Here we go again. People's destination isn't just their next bus connection. Aga Khan is beside a nighghbourhood. Hakimi Lebovic is surrounded by shops and is a pretty popular location. Ionview is needed because there is no stop at Kennedy itself. Kennedy station is a few hundred more meters to the east. TTC already determine they'll need to run parallel bus service if stops are 1km apart. O'Connor and Pharmacy are however too close together and should be combined. Having stops every 400-500m will also bring in more development and is built into the plan back in Transit City. They consider development potential as an important factor to having stop there and still doing the same with the Eglinton west extension. In other words, it's not useless cause it doesn't connect to a bus. In that case Chester Station and North York Centre would be consider useless with no bus connection (the 97C parallel service with 30 min frequency doesn't really count).
I don't understand the fear about running a parallel bus service. There are additional costs associated with having more stops, since the end to end travel time is longer (more operators and vehicles required to operate the same level of service when it is slower). The line also becomes much less useful for people who aren't travelling from points on the line to somewhere else on the line as it slows down anyone trying to connect to or from points outside of the line.
As for development potential, that speaks to the criticism that many people have for transit city: it is meant as an urban planning project rather than a transportation project. Transit city was meant to be complementary to the "Avenues" city plan, which concentrates population growth in midrise development along noisy high traffic corridors, in order to insulate neighbourhoods of detached homes from density or change and push new residents into less desirable areas.
The downtown U, Paris, London, Berlin and NYC all have stops that are less than 400m. First, we'll start by removing Bay, Museum, St Patrick, St Andrew, King, Dundas an Wellesley cause they are too close to other stations. While at it, they should remove Spadina Station too cause it's just 300m from St George.
I doubt the Yonge line would be designed with that stop spacing if it were built today. Although those stops you mention all connect to high-ridership surface routes (except maybe Museum) and have population/job densities far higher than what we will ever see on Eglinton East.
Wait, what's this I see in the original EA before Metrolinx intervene with everything?
http://thecrosstown.ca/sites/defaul...t-description-plates-plates-46-89.pdf#page=40
Metrolinx wanted to remove the stop and the residents fought for their stop back. It's not going to be a major stop but it is 500m away from Don Mills not 150m (Tweedsmuir) or 300m (Sussex). A stop like these does save people a trip down a long flight of stairs. I agree this would be one of the least used the stop in the east end.
If we are designing rapid transit to save people from having to take stairs, then we are not designing it correctly.
I'm not sure if the city is being cheap by building less stations. I'm not sure if a faster line would draw more people away from using the Yonge line.
A faster line would draw more ridership, but that would worsen loading on the Yonge line, since people who used to bus down to Bloor (and transfer south at Yonge/Bloor) would now take the Eglinton LRT to Eglinton and ride the Yonge line south.
It's 300m....if you are on Eglinton. And if you're not, then you have that much further to walk to get to a stop.
Also, the stops will be upon request. If there is no one there or no one needs to step off of the vehicle, it just keeps going through at speed.
Dan
Toronto, Ont.
For rapid transit, each stop should be well-used enough that there's no need to "request" a stop. People are willing to walk to walk much further than 500m for a service that is fast and reliable. Most people along Queen/Dundas/any streetcar line walk rather than wait at a stop, because walking is more reliable and because they can just catch a streetcar/bus if it overtakes them.
Let's not remember transit city was designed more for locals to access better service and not someone elsewhere to zoom past the corridor. It was never intended that riders should use it from Kennedy to get downtown via Eglinton Station. Easily walkable to you doesn't mean easily walker to someone in a cane. Even with the current spacing, there will be a lot of complaints from seniors about their local stop being removed. As the population ages, there will be more support for a system that works with seniors.
A city's transit system has to balance two competing but complementary goals, ridership and coverage. Ridership is maximized by traveling in straight lines with few stops at high frequency. Coverage is maximized with curvy milk runs, but requires sacrificing frequency to travel further/stop more with the same resources. A high capacity, expensive, tunneled line is best used for capturing ridership than achieving coverage for those with special needs.
We are spending billions of dollars to tunnel the majority of its length through Eglinton to speed it up. It is schizophrenic to have it try to occupy both the role of rapid transit and of local bus.
It's also important to think of Eglinton in the context of a *system* rather than just a single line. For anyone connecting via Eglinton, their trip times will be reduced, and journeys that took too long before will now be acceptable. We should be trying to maximize the number of jobs/people within the transit isochrone map.
Transit city had some good ideas. It was trying to blanket the city in low-cost, reliable transit, rather than focus on a few ultra-high capacity, piecemeal subway extensions every generation. But in the current context of the Eglinton LRT, with 10km of tunnels and as the only other cross-town rapid transit line, it needs to be revisited from the original concept.
I'd like to see more of a focus on developing transit-only lanes in other corridors (Steeles, Wilson, Islington, Lawrence, Finch-East, Sheppard-East, Don-Mills) as a precursor to LRT. We've kept the remnants of Transit City's projects, but lost the philosophy of developing ridership by improving the highest-use bus lines (either through priority measures or conversion to LRT).
Second, TTC also already concluded that removing the midblock stops won't improve speed as much as the subway. Unless it's grade separated, they'll still be caught at lights. Regarding request stops, I believe the lights would be sync and timed expecting them to stop at all stops during most of the day. Not stopping at the stop would just result in the trains stopped at the next light. The real benefit would come at lower traffic times where they can keep the lights green at midblocks.
Synchronization of the lights for the LRT is something that I would think is a no-brainer normally, but after looking at Spadina and St. Clair I think it's pie-in-the-sky unrealistic to expect anything resembling that.
