JasonParis
Moderator
I think he's referring to the branch that goes all the way to Sheppard Station.
Toronto Spadina Subway Extension Emergency Exits | ?m | 1s | TTC | IBI Group
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scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
I take it between Yonge and Downsview on a semi-occasional basis and it's always got a decent number of people on it. Not crowded, but definitely busy enough that it's not irrelevant. Far more people would take these routes using subway extensions - you can't always predict future rapid transit ridership based on the ridership of ancestral bus routes.
I'm not sure how well-attended summer school classes are at York, but there'll still be plenty of people taking the line...on a good day, the Finch West bus alone could dump as many as the university onto the line. Who knows what the NW quadrant of the city will be like in 50 years. Of course, lines must be built to accommodate maximum rush hour periods, so they'll invariably be quite a bit less busy off-peak. This is expected and not an issue.
unimaginative2
Senior Member
I agree. Finch West is the big sleeper on this line. It will undoubtedly become one of the busiest stations on the entire subway network from the day it opens. Not only is Finch West one of the busiest bus routes, but the new subway will also attract people from further west which are now riding north-south routes down to Bloor. Jane and Finch will go from as much as a 30 minute ride to the subway at rush hour to less than 5 minutes.
scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
Transit's overall share could rise by 33%, even 50%, in a short time, adding thousands more riders (and I mean, for example, going from 15% to 20% of all trips taken on transit).
ShonTron
Moderator
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Agree with you there for sure. The Keele-Finch station will be a big addition to the subway network. It won't have the loads of Finch, but it will have very respectable boarding numbers - somewhere around the range of Warden.
rpgr
Active Member
Classes aren't really that busy in the summer although if you ask me, with the increase in population, York should start thinking about year round schooling with the student deciding which 2 semesters they want as their "main".
My big problem with no connection linking East and West side stations is that it doesn't really fix the problems of those coming from the East side (aka the current Finch station) which as I said, is one of the 2 big ones. You are still stuck on that mini 2 lane road section on steeles coming from Finch station which is just a snarl to traffic.
During the busy mourning/afternoon rush hour, it would take about 40-60 min to get from Finch station to York U. During non-busy times it would take a mere 15-20 min.
Maybe it's coming from my bias that I believe we should have Finch station link up somewhere on the west side but it would solve a lot of problems in that area if it did.
My opinions of course are coloured by the time I spent in York.
With the rampant overcrowding of route 60 during normal school times and the emptiness of York in general during the summer as well as the changing demographics of society at large, the way I see things are coloured differently.
Universities should be open year round to accomodate the overcrowding. If there is a season where people should be allowed "off" it should be the Fall/Winter season so people can escape the cold and / or get jobs easier (summer jobs aren't easy to get, Xmas season jobs are).
Disparishun
Active Member
What if, instead of extending the Sheppard line straight west, it sort of jogged up to double the Yonge line, in the way that the Spadina line does at Spadina & St. George, then ran beneath Finch, or even above ground in the Hydro Corridor, to Finch West? (I know the jog bit sounds a bit hard to do, but surely there'd be a way to engineer it if it made sense.)
Excellent idea. Makes a lot of sense for York imho. And of course it would help smooth out traffic patterns a little bit...
rpgr
Active Member
To be honest, I don't care what they do exactly as long as East meets West in some viable fashion that doesn't help clog the traffic arteries!
Panzerfaust
Active Member
That would be extremely difficult if not impossible to engineer what with the current setup at Sheppard. It would involve far too much expensive construction to retrofit Sheppard-Yonge for west-north operation while still being able to stop at the station. As it stands, you'd have to skip Sheppard-Yonge, and even then I don't think there's a west-north track there to start with.
I've always thought that Sheppard should be interlined in the west with the Spadina line, possibly as far as Steeles West. That way every other Y-U-S train and every Sheppard train can be turned there, while the other half of the Y-U-S trains continue to VCC. It makes sense seeing as how capacity along the new extension in the 416 would be effectively doubled and a transfer would be eliminated for anyone going to York from the Sheppard corridor. It would also serve to relieve Yonge North to a certain degree.
Unfortunately, I don't think that volume of trains could be supported, so here is my alternate idea: Move the short-turn on Spadina to Downsview, then run every other Spadina train north to VCC while running all Sheppard trains to VCC as well. That way capacity on all parts of the Y-U-S are the same and the number of trains is manageable. Perhaps there would be slightly less capacity past Downsview, what with the lower frequencies on Sheppard, but who's to say that will stay the same with this extension?
The final problem would involve the actual physical constraints of intercepting the subway at Downsview from directly under Sheppard, then following the line. I figure that there could be a Bloor-Yonge style transfer at Downsview, then new trackage under the park that swings up to join with the Spadina tracks just before Sheppard West.
Anyway, it's just a fantasy idea of mine. The chances of it ever happening are almost nil, and I'm sure there are reasons why it could never work other than funding.
Le Gique
Active Member
in the year 2030...
when we're older, wiser and probably voting conservative, I can picture a bunch of transit geezers standing on a York University subway platform
it could be on a mid-December day, or mid-June, or the second week in September.
-will trains be running more than every five minutes in the morning peak, as they do now on the northern Spadina line, 30 years after construction?
-will anybody be riding on the line north of Steeles, on peak or off?
-will there actually be serious transit-rider-producing development anywhere along the route extension?
-if ridership is weak for substantial periods will any of those geezers admit to past wishful thinking and that maybe, just maybe, another technology might have been a better fit -- like say (heavens forbid) light rail lines that branch north and west at Finch/Keele and branch again further out?
-will some whippersnapper transit constable have to tase the aged geeks when the ItoldyousoNoyoudidn't brawl breaks out?
when we're older, wiser and probably voting conservative, I can picture a bunch of transit geezers standing on a York University subway platform
it could be on a mid-December day, or mid-June, or the second week in September.
-will trains be running more than every five minutes in the morning peak, as they do now on the northern Spadina line, 30 years after construction?
-will anybody be riding on the line north of Steeles, on peak or off?
-will there actually be serious transit-rider-producing development anywhere along the route extension?
-if ridership is weak for substantial periods will any of those geezers admit to past wishful thinking and that maybe, just maybe, another technology might have been a better fit -- like say (heavens forbid) light rail lines that branch north and west at Finch/Keele and branch again further out?
-will some whippersnapper transit constable have to tase the aged geeks when the ItoldyousoNoyoudidn't brawl breaks out?
RedRocket191
Senior Member
- I believe
- I believe
- Yes. Vaughan Corporate Centre should be at least what MCC is now.
- We might have subways doing that by then.
- No, he'll use force-field guns.
scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
What a lame argument. A streetcar line would also be used spottily enough off-peak to warrant nothing but bus service (edit - I mean the branches). Sometimes Yonge trains going south at 2pm only have 50 or 100 people on them...does that mean it's a failure? The Bloor-Danforth line has generated barely any development...is it a failure, too? Anything that's not streetcars or that doesn't need Tokyo-style crowd pushers is going to be a failure in your eyes.
unimaginative2
Senior Member
CityPlaceN1
Senior Member
Amazing how the quotes range from 1.2 to 5.6 million. Quite the gap!
DENTROBATE54
Banned
Sheppard was an errorenous project from day one in the vain of Sorbara-type monopolizing of transit finances and corporate embargo alotting certain private sector groups to coerce politicians to give this project the greenlight.
To throw one more penny of hard-to-come-by transit windfall dollars on this subway line, especially through the lowest of low-density sprawl and a technically near-impossible bridge crossing that makes the work done east of Leslie Stn. look like child's play, is a ridiculous dream, emphasis on DREAM.
It's like saying, "Oh golly, it'll take two decades for the VCC extension to be at capacity, but let's not make YUS be too greedy. We'll siphon off many of the already unsatisfactory ppd numbers on YUS via interlining the exact same area onto the one-trick-pony line, hurrah!!"
The unfortunate reality though is that indeed the east and west limbs of the YUS must be connected at some point north of the BD line, if not by multibillion dollar subways than a dependable all-day, 5-mins frequency BRT/LRT right-of-way may have to do.
Potentially yes from the influx of commuters from Ebenezer, Woodbridge, Maple, Vellore Woods, Vaughan and Concord. I don't get why people care so much about immediate density around a subway station yet so little for the many people that had to commute several kms already just to access that station. Discrimination by area code, I say.
If lengthy arterials can interact with a station directly without diverting to out of the way monster-terminals, then we should be more concerned about that and not a handful of condo-owners that might ride the subway when their car's in the shop.