[Hipster Duck]

WK Lis, citing bus ridership stats from www.lightrailnow.org is like getting your news from Fox. It's incredibly biased and prone to truth-bending. The paragraph comparing LA's Gold and Orange lines, in particular, is completely disingenuous.

A city like Prague manages a bigger mixed traffic streetcar system with short headways. The bunching problem isn't a limitation of the vehicles; buses are prone to that too.

I've rode the Prague system and it's hardly "mixed traffic". There are a lot of streets where the streetcar runs on a disguised right of way: road cul de sacs, streetcar tracks mounting sidewalks to cut across intersections, etc. The grid layout of the North American city largely precludes this kind of operation. The King west streetcar proposal of about 9 years ago was about the closest we got to operating a streetcar like they do in Continental Europe.

Much of the delay is caused by slow loading, with people filing past the driver and paying. The new streetcars will have all-door loading so they should speed up even the mixed traffic lines. The loading will be faster than any bus.

I'm having a hard time visualizing these new, long streetcars on Toronto's roads. It's not that I've never rode one in Europe, it's that in Europe almost all of these anaconda-like trams run in their own ROW or in a disguised-ROW like the one I described above. It's hard enough getting drivers to stop behind the rear doors of an ALRV; imagine what it will be like behind one of these suckers. Although I understand that the new streetcars will be all-door loading, a part of me thinks that the TTC's paranoia about fare evasion will step in and nix this.

 

[RedRocket191]

I'm having a hard time visualizing these new, long streetcars on Toronto's roads. It's not that I've never rode one in Europe, it's that in Europe almost all of these anaconda-like trams run in their own ROW or in a disguised-ROW like the one I described above. It's hard enough getting drivers to stop behind the rear doors of an ALRV, imagine what it will be like behind one of these suckers? Although I understand that the new streetcars will be all-door loading, a part of me thinks that the TTC's paranoia about fare evasion will step in and nix this.

City staff has been very clear for years that the new streetcars will not have fare boxes. If they were going to nix it, then it would have been nixed long before the tender was even opened for bidding - they had plenty of warning. At this stage, its full steam ahead on all-door boarding with alternate fare payment.

On a side note, this is why I believe the TTC's opposition to Presto is all smoke and mirrors and will vanish very soon. Of course, they will be the last to implement the system do the the sheer size of the agency.

 

[Whoaccio]

I think we are starting out with some overly optimistic assumptions about legacy streetcars in Toronto. We should be honest about what the current system can realistically accomplish.If the goal is to shuttle a few yuppies from their favorite "gastro-bar" to a club a few hundred meters away, it works pretty well. If the goal is to shuttle people 4-6km from their house to their job, on time and reasonably, i don't think anybody can realistically stand here and tell me it works.

I realize subway proposals take on a kind of hyperbolic quality to them, usually related to their absurdly high price tag, but I honestly see no way to avoid the need for a major E/W connection in the downtown core. At the current rate, the TTC wont even consider a drl until 2018. Given past TTC projects, that would take us to 2025-30 (35?) before we have something that people in the 1920s thought might be useful (I realize the Queen "subway" wasn't exactly a subway, but come on).

As it is, the legacy routes have poor cost recovery with no visible savings over bus routes. If we added the capital costs associated with maintaining 300+km of tracks and the high costs of new cars, I don't think the system is as affordable as proponents make it out to be. LRT is cost effective (admittedly, not synonymous with "transit effective") in the Calgary mold i.e. built in the middle of old rail ROWs & highways running @ 15m headways and 1km+ stop spacing. Running down Queen with double digit stop spacing in mixed traffic is almost akin to driving a Ferrari with the brakes on.

The thing that really grinds my gears the most is this stepheen rees inspired lore about magical streetcar suburbs. I don't really think I have ever heard a multi-billion dollar infrastructure discussion be guided by a weird blend of history, philosophy, sociology and design aesthetics You can't read more than two articles on spacing without streetcars being presented as the only way to build pleasant communities, as if Toronto is the only city with neighborhoods.

p.s. the current fare system discourages exactly what the streetcars are good at, local transit. It just isn't worth it to take the sc from Queen & Dufferin to Chinatown @ 2.75. Driving, biking and even walking just make more sense at those prices. Here in lies the major issue though. The TTC needs higher fares on SC routes due to their high cost. If they were to lower the fares to a level more in line with the distance they are typically expected to cover (1-3 km), their cost recovery would bottom out. But by keeping fares higher, they are alienating potential customers. So, in a way, streetcars are screwing streetcars.

 

[Chuck]

I love streetcars and would love to see every bus route in the city operating as a streetcar. However, given that so many people make use of the downtown streetcars in such a small area of the city (basically Keele to Woodbine and south of College), streetcars are simply not practical. The same conditions that led Toronto to build the Yonge subway exist today along King and Queen St.

From a sentimental perspective it hurts me to say this, but I honestly think that building a subway along Queen St, and ditching the King, Queen, and Dundas routes would be best. College should stick around, as should St. Clair and the north-south routes. There should also be new streetcar routes in the suburbs, and maybe even on former routes like Dupont and Harbord. The key though is that streetcars should compliment the subway as feeder routes, rather than operate in its place.

 

[Hipster Duck]

The thing that really grinds my gears the most is this stepheen rees inspired lore about magical streetcar suburbs. I don't really think I have ever heard a multi-billion dollar infrastructure discussion be guided by a weird blend of history, philosophy, sociology and design aesthetics You can't read more than two articles on spacing without streetcars being presented as the only way to build pleasant communities, as if Toronto is the only city with neighborhoods.

This might have been the funniest/most insightful/aboveboard thing I've read on the forum all month. Kudos!

 

[Dan416]

In this city people will go out of their way to take the subway over the streetcar, even if the streetcar is more direct, because of the long waits to take the streetcar versus how quick the subways are. No one minds waiting for the subway. I don't live in Toronto, but the bunching that I've personally witnessed is ridiculous and out-of-control. How hard can it be for the TTC to manage headways? Honestly? Is it rocket science? No! It's part of their job! Whoever is in charge of headways at the TTC should just be fired.

 

[CGM]

When buses are replaced by streetcars, ridership increases.

I can tell you that from my own experience... I'd rather walk than take the bus... noisy and bumpy rides with windows rattling... Not to mention the fumes at the back of the bus... feedback from vents/windows... Streetcar is smooth, quiet, fresh and the windows open at seat level.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

As for streetcar suburbs, everyone knows that it's the retail strips on the main streets that give these neighbourhoods their character and are the reasons the areas are attractive, *not* the streetcars. Take these main street strips away and you're left with Markham with streetcars. That's why Transit City is so funny: they're trying to build Main Streets by adding streetcars and then planning/zoning for Main Streets, when they could just plan/zone for Main Streets and save a few billion dollars...

Every time I've ridden the Dufferin bus it's been like that. Wait for 15 mins at Bloor then have 5 buses show up at once. In the past Scarberiankhatru has cleverly described operation on Finch East as "pelotons" of buses traveling in packs down the street.

Finch East's pelotons are not the same thing as bunched Spadina streetcars. I've never waited more than 10 minutes for a Finch East bus in my entire life, and very, very rarely have I waited more than 5 minutes, even when frequencies are affected by mild bunching. Buses are bound to get a bit bunched when there's one scheduled to arrive every 2 minutes or so and the Finch pelotons are not a direct result of questionable operations.

When I described the pelotons, I don't think I was referring to bunches of 5 or 6 like streetcar bunches...what usually happens is that if 2 or more Finch buses are more or less caught in the same light cycles and one is full, it sometimes 'takes the lead' and only lets people off, zooming ahead, leaving the emptier one to pick people up. Once in a while you'll see buses passing each other once or twice for no apparent reason...I guess physically passing another bus is the only way for drivers to gauge how full/empty each bus is.

There's fewer and smaller bus pelotons today compared to the early 90s (I think), before the major bus cuts. Pelotons also only happen when two regular or two express buses are together, not a mixture.

 

[MisterF]

As it is, the legacy routes have poor cost recovery with no visible savings over bus routes. If we added the capital costs associated with maintaining 300+km of tracks and the high costs of new cars, I don't think the system is as affordable as proponents make it out to be. LRT is cost effective (admittedly, not synonymous with "transit effective") in the Calgary mold i.e. built in the middle of old rail ROWs & highways running @ 15m headways and 1km+ stop spacing. Running down Queen with double digit stop spacing in mixed traffic is almost akin to driving a Ferrari with the brakes on.

What you're forgetting is that there's a lot development downtown that likely wouldn't have happened if the streetcars had been removed 50 years ago. Streetcar routes attract development in a way that buses, especially in mixed traffic, don't. A subway, of course, is even more attractive to developers. Put simply, you get what you pay for.

I love streetcars and would love to see every bus route in the city operating as a streetcar. However, given that so many people make use of the downtown streetcars in such a small area of the city (basically Keele to Woodbine and south of College), streetcars are simply not practical. The same conditions that led Toronto to build the Yonge subway exist today along King and Queen St.

From a sentimental perspective it hurts me to say this, but I honestly think that building a subway along Queen St, and ditching the King, Queen, and Dundas routes would be best. College should stick around, as should St. Clair and the north-south routes. There should also be new streetcar routes in the suburbs, and maybe even on former routes like Dupont and Harbord. The key though is that streetcars should compliment the subway as feeder routes, rather than operate in its place.

I think when it comes down to it we mostly agree. I'm in favour of a Queen subway, to provide local trips while the DRL would serve a more regional market. What I'm against is replacing streetcars with buses without any mass transit, which is what some forumers have suggested. For buses to replace the Queen streetcar you'd need 2-3 times as many buses as there are streetcars now to carry the same number of people. The bunching problems would be just as bad if not worse. Of course, in reality ridership would drop if that line were replaced with buses.

 

[Hipster Duck]

What you're forgetting is that there's a lot development downtown that likely wouldn't have happened if the streetcars had been removed 50 years ago. Streetcar routes attract development in a way that buses, especially in mixed traffic, don't.

I don't see where streetcars have proven to be catalysts for development. Sure, there's a lot of construction going on in areas served by streetcars, such as King West and Leslieville, but that's due more to the appeal of the area nearby and the fact that developers have freer reign to build on those cheap brownfield sites. That a streetcar trundles through these areas doesn't seem to be of much consequence.

In the same way, "Avenuization" is taking place primarily in bus country(Sheppard West, The Queensway, Avenue Road north of Lawrence, parts of East York, Leaside, etc.), but that's not because a bus runs through these neighbourhoods. It has much more to do with the appeal of the area to certain demographics relative to affordability and what sort of jobs and services are nearby.

The only public transit mode that is a proven catalyst for urban-style development in Toronto is the subway*.


---

*If transit commissioners can wrap their mind around electric regional rail, they would realize that that would be quite the development dynamo out in the 'burbs, too.

 

[egotrippin]

On the topic of fares, I believe the Viva method would be best. Instead of per ride fares, a machine should issue tickets with time limits. This way it's worth it paying $2.75 for a short trip, as you can return on the same fare. For instance, grocery shopping. It's ludicrous to pay $5.50 to go to and from the grocery store (walking/biking with a lot of groceries is more painful though), so with a timed ticket, you can get home for a reasonable amount.

For longer distances, a zone based surcharge could be added depending on the lines you're taking. It seems odd that it costs me the same amount to go from Parliament to Jarvis and back to get groceries, as it does to travel to work at Warden and Eglington with a streetcar, subway, and bus connection.

Although, with the fare system in the new cars, I assume you'll have to get your ticket at the stop; perhaps they'll adopt a method similar to the one I've mentioned. Pre-bought tickets with multiple door loading sounds nice, however fare-dodgers are already an issue. Short of staffing TTC employees at every stop, how can this be combated, especially on much larger vehicles with a lot more people per stop?

 

[scarberiankhatru]

The only public transit mode that is a proven catalyst for urban-style development in Toronto is the subway.

Then why are urban-style buildings sprouting at Kennedy & McNicoll, an intersection home to some of the worst bus service in the city? Urban-style development can be achieved by simply tweaking site plans and requiring some basic stuff from developers, like not surrounding buildings with 10 feet of grass or not 'meeting the street' with a huge, curving, gated driveway. Urban-style concentrations of towers have even fewer prerequisites...just look at Don Mills (the towers-in-a-park contexts are not urban, but the many towers/skyscrapers, in and of themselves, are urban developments).

We've seen it in places like Glencairn or Chester: added transit does absolutely nothing by itself to trigger development. This isn't SimCity. Still, subways are the only form of transit that city council or developers or the buying/moving/voting public feel is worth going to the effort of triggering development for.

And we can't compare today's planned and regulated world with the development landscape a century ago which was more of an organic free-for-all. As for the "light rail is better than buses" development paradigm, it probably exists almost solely in examples of exurbs that are connected to larger urban places by a single transit line (such as a century old streetcar suburb), and has been entrenched by American cases of buses being associated with blacks and the poor and light rail being used as a revitalization tool to string together white/tourist zones (every American line seems to run from the airport to a suburban office/hospital node to a couple tourist sites to downtown).

 

[Hipster Duck]

Then why are urban-style buildings sprouting at Kennedy & McNicoll, an intersection home to some of the worst bus service in the city?

In my last post I mentioned that demographic and employment/service proximities were probably the most potent forces behind new condo developments.

I don't mean to say that the construction of a subway will, by itself, trigger development. For example, Chester subway is "underused" and smack dab in a wonderful neighbourhood but, of course, given that nobody in their right mind would dare build anything in that neighbourhood more than 3 stories (or at all), it probably will remain a small, community stop for the foreseeable future.

What I meant is that no other form of public transit has nearly the ability to lure new residents or developers to a site quite like a subway. Open a Condo Guide and one of the features a developer will tout is access to the subway or "the TTC" (which is a metonym for "the subway"). Any landlord will cram the words "near subway" into the tight space of an apartment ad and raise the rent accordingly.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Yeah, I know what you meant and I agree with you about subways & development...though I disagree with you about subways & "urban-style" development. Only a subway line will directly trigger 'unplanned' development (a 'finished' neighbourhood existed before NY Towers was built, for example) and lure people.

I was mostly using your quote to show why the stated effects of light rail on development is rather dubious and certainly not proven. Some forumers do think we live in SimCity and adding transit works like magic...where buses only trigger a bit of development, subways trigger the most, and light rail - being the 'baby bear' of cost effectiveness - is an ideal compromise that has the added benefit of automatically leaving an Annex-like urban form in its wake. This scale is, of course, rubbish. If even a rapid transit line like a subway, one that has been proven able to trigger unplanned developments and lure new residents, doesn't guarantee changes (there's vacant/underused areas near most subway stations), what hope does a streetcar line of effecting changes? None, not without some help...which, for instance, is why Transit City is being accompanied by official plan rewritings. People talk about light rail vs buses as if buses don't even count as transit lines and can do nothing to help build a more urban city, and as if light rail "will" do any number of things...it will be cheap and it will be fast and it will be comfortable and it will revolutionize the suburbs and it will spawn urban Avenues. So Finch West will be rezoned and some Avenues development will occur, and people will cite this as proof that streetcars are better for redevelopment than buses.

If Toronto's streetcars were removed 50 years ago, it is possible that there'd be less development in parts of downtown because the removal of transportation infrastructure might have removed incentives to build higher or even just rebuild...but that assumes the streetcars wouldn't have been replaced by buses or subways or something else. That didn't happen and we can't go back in time to reset history and replay it with different variables, so people have to go looking at other cities, often American cities (in which the loss of streetcars weren't exactly the only changes going on in the 60s/70s).

 

[Whoaccio]

Maybe I am being obtuse, but I don't like the concept of justifying transit on an urban planning & aesthetics basis. If the city wants to improve urban planning, it should deal with it from an urban planning perspective. Sure, transit has an important role to play in supporting whatever development occurs but it shouldn't be the basis of planning. For instance, the city shouldn't be spending billions on an LRT line in order to "avenue-ize" Scarborough, it should zone for the appropriate density.

I know Steve Munro has derided subways on more than one occasion as a sort of wealth redistribution scheme whereby the government spends billions of public money in order to increase the land value of private speculators (i.e. Yorkdale Mall). He isn't wrong either, using transit in lieu of proper urban planing is a recipe for failure regardless of the mode. What I find curious is that people are treating LRT as a method to do exactly that, use billions in infrastructure spending to benefit private developers.

If we want to develop urban neighborhoods, we should be knocking on the door of the planning department, not the transit department. I mean, where to start with what makes a community successful? Economics? Urban design? Transportation? Demographics? The list goes on. I am skeptical that Transit City presents us with a vision that all we have to do is spend billions on LRT add water and, bam!, we have compact urban neighborhoods. The same goes for BRT, Subway or Swan Rides, mind you.