a subway line that is meant for local travel while the other is a long distance train meant to connect towns and cities together. Nobody is going to take the subway if its going to take the subway alone 2+ hours to reach their destination before factoring in possible bus use.

The longer a line becomes the less efficient it becomes unless you have an express service running on the line for people who are travelling in from the more far flung areas of the line. Imagine if Line 1 went all the way to Newmarket but only operated local trains, why would anyone use that to commute downtown when the GO Train is faster and while Driving may not be faster it still has its own allure, people would rather be hold up in their own car for 2 hours then on a train that isn't even meant to be a long distance intercity train like VIA Rail or GO. Its the same deal with the idea of extending Line 2 or 4 into Pickering.
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You are mostly correct, however I feel like you're missing one important thing, that is that not everyone takes a train to go end to end. On Line 1, this is especially apparent since even though the line goes from Finch to VMC, nobody in their right mind would ever take that trip when commuting. The same thing could be said if the Yonge Line is theoretically extended all the way to Newmarket. The point wouldn't be to go to Union from Newmarket, that's just ridiculous, instead the point would be to go from Newmarket to somewhere along the line like Richmond Hill, or worst case scenerio, North York. When you have a smaller scale transit system, yes it helps to look at it from a commuter's perspective, but the endgame of rapid transit shouldn't be to serve commuters, it should be to make going from A to B without a car as quick and painless as possible regardless of time of day or where points A and B are located. In such a scenario, an extremely long metro line with frequent stops isn't a problem when you have services like GO that basically operate as express routes anyway. A more pressing issue with longer train lines is instead how any hiccup along the line can easily mess up the service patterns. Going back to a hypothetical Newmarket extension of the Yonge Line, if there's a service issue at Yorkdale Station, that hiccup will send ripples down the line and have a severe impact at Newmarket, despite both stations being like 70km apart (don't quote me on the number, I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here).
 
ARG1 said:
You are mostly correct, however I feel like you're missing one important thing, that is that not everyone takes a train to go end to end. On Line 1, this is especially apparent since even though the line goes from Finch to VMC, nobody in their right mind would ever take that trip when commuting. The same thing could be said if the Yonge Line is theoretically extended all the way to Newmarket. The point wouldn't be to go to Union from Newmarket, that's just ridiculous, instead the point would be to go from Newmarket to somewhere along the line like Richmond Hill, or worst case scenerio, North York. When you have a smaller scale transit system, yes it helps to look at it from a commuter's perspective, but the endgame of rapid transit shouldn't be to serve commuters, it should be to make going from A to B without a car as quick and painless as possible regardless of time of day or where points A and B are located. In such a scenario, an extremely long metro line with frequent stops isn't a problem when you have services like GO that basically operate as express routes anyway. A more pressing issue with longer train lines is instead how any hiccup along the line can easily mess up the service patterns. Going back to a hypothetical Newmarket extension of the Yonge Line, if there's a service issue at Yorkdale Station, that hiccup will send ripples down the line and have a severe impact at Newmarket, despite both stations being like 70km apart (don't quote me on the number, I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here).
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While that is true this leads to another issue which I would have gotten to had I not already wrote a ton of stuff. You can also get around the length problem if you have multiple destinations that people want to go to on the line. However in the case of the GTA this isn't what is happening, there is still only 1 real destination that the majority of commuters are going to and that is Downtown Toronto. We can see the idea of multiple "sub-centre's" in the GTA is not working out the way we want it to. There's a lot of places people are commuting from but only really one place they are commuting to. The majority of sub-centres are based around residential use so there are a lot of places for people to live but not a lot of places to work and commute to. Lot's of condo's but not many offices. None of the sub-centres outside to downtown have put a dent in downtown Toronto's office and commercial use so people are still by and large commuting from the burbs into downtown instead from the burbs to ideally the closest centre to them. So while what you say is true that is simply in my opinion not how it would play out here in Toronto because to me the focus is all wrong in regards to how the sub-centres are planned and developed. Tall towers may make a sub-centre look like a downtown but those towers mean nothing if they are empty for half the day because everyone left to work somewhere else.
 
CaskoChan said:
To be honest, the Mississauga Extension of line 2 would be great because it would link up to the Hurontario LRT, connecting the GTA on a whole new level.
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I like the idea, but I don't think it will work all that well in practice. Not to mention it wouldn't be a good use of very limited transit money.
 
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