News   Mar 28, 2024
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Finch West Line 6 LRT

Surprise, surprise. The biggest bus has the most incidents. When you normalize it by ridership, it isn't even in the top 5.
 
This article is ridiculously irresponsible. Does nothing but whip up public hysteria. This is similar to claiming that Toronto is more dangerous than Medicine Hat, because Toronto has more crime than Medicine Hat, while ignoring that Toronto is several times larger.

Here's the data sorted by incident rate per 100,000 riders:

Sorted by incident rate:
1. Lawrence East: 92 per 100,000, 2% assault rate

2. Ossington: 79 per 100,000, 40% assault rate

3. Eglinton West: 74 per 100,000, 13% assault rate

4. Lawrence West: 63 per 100,000, 0% assault rate

5. Yonge: 52 per 100,00, 37% assault rate

6. Mt Dennis: 44 per 100,000, 20% assault rate

7.Rogers Rd: 41 per 100,000, 21% assault rate

8. Dufferin: 40 per 100,000, 5% assault rate

9. Finch-Don Mills: 40 per 100,000, 38% assault rate

10. Jane: 40 per 100,000, 22% assault rate

11. Bloor: 37 per 100,000, 27% assault rate

12. Finch West: 36 per 100,000, 15% assault rate

13. Wilson: 35 per 100,000, 33% assault rate

14. Weston: 34 per 100,000, 21% assault rate

Note that the above data is sorted by general incident rate, most of which is mostly made up of fare evasion (fraud).
 
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They have listened and are making changes. For example, instead of one left turn from westbound Finch to southbound Arrow, they're putting in two left turn lanes.

View attachment 67968

And putting the bicycle lane into an underpass at the 400 southbound ramp from eastbound Finch.
This is beautiful. Getting off the highway and immediately having to turn left on Arrow is an absolute nightmare. I hate that off-ramp so much.
 
There is a lot in flux at the moment with the Finch LRT. Residents in the public consultation seemed to prefer a Bus Rapid Transit option (which they were promised would be considered), and I am working on a story at the moment about the TTC's expressed desire to examine linking the Crosstown W with the Finch LRT via the airport (and to finish the Crosstown E and W by 2021).

What would you all think of joining Crosstown W and Finch? What route would you think would work?
 
^Isn't that article talking about the crosstown? It makes no sense to do a BRT there - it would force a transfer in the same direction at Mt Dennis.

Plus I'm not really sure why they'd be ok with a BRT but not an LRT since they're almost the same thing, just with different vehicles.

I think it would be great for the Finch let to head down to the airport and meet up with the ECLRT. Dunno if that means making one big sideways U or keeping them separate though - there might not be point in making them one line, I'm not really sure.
 
^Isn't that article talking about the crosstown? It makes no sense to do a BRT there - it would force a transfer in the same direction at Mt Dennis.

Plus I'm not really sure why they'd be ok with a BRT but not an LRT since they're almost the same thing, just with different vehicles.

I think it would be great for the Finch let to head down to the airport and meet up with the ECLRT. Dunno if that means making one big sideways U or keeping them separate though - there might not be point in making them one line, I'm not really sure.

I think they seem to be stuck in the LRT are streetcars logic and that they tear up streets etc.
 
There is a lot in flux at the moment with the Finch LRT. Residents in the public consultation seemed to prefer a Bus Rapid Transit option (which they were promised would be considered), and I am working on a story at the moment about the TTC's expressed desire to examine linking the Crosstown W with the Finch LRT via the airport (and to finish the Crosstown E and W by 2021).

What would you all think of joining Crosstown W and Finch? What route would you think would work?

Intuitively, I suspect this route would have very low usage. We've gone over the issues with service Airport Corporate Centre (ACC) in detail before. Essentially, ACC is a very disperse area, as large as downtown Toronto. It can't be effectively served by a few LRT stops. Furthermore, employment is spread out relatively evenly over 24 hours, lowering the peak hour ridership. The geographic distribution of ACC workers also works against this LRT proposal. Less than half of them live in Toronto, and a fraction of those people would live in the catchment area for the Finch/Eglinton LRT. This is reflected in the results of the Eglinton-Crosstown EA, which showed peak demand of only a few hundred people per hour for the airport.

Some will argue that the Eglinton/Finch LRT will serve north/south trips in Etobicoke. The problem with this is that travelling all the way west to Renforth Gateway will certainly be slower than using any one of the half dozen or so north/south bus routes in Etobicoke, and the detour to the airport would add considerably to trip times. The LRT wouldn't be an attractive service for north/south users. For this Eglinton/Finch LRT proposal, I'd expect peak usage to be below 1,500 pphpd, making it hard to justify the cost.

The best way to improve transit in Etobicoke would be a BRT network. It allows us to bring rail-quality transit to routes that will never have the ridership to support LRT. The BRTs would be 25% to 30% faster than regular bus service, faster than all of our express bus service, and would be more reliable. Based on their high ridership and right-of-way availability, the Etobicoke routes ideal for BRT would be
- Wilson/Albion
- Kipling
- Steeles
- Jane
- Lawrence (connecting to Pearson Airport)

Kipling and Jane would act as a spine for Etobicoke, facilitating faster north/south travel within Etobicoke and to Eglinton Line, and Wilson/Albion, Steeles and Lawrence would serve trips east/west, primarily to University Line.

I have a more detailed BRT proposal here: http://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threads/ttc-transit-city-bus-plan.9947/page-9#post-1093571

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Kipling and Jane would act as a spine for Etobicoke, facilitating faster north/south travel within Etobicoke and to Eglinton Line, and Wilson/Albion, Steeles and Lawrence would serve trips east/west, primarily to University Line.

Jane is not in Etobicoke, and just one north-south separated transit ROW is not enough. Kipling should be the main spine, with a second one either on Islington or along the 27/427/Brown's Line corridor.
 
Jane is not in Etobicoke, and just one north-south separated transit ROW is not enough. Kipling should be the main spine, with a second one either on Islington or along the 27/427/Brown's Line corridor.

I had a feeling someone was going to point that out. I know Jane is not in Etobicoke. It still will serve as a north/south spine for the borough though, particularly for customers travelling southeast or northwest.

My issue with an Islington BRT is that it is rather close to Kipling. Kipling has higher ridership, so my preference is for the BRT to go there. Other issue with Islington is that the right-of-way ins't wide enough to facilitate BRT. It's only 27 metres wide, compared to Kipling's 36 metres. A BRT can go on Kipling without removing car lanes (important for political reasons), but that's not true on Islington. In fact, Kipling is the only arterial in Etobicoke running north/south wide enough to install BRT without removing car lanes (Albion and Rextale are too, but those streets are diagonal). The best we can do on Islington is probably HOV lanes. To put this all in perspective, Islington is 3 metres narrower than St. Clair.

The Highway 27/427/Brown's Line corridor isn't served by any TTC routes. I don't think that would be a wise corridor for BRT, as there aren't many destination points that would be accessible by bus on that corridor.

Martin Grove and Royal York aren't good choices because that route has relatively low ridership, about a third the usage as Kipling

Tl;DR: Kipling and Jane are the only two high volume routes in Etobicoke with wide enough right of ways to support BRT
 
The Highway 27/427/Brown's Line corridor isn't served by any TTC routes. I don't think that would be a wise corridor for BRT, as there aren't many destination points that would be accessible by bus on that corridor

What? What are the routes 123, 110A, 191 and 192 then?

The Highway 27 corridor is perfectly suited to BRT and would connect a lot of nodes (Long Branch, Sherway Gardens, Cloverdale/potential subway connection, Etobicoke Civic Ctr, Renforth Gateway, Pearson Airport, Woodbine Racetrack, Woodbine Ctr, Humber College, 407 Transitway)
 

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