Originally Posted by
BMO
All that is a waste, if you took the same vein of thought, you could just spend the $8 on decreasing headways on ALL bus routes in the city, which would amount to greater overall time savings across the city. That's the quick short term fix to the solution. Heck you could probably even put BRT on every single arterial for that money (something LRTistas seems to believe is the answer to capacity concerns; just build more LRT on parallel streets)
Building Eglinton alone underground would have a 66K capacity (not including sheppard subway in the mix) building the current transit city lines would have a max capacity of 60K.
It is expected that Eglinton will have a peak ridership of 12K if it was built underground. To put that in perspective, the Spadina line currently has a peak ridership of 13K. Not only this, but it would relieve the Bloor-Danforth line, and create a much needed redundancy in the system.
Everyone says Subway is not appropriate for the corridor, yet they toss out figures like 12K peak ridership which is well into subway area (starting peak ridership for considering subway is 10K, and max capacity for LRT is 15K).
Ok, fine don't believe me, let's look at the so called benefits of LRT. Wow it's going to improve the urban form, create a more human scaled development along the corridors, and it will promote local trips...Alright, how many people here would like to move to Birchmount and Eglinton, and not rather go to Downtown Toronto for entertainment? Yup, thought so.
Eglinton is NOT a destination, it is a corridor. People aren't travelling along Eglinton to go one or two blocks down, they're using it to get ACROSS Eglinton. What I'm saying is that LRT's benefits are only useful for gentrifying and developping an area, if that stops are closely/ reasonably spaced. Having Subway-like stop spacing will NOT foster the so called avenue style development. Why would anybody build between stations, if they're going to have car access cut off by an LRT line in the middle of the road, that will not stop there. You'll see development at the major intersections/stops.
Having said this, you need a reliable and completely segregated line on Eglinton. Like I said, it is NOT a local route, it is a means of getting to the core. I truly believe Scarborough doesn't really care whether it's subway or LRT, all they care about is if it will get them to the core quickly. A fact that at-grade LRT cannot deny, is that it is undoubtedly slower than subway, or any completely spearated line for that matter.
It's easy to say we want LRT in the suburbs if your own ward will get a subway regardless of which plan is chosen. Ppl on St. Clair still do not like the lack of car access on the street (talking about actual movement of vehicles) and that is further downtown than Eglinton, so why would you expect people in the suburbs to like it? I understand they will be expanding the road so that the LRT doesn't take away road capacity, but it will still create a number of issues for left-turns, etc. No one can deny that make turns on any street is a pain.
So before you start arguing that we should "Stop the waste and build Transit City" take a look and see what the real issues are. People in the suburbs just want to get to and from work as quick as they can. subway allows this. I understand that Finch West may have to wait longer for their transit, but look at how much less time they will have to spend to get on the subway once the Spadina extension is built. Building a proper backbone of subway (or completely grade separated transit) is what is NEEDED in this city.
Council is trying to take the easy option out of this whole debacle. Why should they look for alternative financing options, when it's political hot sauce? No, Josh Matlow and Karen Stintz just went for what's easy. Maybe saying, gee let's see what revenue tools we need for financing subways or any other transit are because we will never get this kind of money in the future for transit expansion, and then come up with a plan, and see what council thinks about it. Karen Stintz is always the first person to note that Ford cannot pay for his subways, but she doesn't say how anything else in the city will ever get built after this one time $8B grant.
If there's one thing you have to give credit to a lot of the subway supporters (not all ofcourse) is that many subway supporters are actually for AFP options and looking for other ways of financing a consistent and incremental expansion over a long-term plan.
You all bicker and argue about Ford and Stintz, but the real douchebags in this whole situation are McGuinty and his idiot Metrolinx agency, that came up with a $50B plan, without any way of financing it, just so that it wouldn't be an election issue. That's just as bad as saying we'll have subways on Finch (like what Ford is saying) and not having any numbers to back it up. So you get this whole situation where the city knows it only gets one chance to do something, and then, what ends up happening, is that NOTHING happens.
Ppl all-over the city want to be able to move quickly. I think something better than LRT is needed, not just on Eglinton, but also on Sheppard, DRL, and Yonge. Instead of saying, let's just invest in LRT so that it has short term benefits for everyone, we should really look at what Toronto SHOULD have, and what plan we can create to achieve that. A line that hits 4 growth nodes including the Airport, one highway terminus, two town centres, is NOT where LRT should be built, it's the perfect candidate to be a backbone subway for across the city.
One last thing to note is that transit planning isn't always about ridership or density, or making a profit off of your investment. Transit is much more complicated than that. Transit is affected basically by everything. It is an integrated system that relies on various things. Ignoring highway traffic patterns (especially the most heavily used highway in NA) and just looking at existing bus routes and density is NOT a comprehensive model for transit ridership projections, the 401 is a very sophisticated transit system that has a multitude of start and end locations, but there is not doubt that it is the primary east-west route across the city in the north, in fact many areas in the suburbs with the lowest densities are in employment districts. There is no existing option that comes anywhere close to the 401 in terms of transit. Think of building a subway across eglinton as a transit highway. the buses are the arterials, and the pedestrians and cyclists are the collectors.
LRT is more like highway 7 or kingston road; it's fast, but still stops for lights.
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