From today's
EYE:
Editorial
Making transit rapid
Our plans could make transit great, but we're doing it wrong
The news earlier this week was full of discussion of rapid transit - more gnawing on the already-chewed bone of the St. Clair right-of-way alongside the first meetings for the Environmental Assessment for the Waterfront West LRT.
This was to be expected, since LRT routes and dedicated busways formed the core of David Miller's transportation strategy during the just-ended mayoral campaign. In contrast to Jane Pitfield, who promised to start the digging on an expanded network of subways (a plan that no one had any idea how to pay for in the absence of significant funding from the provincial and federal governments), Miller wanted to get things moving on the surface.
His plan taken in total - more streetcar rights-of-way along Queens Quay, on Don Mills from Steeles into downtown, along the west waterfront from Etobicoke to Union Station and another one across Eglinton that would go out to the airport, as well as a dedicated busway across the Finch Hydro Corridor and either light rail or some other rapid transit connecting the Sheppard Subway to the Scarborough Town Centre, among other things - is inspiring to look at. It takes the current transit grid and gives us a network of high-speed lines that could get Torontonians out of their cars and connect them to each other.
David Miller says the plan is to "make streetcars and buses as speedy and reliable as the subway." There's the catch. We support that idea, and we know it is possible, but we doubt the mayor's plan will make it happen. Because the way Toronto has gone about building LRT lines thus far, at Harbourfront and on Spadina and St. Clair, ignores the lessons of Europe and Australia about what surface rapid transit can be and instead duplicates the model of our existing streetcars with few additional benefits.(We'll pause here to acknowledge that our transit views are very heavily influenced by those of transit activist Steve Munro. If there were any justice - and if he'd accept the job - Munro would be put in charge of the TTC. As it is, he keeps an excellent blog at
www.stevemunro.ca, which we suggest you check out.)
What's wrong with how we build LRT lines? Let's look at how the speedy, reliable subway behaves. It arrives every minute and a half or so, and passengers who have paid a fare before stepping onto the platform board quickly. The subway then proceeds to about 40 kilometres an hour and stops once every kilometre or two. It encounters no traffic obstacles such as red lights or crosswalks along the way.
Now let's look at our existing streetcar rights-of-way: streetcars wait while passengers fumble for passes and change to individually pay fares as they board.
The streetcar (which, as no one in Toronto has occasion to learn, can travel as fast as 70 km per hour) then crawls forward, barely getting up to the speed of traffic and then stops every block or two. It waits for red lights whether there's a streetcar stop or not, and then often waits while cars make left turns through the streetcar lane. Then it crawls forward again.
Why, when we decide a surface route will have to stand in for a subway, do we ignore the ways in which it could behave like a subway? Why don't we have a system of collecting fares that doesn't involve stopping the car for minutes at each stop.
Why don't we space the stops out to every 500 metres or every kilometre so that the streetcars can speed along as subways do? Why don't we have a not-so-high-tech system of traffic signal priority that would ensure a streetcar never had to stop at a red light, as they do all over Europe? Why do we make 50 passengers in a streetcar wait while a single driver in a car makes a left turn?
We don't know. But our current approach seems to view a streetcar in a right-of-way as just another single vehicle sharing the road.
We'd like some answers. Better yet, we'd like to see the problems fixed, so that when the mayor compares surface transit's speed and reliability to that of a subway, he's telling the truth.
