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Roads: HOV lanes

Did you miss my earlier post about hawc trolling you?

It would be great if the DRL ran from downtown up to the office parks along the DVP, or at least ran close enough to make transit a viable alternative for those commuters.
 
So predictions of the apocalypse seem to have fizzled this morning. The drive wasn't any worse than last week, actually seemed to move better.
 
I've had generally good experiences driving with the HOV lanes in place.

However, yesterday was the QEW apocalypse. I saw 4 accidents from Park Lawn to Bronte, one happened directly behind me (rear ended car).

Personally, I'm going to lay the blame squarely with the OPP. They are swerving in and out of the lanes pulling people over and causing traffic to smack on their brakes (unfortunately not everyone is paying attention).
 
drove on the Gardiner from Etobicoke into downtown Saturday evening (6PM) and didn't have a single stoppage. Something I haven't experienced in YEARS!
 
Tuscani01 said:
So predictions of the apocalypse seem to have fizzled this morning. The drive wasn't any worse than last week, actually seemed to move better.
Click to expand...

Was on vacation out of town last week and read about the chaos caused by the temp HOV lanes.....drove to work today and really had no trouble at all. As I predicted to my wife....as it relates to my commute....all it is is that we are back to the construction days of having one less lane but with the added bonus that it is during the quieter than normal summer commute days......so my drive in was, if anything, slightly shorter than it was the week before our vacation.

Much ado about nothing....I guess after a week to adjust.
 
I'm hoping that by the end of this summer, commuting in Toronto will be better than it has been in years. People will have gotten used to carpooling and taking transit, and it will become a standard practice in this city.

Obviously, despite the claims of people like hawc, not everyone can carpool. Not only does the spread out nature of the region reduce the ability to carpool, but companies moving towards irregular shift work further frustrates the situation, as well as puts extra strain on our public infrastructure in favour of private profits. But certainly there are a large number of commuters which could carpool, but needed a push like this to get them to consider it.
 
One of the hurdles to carpooling is that most of the people who could do it are already taking transit. Both transit and carpooling work best with a common origin and destination, but of course transit doesn't require actively seeking out people with the same schedules. I could easily find people traveling from my neighbourhood to downtown at the same time but we're already all taking the subway... it's the people with non-standard commutes that are currently driving and who can't easily find matches for carpooling. We should consider ourselves lucky that the modal share for transit is already so high in Toronto relative to other cities.
 
Electrify said:
I'm hoping that by the end of this summer, commuting in Toronto will be better than it has been in years. People will have gotten used to carpooling and taking transit, and it will become a standard practice in this city.

Obviously, despite the claims of people like hawc, not everyone can carpool. Not only does the spread out nature of the region reduce the ability to carpool, but companies moving towards irregular shift work further frustrates the situation, as well as puts extra strain on our public infrastructure in favour of private profits. But certainly there are a large number of commuters which could carpool, but needed a push like this to get them to consider it.
Click to expand...

The factors you note that make car pooling difficult in this area are valid and I think, honestly, the temp lanes were not designed to promote car pooling .....just leave a lane open for the games folks (which I am ok with btw)........if they wanted to promote carpooling they would have set them at 2+.....small sample anecdotal stuff here but me and a guy at my office talked about car pooling.....we don't live too too far from each other and we do have similar (although not identical) hours of work (both pretty variable but could make it work most days) and we thought "hey, let's try out car pooling during the games)....when we heard it was 3+ we said "why bother, we could never find a 3rd anyway".

I think 2+ lanes might have had a chance of getting people to try (and perhaps get used to) car pooling....but 3+ just seemed like a move to clear a lane for the games (again, I am ok with this...but they should not try to mask their intents with other words/ideas).
 
Electrify said:
Not only does the spread out nature of the region reduce the ability to carpool, but companies moving towards irregular shift work further frustrates the situation, as well as puts extra strain on our public infrastructure in favour of private profits.
Click to expand...
While making it harder for people to carpool, flex hours is commonly cited as a good capacity management technique, spreading the peak load out over a couple hours. Everyone likes to complain about Toronto's 3 hour long "rush hour"s, but imagine if all those people were trying to get to work for precisely 9am?
 
I feel like many people have been getting the message, in terms of carpooling or leaving home a bit earlier. The roads seem to be improving coming into the city. They are congested, but don't come to a complete standstill. Downtown roads seem a little lighter too. Lakeshore was practically empty yesterday at 6:30pm. Spadina was pretty empty today at 8am too.

That being said, it seems like those doing the reverse commute are not getting the message. (like myself). The Northbound DVP looks much worse than Southbound in the mornings. I'm guessing that the way our transit was built is the leading reason. Transit is centered on moving people into downtown in the AM and out in the PM, leaving many with no better option than to drive when needing to go the opposite way.
 
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