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Admiral Beez said:
What’s the purpose of the Richmond Adelaide tracks? Will these be a new route or a secondary bypass?
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You have not been paying attention!

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W. K. Lis said:
Could this be the future of the streetcar in Toronto? Maybe try it out as an experiment, to see how it would behave with snow. Unlikely, because of the lack of transit funding for current operations, never-mind innovations.



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There essentially longer buses so i don't really see why they would have any problems. They could probably use something like that on busier bus routes or something like on the islands to provide better transportation around them.
 
T3G said:
Why would we need to experiment with this, when both of the technologies present, tram and bus (including electric) already exist and work just fine?

Solving a problem that doesn't exist?
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Ontario has a history of fantazing about exploring the use of unproven technologies *cough ICTS, hydrogen trains*.
 
Amare said:
Ontario has a history of fantazing about exploring the use of unproven technologies *cough ICTS, hydrogen trains*.
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You say that but they did last beyond their expected life span and was more successful than expected resulting in a full subway being built.
 
Bordercollie said:
You say that but they did last beyond their expected life span and was more successful than expected resulting in a full subway being built.
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More successful than expected? I feel like that's reaching? It been close to 40 years since it opened, the numerous discussed expansions never opened (Malvern, utsc)
 
turbanplanner said:
More successful than expected? I feel like that's reaching? It been close to 40 years since it opened, the numerous discussed expansions never opened (Malvern, utsc)
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The elevated trains of Manhattan ran for 60 years. They were replaced by subways.

From link.

In the early evening of May 12, 1955, a train pulled out of Lower Manhattan’s Chatham Square, near City Hall, bound for upper Manhattan and the Bronx via Third Avenue. It was the last run of the Third Avenue elevated, and the last time a train ran up a large chunk of Manhattan east of Lexington Avenue for six decades.

The Third Avenue elevated—like lines along Ninth, Sixth, and yes, Second Avenues—predated the subway. The line opened in 1878, with service from South Ferry in Lower Manhattan to 129th Street in Harlem. Other elevated, or “el” lines came into service at around the same time. The Second Avenue elevated, which ran from City Hall to Harlem for most of its life, operated from 1875 to 1942. The Ninth Avenue elevated, the first el, operated from 1868 to 1940. The Sixth Avenue elevated was constructed in segments during the 1870s and ceased operations in 1938.

End of the Els​

It’s not a coincidence that all of these lines stopped running at around the same time.

“The els were loud, dirty, messy and slow,” says Clifton Hood, a professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and author of 722 Miles, a history of New York City’s subway system. “The subways were modern and the els looked bad.” The city government, often backed by real-estate interests (and with an eye towards real-estate tax receipts), was happy to remove them.

“The els were run by monopolistic companies that provided bad service,” Hood says. The IND subway system, a municipally-operated service, was designed in many instances to compete with companies running existing rapid transit lines—both subways and els. “One purpose of the IND was to compete with particular el lines,” Hood says. “That was the idea of the Sixth and Eighth Avenue lines.”

There were, of course, many who opposed removing elevated lines, especially on the subway-poor East Side. According to a blog post from CUNY’s Gotham Center for New York City History, “skeptics questioned the wisdom of summarily displacing the 25,000,000 the Third Avenue El had carried in 1954. Some lawmakers tried to ensure that El service would not be eliminated until construction of the promised new subway began.”

Was another way possible? Would some alternative to the Lexington Avenue line—which carries more passengers by itself than the entire networks of San Francisco, Chicago and Boston—be better than none at all? It’s hard to say.
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A Third Avenue train passes over the Bowery in 1896.

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An 1881 map of Manhattan’s elevated rail service.
 
W. K. Lis said:
The elevated trains of Manhattan ran for 60 years. They were replaced by subways.

From link.


800x-1.png

A Third Avenue train passes over the Bowery in 1896.

800x-1.png

An 1881 map of Manhattan’s elevated rail service.
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Not comparable at all! Much of the line isn't elevated and we don't get back more building space after it closes.

We were actually going to rebuild the section that has a tunnel and replace the rolling stock, but then the fords replaced it. I'm sad to see it go but a transit youtuber I like who used to use the line pointed out it's probably more useful in it's new form.
 
Bordercollie said:
You say that but they did last beyond their expected life span and was more successful than expected resulting in a full subway being built.
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At the same time, the folks of Melvern are still waiting for RT that they were to get in the 80's and by 2015/18. Then, riders of the SRT would only have to ride buses for 3 years than the current 7+ years with taxpayers paying 5 time the cost to build the subway than LRT.
 
W. K. Lis said:
Could this be the future of the streetcar in Toronto? Maybe try it out as an experiment, to see how it would behave with snow. Unlikely, because of the lack of transit funding for current operations, never-mind innovations.
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Or just get a double articulated bus from VanHool (same company that provided many of the VIVA buses) and run them on an isolated right-of-way.. maybe with red pavement to make it obvious that the lanes aren't for cars.
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I would not write developments like this off too quickly. It can essentially be driverless and significantly longer than a bus, so more efficient in terms of labour. By interacting with traffic signals and running under control of a system that looks at load demand and headways, it could be freed from the whims of operators more concerned with coffee and pee breaks than customer service. It sounds like a promising option for arterial roads such as Eglinton or Finch East, where LRT would have high startup cots.
 
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