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King Street (Streetcar Transit Priority)

MetroMan said:
The part of King St's sidewalks most congested with pedestrians because of narrow sidewalks and busy theatres, they give nearly all of it to cars! Blue is the for pickups/dropoffs, taxi area.

Meanwhile, right across the street where there is already unlimited sidewalk space because of David Pecaut Sq., they add even more sidewalk space. Flip it around! People can be dropped off or grab a taxi across the street.
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You expect people to CROSS THE STREET to attend the theatre after being dropped off! OMG you utter monster
 
MetroMan said:
I agree with this. Without physical cues like an island forcing them to the right, cars will stop at the light in the lane they're at, staring at the signs trying to figure out why they can't go ahead even though there's an open lane right in front of them. Meanwhile, they'll be blocking the streetcar from proceeding who can't let out passengers because the stop is now on the far side.

Worse still, I looked at the diagram along the entire span and there will be a lot of through traffic still alowed. For example, a car can legally enter at Peter and continue all the way to University. Only now, they have to drive in the streetcar lane because there is only one lane to share amongst them.

This could have been avoided by making alternating one ways which everybody can intuitively understand. Leave it to this city to screw up the entire point of this project by compromising to both sides until neither of them get something that works. Call me cynical but this looks destined — if not designed — for confusion and further gridlock for both streetcars and cars.
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Tory and Keesmat are the king and queen of over-promising and under-delivering. They'll tease you with promises of precious gems but end up delivering polished up lumps of coal.

I've been saying from the start if you wanted a pedestrian fun zone Queen works because there are actual laneways behind most of the buildings. Instead the plan calls for a seriously compromised transit priority scheme and a seriously compromised subway.
 
Forgotten said:
I've been saying from the start if you wanted a pedestrian fun zone Queen works because there are actual laneways behind most of the buildings. Instead the plan calls for a seriously compromised transit priority scheme and a seriously compromised subway.
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Even if King and Queen were matched on that, and other factors, there's a massive one not being considered: If the Relief Line is built and terminates at Ossington/Queen, it makes sense to have a surface transitway west from there, that being Queen unless the terminus is located at King and University, in which case the King Transitway makes sense.

Given, as planned by the City (I'm a skeptic on this, but I digress), the Relief Line as planned as Phase 1 is a decade or more away, it's time to start planning ahead for once, and this must be an important consideration taken at this time unless Phase 1 is extended westward under Queen from Osgoode. Is this the left hand not knowing what the right is doing? If passengers wish to continue along an east-west alignment past University, then why make it difficult and a terrible use of infrastructure to force them to shuttle on the University subway to do it?
 
ADRM said:
I think the planners might be underestimating the degree to which right-turning cars are still going to hold up streetcars in the stretches with the highest pedestrian traffic.

You're still going to wind up almost every block with that dumb-ass, very Toronto situation where a single-occupancy vehicle is holding up tens of thousands of people on streetcars because the stream of crossing pedestrians is going to hold up right turners.
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Agreed on the right turn queue backing up into the streetcar lane and holding them up.

If you want to keep the streetcars moving the best way would be to prohibit any turns on that stretch of King Street.

Vancouver's Granville Transit Mall is one lane each way and prohibits all turns (except buses and emergency vehicles).
Any cars that are on the street get stuck behind the buses and have to wait.
Regular cars are not supposed to be on the transit mall, but they end up there anyways.
 
Juan_Lennon416 said:
The Queen's Quay design is a total mess!
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To me, it's obvious but I followed the planning quite closely. But the design aside, there are SO many signs there (and elsewhere in the city) that are routinely ignored. Signage is not a solution.
 
dowlingm said:
The project (not the pilot) could extend west of Bathurst a little (see the PM diagram). To make that work though, extending Front Street as 2 lanes past Tecumseth and through the works yard to Walnut, while moving the tennis courts on the west side of Walnut to the proposed park extension south of Wellington so that Walnut could be widened to two ways. Not a cheap solution, plus it rams a road through the "park on a lead factory" at 28 Bathurst, but it might help redirect some traffic away from Bathurst-King given that Wellington doesn't have much capacity to.
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Front isn't going anywhere. There was just a high profile fight in City Hall to use the lot where Front St. terminates to build a new park. It passed.

I'm all for parks but I too think that Front should be extended, at some point in the future finding its way to Liberty Village.

I'm 100% in support of closing King to cars but I recognize that we need to provide options for drivers so a solution must be found for an alternative west of Bathurst.
 
aquateam said:
1. They should really consider using Quebec-style signage, where the signs say what you CAN do instead of what you CAN'T do. As currently signed, it is very confusing.
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Recall what happened, when they used to use that kind of signage on the Transitway in Ottawa. Someone challenged their ticket on the basis that there was no indication that they couldn't. And they won.
 
The Granville transit mall uses "what you are allowed to do" signage as well, and I found it extremely confusing when I was there last week. It's a straight through arrow with a green circle. Cool, I can go straight, but what about turning? Unless signage indicates otherwise, I can turn, and the signage isn't telling me not to..
 
innsertnamehere said:
The Granville transit mall uses "what you are allowed to do" signage as well, and I found it extremely confusing when I was there last week. It's a straight through arrow with a green circle. Cool, I can go straight, but what about turning? Unless signage indicates otherwise, I can turn, and the signage isn't telling me not to..
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Why not have both?
 
innsertnamehere said:
The Granville transit mall uses "what you are allowed to do" signage as well, and I found it extremely confusing when I was there last week. It's a straight through arrow with a green circle. Cool, I can go straight, but what about turning? Unless signage indicates otherwise, I can turn, and the signage isn't telling me not to..
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or you could acquaint yourself with BC driving rules. http://www.icbc.com/driver-licensing/Documents/drivers3.pdf
Turn control signs are mounted directly above the intersection. You must follow the direction of the arrow.
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I doubt that this project will bring any substantial improvement. With a ridership higher than the Sheppard subway line, the King streetcar is saturated and cars cannot be banned for various reasons; the solution is a subway line. But subway discussions revolve around "relief", as if their only purpose is to bring people into the city and out again, or to generate more development, and not to have people move faster and more easily within the city, where more and more people want to live.
 
Bayer said:
With a ridership higher than the Sheppard subway line, the King streetcar is saturated and cars cannot be banned for various reasons; the solution is a subway line.
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This talking point is pretty misleading. Yes, the Sheppard line has lower ridership, but the King streetcar is more than twice as long, and it's really two routes (east end - downtown and west end - downtown) combined into one. On a per-kilometer basis, King's ridership is half of Sheppard, and only the Spadina streetcar is even close to Sheppard's ridership (43,000 vs. 49,000 for roughly the same distance).

The problem with King is speed. If streetcars there could move as fast as they can on St. Clair, the route's capacity at rush hour would increase by 20-30%.
 
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