T3G said:
T

That no longer seems to be the driving philosophy behind subway projects. The idea now seems to be that the subway should behave like a GO train, at the expense of screwing over the people in the actual city who may need to use it.
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Y'all should travel to Finch Station one morning and look at who is getting on the train.
Feel free to check passports and tell the people who shouldn't be allowed on that it's a local service, notwithstanding the massive commuter lots, GO and YRT bus terminals etc.

If anyone thought that simply "providing LOCAL SERVICE in the City of Toronto," was the function of the subway, I'll make sure no one tells you what happens in the SEINFELD finale (cuz I assume you are somehow still living in the late 1980s or something.).

Here's a thought exercise for people who think the subway is being used too much like a GO Train:
What if GO Trains functioned more like subways, picking up Toronto riders and stopping more often? Maybe like at East Harbour or over by Spadina, for example?
[pause for effect]
Nah - that's crazy. It's a REGIONAL ervice and we don't want 416 riders screwing over 905ers. Next thing you know, they'll be hanging out socially or maybe even having children together! We don't want....what's the term for it.?.... oh yeah, an "integrated, multi-modal transit network."
 
And right after you've checked everyone's passports at Finch station, you can ask them whether their commute would be made more pleasant and agreeable by having some kind of fast express service that gets them to their downtown office quickly, rather than having to use transit that is set up so that the locals can do their shopping and kids can go to school and is thus considerably slowed down. What sort of answers do you think you'd get?

Imagine the traveller standing at Downsview Park station wanting to get downtown. Do you think he'd rather take line 1, or would he rather take the GO train and save a boatload of time? If we want to serve the commuter market from the outer boroughs, we should actually serve the commuter market from the outer boroughs instead of trying to use one type of service to serve EVERYONE, and no one in a great way.

When you understand why we don't use Nova LFS buses on GO runs out to Peterborough, you'll also understand why using local subways to serve the growing commuter belt outside of the city is not a satisfactory solution for anyone else, either. The perpetual extension of the YUS is politics and nothing more.
 
T3G said:
And right after you've checked everyone's passports at Finch station, you can ask them whether their commute would be made more pleasant and agreeable by having some kind of fast express service that gets them to their downtown office quickly, rather than having to use transit that is set up so that the locals can do their shopping and kids can go to school and is thus considerably slowed down. What sort of answers do you think you'd get?
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Considering that something like fully two-thirds of the people getting on a Finch are not heading downtown - what kind of answers are you expecting them to give you here?

Dan
 
This is a bizarre false equivalence.
First of all, you're assuming everyone is going downtown. If you were to actually ask a lot of those people, many would tell you they work at Yonge/Eg or Yonge/St. Clair or Yonge/Bloor or Spadina/Queen and so, no actually, they don't really want an express trip to Union, after which they'd have to double back to their office, thank you very much.

So that's one answer I think I'd get and the false assumption everyone in the 905 wants to go to Union Station is a biggie. And it's less true now than it ever has been.

Another answer I might get, at Downview Park station might be, "I'd definitely take the GO Train! It costs the same, right?"
And you would tell them.... yes?

I could go on, explaining how people who live at Yonge/Steeles aren't going to drive 10 minutes north to take a GO train that only goes to Union or how the idea that communting patterns in Willowdale and Thornhill are any different is absurd or how your suggestion of a "perpetual extension" is a straw man that no one is arguing for (we are talking about a line that barely goes north of Steeles, within a contiguous urban area) and so on.

The subway needs to handle more regional load (as it has, for decades) and GO needs to handle more local load (as it soon will, finally). And fare integration is long overdue will make those systems work better together.
As it stands, the YNSE is being built and the TYSSE is built and no one here is seriously advocating for an etension of either (Except in a limited fashion, in the long-term, maybe) so all the imagingings of what this foreign species of Outer Borough Transit Rider would like to do, given the choice, ends up being kind of a moot point.

smallspy said:
Considering that something like fully two-thirds of the people getting on a Finch are not heading downtown - what kind of answers are you expecting them to give you here?

Dan
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this was posted while I was repling but...
Exactly. Strong, "Tell me you've never commuted through Finch Station without telling me you've never commuted through Finch Station" energy with this question/assumption.
But that's OK, many Toronto politicians and TTC staff think the same way, which is partly we are whwere we are.
 
T3G said:
And right after you've checked everyone's passports at Finch station, you can ask them whether their commute would be made more pleasant and agreeable by having some kind of fast express service that gets them to their downtown office quickly, rather than having to use transit that is set up so that the locals can do their shopping and kids can go to school and is thus considerably slowed down. What sort of answers do you think you'd get?

Imagine the traveller standing at Downsview Park station wanting to get downtown. Do you think he'd rather take line 1, or would he rather take the GO train and save a boatload of time? If we want to serve the commuter market from the outer boroughs, we should actually serve the commuter market from the outer boroughs instead of trying to use one type of service to serve EVERYONE, and no one in a great way.

When you understand why we don't use Nova LFS buses on GO runs out to Peterborough, you'll also understand why using local subways to serve the growing commuter belt outside of the city is not a satisfactory solution for anyone else, either. The perpetual extension of the YUS is politics and nothing more.
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There's an interesting case study we could look at, which is the tale of the Express track system in NYC. Back during the days of BMT and IRT, the companies would build or retrofit express tracks to the subways/els that would allow trains to bypass many stations and provide faster commutes for those living far from Manhattan/wherever they were commuting to. When the IND was formed and started building the IND Subway, the primary goal was to build what would be considered as a "modernized subway system", which included improvements to how the subways were built that would improve station capacity, improve speeds, and improve connections. One of the rethinks that the IND did however was rethinking the whole "local/express" system, and they rationalized it to the idea that "local" lines should operate as intra-borough lines, meanwhile "express" lines were explicitly inter-borough. As such, the local lines on the new subway trunks would usually terminate at some station near the edge of the borough, and only the express would actually cross the east river. The prime example of this in action would be the 8th Avenue Line, where World Trade Center station would act as a terminus for the local trains in Manhattan, and IND Court St station (nowadays part of the NY Transit Museum) would be the terminus for Brooklyn Local trains. The thought process was the same as yours, if you were travelling to Manhattan and you were in eastern Brooklyn, why would you ever take the local train?

As it turned out, this line of thinking was incredibly flawed because imagine if your end station didn't have an express station, or heck, if both your end and start stations didn't have an express station. Even if transferring to the express and back saved you time, many people would just say that its not worth saving the 5 mins, and just want to have a more direct ride. This resulted in the city changing their mind and now all local services travel through the 2 track Cranberry St tunnel (which means that the theoretical headways of both the 8th Avenue local and express are halved due to this bottleneck). The same principle applies to the relationship between GO and the TTC Subway. Even if we started our journey at Downsview Park, GO could make more sense in many situations, especially if you're travelling to near Union, but if you're working near Queen's Park or Museum Station, its not unreasonable for someone to not want to bother transferring at Union Station, and will just bite the extra 5-8m travel time if it means having a direct ride (and since you're starting so early on the line, you're more likely to be able to find a seat). This is before we bring up that starting at a station like Downsview Park is an ideal situation, and the comparison looks more dire if we're starting at a station that isn't an interchange such as Finch West, or Clark (or if we address the fact that the Richmond Hill line is so slow that you likely won't be saving any time at all transfering to it unless your starting station is a RH line station).

Fact of the matter is, the Toronto Subway is an express service. While its not as fast of an express service as GO is, its by no means a "local service meant for Toronto Residents". Its a service that has been used regularly be 905ers since at least the 80s, and has been a crucial piece of infrastructure for commuting 905ers for the past several decades. I mean, a quick look at the YRT bus map will tell you as much - the whole network is basically setup to funnel people to the Toronto Subway.

Edit: Fixed some typos.
 
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It never ceases to amaze me how much controversy this project drums up for no reason. While there are legitimate criticisms, so much of it boils down to the jurisdiction this is being built in. I could write many paragraphs about how meaningless it is today for others to point out how useless this is. The morphology is identical, if not superior to Scarborough, Etobicoke, and North York, while also being just as close/far from downtown as the furthest parts of the 416.
 
Sunnyside said:
It never ceases to amaze me how much controversy this project drums up for no reason. While there are legitimate criticisms, so much of it boils down to the jurisdiction this is being built in. I could write many paragraphs about how meaningless it is today for others to point out how useless this is. The morphology is identical, if not superior to Scarborough, Etobicoke, and North York, while also being just as close/far from downtown as the furthest parts of the 416.
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I understood some of that back when the project was first announced but I kind of expect people on these boards to know more than the Average Joe. There's nothing to say about this topic that wasn't already said many times back in the 2009-2015 era. All sorts of nonsense about it the project not making sense, going to suburbia or it should be built but only to Steeles, or whatever. The policy context - or even just looking at the area on Google Earth - should make the need for it clear but some things are never going to change, I guess.

I mean, post-COVID, we still have to listen to this "People from the suburbs only use transit to go the financial district!" nonsense? The idea that somewhere there's someone who lives at Yonge/Eg and works in Markham is nigh imcomprehensible, apparently. The idea that the barren hinterlands of Yonge and Finch - not in Toronto but in the City of North York, in the 1970s - could support a subway would have raised just as much ire if this forum existed then, I'm sure.

And I don't expect a mea culpa from anyone but it should only take one glance at the development the Province has approved at Highway 7 (and guesses how much money it's bringing back to the project) for every single individual who supported an extension to Steeles to hang their heads in shame. You either get what the project is about or you don't.

Maybe when Dougie redraws the maps in York Region, he'll just extend Toronto up to Highway 7, and amalgamate the rest of York Region. Then at least we won't have to hear more about the the nerve of Toronto's subway having stations in Vaughan, Markham or (literally the southmost 100 metres of) Richmond Hill.
It'll all be "Toronto," whatever that really means.
 
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The reason GO Transit didn't want to serve trips within Toronto until recently, isn't so much a jurisdictional divide, but rather the huge capacity mismatch. TTC ridership was so much greater than all of the GO Trains ridership, that shifting even a small percentage of TTC riders on GO could wreck their service patterns. For example, a crowd of intra-416 riders boards a GO Train at Union, and leaves no space for the 905-ers who switch to driving instead. The 416-ers pay for GO more than they would for TTC, but still less than the average GO fare because they travel a shorter distance. And then they all alight while still within Toronto, while a nearly empty GO train continues its nearly useless journey into the 905.

Of course, the proper soluition for that is increasing frequencies and adding some short-turn trips, but that requires infrastructure investments and takes time. Hopefully, we are getting there.

GO Train lines can and should provide very valiable service inside Toronto. Especially the LSW, LSE, Brampton, and Markham lines, that run through areas not served by TTC subways.
 
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Rainforest said:
However, the Yonge extension is useful in any case, as it creates a good connection between the central North York and central Richmond Hill. RH GO Trains cannot do that as they divert quite far east from the central North York.
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Yonge st is probably the one corridor you could always justify having a subway slowly extend up. It’s such a good connection because it is the most central artery in the entire region. People joke about it going all the way to Barrie, but look at the tube lines in London; some of them go very very far. And of course, every time the Yonge line is extended, development follows. It’s the largest (and longest) established place for TOD anywhere in the GTHA.

The unique part is that any question of demand for a subway on Yonge almost entirely comes down to how much pressure there is from the north pushing down on it at a municipal level; it seems that if a place like North York, as a whole, put enough pressure onto Yonge into Toronto, so too has Richmond Hill today. I would argue moreso if I am being honest, but that’s another story.
 
Sunnyside said:
Yonge st is probably the one corridor you could always justify having a subway slowly extend up. It’s such a good connection because it is the most central artery in the entire region. People joke about it going all the way to Barrie, but look at the tube lines in London; some of them go very very far. And of course, every time the Yonge line is extended, development follows. It’s the largest (and longest) established place for TOD anywhere in the GTHA.
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There is a point where extending too far becomes counter-productive and I'm not sure where that is but it definitely isn't Highway 7 (and it definitely isn't Steeles, which ihas no import beyond it being a line on a map, dictating where taxes go). I've said before that, in the long term, I could see an extension going to Major Mac; maaaaauybe Elgin Mills. But with the Oak Ridges Moraine and the gap between there and Oak Ridges/Aurora, I find it hard to imagine a subway ever making sense there (especially if they can improve GO service).

But I'm sure anyone bored enough can find me making the same, "...because it's Yonge Street," claims many time sover the past decade. That fact is more signficant than whether it's in North York or Markham. It may be bad that our density is not evenly distributed and so much weight is put on Yonge, where we have a single subway line without any real redundancy or an express alternative but that's the urban fabric we've inherited.
 
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
There is a point where extending too far becomes counter-productive and I'm not sure where that is but it definitely isn't Highway 7 (and it definitely isn't Steeles, which ihas no import beyond it being a line on a map, dictating where taxes go). I've said before that, in the long term, I could see an extension going to Major Mac; maaaaauybe Elgin Mills. But with the Oak Ridges Moraine and the gap between there and Oak Ridges/Aurora, I find it hard to imagine a subway ever making sense there (especially if they can improve GO service).

But I'm sure anyone bored enough can find me making the same, "...because it's Yonge Street," claims many time sover the past decade. That fact is more signficant than whether it's in North York or Markham. It may be bad that our density is not evenly distributed and so much weight is put on Yonge, where we have a single subway line without any real redundancy or an express alternative but that's the urban fabric we've inherited.
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I agree about your cutoff point, and would add that somewhere between Richmond Hill and Aurora is where we can and should look at building a connection between the Barrie and Richmond Hill corridors.
 
What would be the plan for extending the Yonge line further north? Would you just extend a long the rail ROW?
 
chrisw said:
What would be the plan for extending the Yonge line further north? Would you just extend a long the rail ROW?
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It would probably look something like electrifying, double tracking and reconfiguring (retracking the Leaside Spur and Half Mile Bridge) the Richmond Hill Go Line.

Would provide the subway style service north of HWY 7 and provide and express option to Union and the East West subway lines
 
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