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How do city planners exactly determine which route or road is better for RT?

There are three main factors.

1. Where are the people going to and from now.

2. Where will the City be growing in the future. Transit can be used to direct growth to certain areas and protect other areas from too much growth.

3. Where will it fit. There is no point spending $10b on a line down a difficult route if you can build a $5b line 1km away.
 
howl said:
There are three main factors.

1. Where are the people going to and from now.

2. Where will the City be growing in the future. Transit can be used to direct growth to certain areas and protect other areas from too much growth.

3. Where will it fit. There is no point spending $10b on a line down a difficult route if you can build a $5b line 1km away.
Click to expand...


Clean and simple. So by that measure, should the busiest bus routes in the city be upgraded to LRT?
 
generally, yes, but not always. other projects can steal ridership from other routes. The Sheppard LRT will likely make Finch East a much less busy route as more people will take north south bus routes to get to Sheppard instead of a single east west bus route to get to Yonge.
 
innsertnamehere said:
generally, yes, but not always. other projects can steal ridership from other routes. The Sheppard LRT will likely make Finch East a much less busy route as more people will take north south bus routes to get to Sheppard instead of a single east west bus route to get to Yonge.
Click to expand...

Are you talking about the extension from Keele to Yonge, or an extension east of Yonge? As far as I know, there's no official plan for the latter.

Anyways, in a perfect world the Sheppard Subway would have never existed and we would have Finch East LRT. Finch East has well beyond what we need to justify an LRT imo. I guess we'll have to see how SELRT affects ridership on the Finch East bus routes to see if it makes sense to extend the LRT to therel. I really would love to have some kind of northern crosstown LRT line.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
Are you talking about the extension from Keele to Yonge, or an extension east of Yonge? As far as I know, there's no official plan for the latter.

Anyways, in a perfect world the Sheppard Subway would have never existed and we would have Finch East LRT. Finch East has well beyond what we need to justify an LRT imo. I guess we'll have to see how SELRT affects ridership on the Finch East bus routes to see if it makes sense to extend the LRT to therel. I really would love to have some kind of northern crosstown LRT line.
Click to expand...

If you bring the the Bloor Danforth subway goes to Finch, I would think the idea of bringing the LRT to McCowan would come up.
innsertnamehere said:
generally, yes, but not always. other projects can steal ridership from other routes. The Sheppard LRT will likely make Finch East a much less busy route as more people will take north south bus routes to get to Sheppard instead of a single east west bus route to get to Yonge.
Click to expand...
This will change the dynamics of the eastern part of the city. I would think that, Finch East and Sheppard should be built.
 
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innsertnamehere said:
the sheppard subway really f***s things up in terms of a viable crosstown route.
Click to expand...

Yes it did. We really can't do anything to Sheppard. Can't extend it . Can't close it. Can't replace it. The thing is a cancer on Toronto transit.

I've been thinking about this for a while and I think the best and cheapest solution is to just build SELRT and then extend Finch LRT east to McCowan, assuming that both the SELRT and Finch LRT would have acceptable ridership levels. As of right now, the Finch East busses actually have slightly more ridership than Finch West, so there's actually a (very) small chance that Finch East LRT could be viable if SELRT doesn't cause an enormous drop in Finch East ridership.

It's hardly elegant (that route duplication!!!), but is the best I could think of.

Either that or ignore the problem. It's not as if there are a significant amount of people travelling from northeast Toronto to northwest Toronto. All other solutions I could think of just sucked:

-Replacing Sheppard Subway with LRT and connect it to the FWLRT - too expensive and poor politics.
-Extend Sheppard Subway to run on Finch West or Sheppard West - ridiculously expensive and almost zero riders
-Get rid of Sheppard Subway and replace with Finch Crosstown LRT - bad politics, waste of a $1 Billion subway
 
TheTigerMaster said:
Yes it did. We really can't do anything to Sheppard. Can't extend it . Can't close it. Can't replace it. The thing is a cancer on Toronto transit.

I've been thinking about this for a while and I think the best and cheapest solution is to just build SELRT and then extend Finch LRT east to McCowan, assuming that both the SELRT and Finch LRT would have acceptable ridership levels. As of right now, the Finch East busses actually have slightly more ridership than Finch West, so there's actually a (very) small chance that Finch East LRT could be viable if SELRT doesn't cause an enormous drop in Finch East ridership.

It's hardly elegant (that route duplication!!!), but is the best I could think of.

Either that or ignore the problem. It's not as if there are a significant amount of people travelling from northeast Toronto to northwest Toronto. All other solutions I could think of just sucked:

-Replacing Sheppard Subway with LRT and connect it to the FWLRT - too expensive and poor politics.
-Extend Sheppard Subway to run on Finch West or Sheppard West - ridiculously expensive and almost zero riders
-Get rid of Sheppard Subway and replace with Finch Crosstown LRT - bad politics, waste of a $1 Billion subway
Click to expand...

The sheppard subway to finch west? that could work, but I remember a study by the TTC in 2011 saying a Finch west subway would be empty miday and not very full at peak.
 
The question for me for Sheppard West is whether the 3.5km extension of the subway is really going to be that much more expensive than an 8.5km Finch LRT extension. the question is how to best bridge that gap with what we have, and while the subway would run relatively empty, it would probably cost just as much as the LRT option, if not just a tiny bit more. I can't see the subway costing much more than $1.2 billion, with the LRT costing closer to $1 billion. for that difference you may as well go for the subway IMO.
 
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innsertnamehere said:
The question for me for Sheppard West is whether the 3.5km extension of the subway is really going to be that much more expensive than an 8.5km Finch LRT extension. the question is how to best bridge that gap with what we have, and while the subway would run relatively empty, it would probably cost just as much as the LRT option, if not just a tiny bit more. I can't see the subway costing much more than $1.2 billion, with the LRT costing closer to $1 billion. for that difference you may as well go for the subway IMO.
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If our goal is to just bridge Spadina and Yonge, extending Sheppard west does become an attractive option. My concern is how expensive it will be to operate the thing.
 
The Sheppard subway should have been built as a branch of the Yonge line with alternating trains going to Finch Station and Don Mills Station. Its because its a short line requiring an interchange that kills it. If there was a Y-branch north of York Mills station with the Sheppard branch going west of Yonge, then under Botham Road or Pewter Road before swinging east, it could continue to use the existing infrastructure at Sheppard/Yonge Station.

Alternately, it could become a branch of the Spadina line branching off between Yorkdale or Wilson and Downsview Stations.
 
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