King Street (Streetcar Transit Priority)

[Avenue]

I can see a separated ROW being installed on College/Carlton. A lot of the infrastructure — including centre island stops — is already in place. What’s kept it from happening is the deeply engrained curb parking.

College is way too narrow and curvy for a lot of stretches to accommodate physically separated right of way (unless you narrow the sidewalk, which would never happen because businesses businesses businesses). To the east, the switch to Gerard via Parliament is a nightmare. It has little to do with curb parking.

 

[steveintoronto]

College is way too narrow and curvy for a lot of stretches to accommodate physical right of way (unless you narrow the sidewalk, which would never happen because businesses businesses businesses). To the east, the switch to Gerard via Parliament is a nightmare. It has little to do with curb parking.

I think too many are getting intoxicated with a concept that can barely work on King. It must work on King, it's not King Street itself that demands it, it's Toronto commuters. There's no way the other streetcar routes will carry the load King does, and King deserves massive amounts of capital to make it work properly. It's like expecting an athlete to perform on rationed oxygen.

Concentrate on King, there's far more than the core that needs intense attention. A bypass for Roncesvalles and Broadview is necessary for a start for King to deliver the load at either end. This ties in with Towered's comment on College western end. A bypass (God of parkland forgive me) immediately to the west of Parkside Drive to deliver 504 streetcars to Keele would also connect the 506.. Run through for some onto the Queensway is an obvious option, but it delays delivering most of the load up to the subway. King in itself is just a start that needs far more work before being considered a success.

You can put a highway in the middle of a city, but unless it's continuous to intercept and deliver the load, it's meaningless.

I rode the 504 to Dundas West on Monday late afternoon. It was a nightmare, no faster than it ever was through the core, and then short-turned at Roncy and Queen. Needless to say, the transfer north on Roncy was charged as another Presto fare. (Don't get me started on that, I gave up trying to get through to the TTC yesterday after almost an hour on the phone with first Presto, then them). And then that streetcar hit a parked car two stops north (Galley). I had a sense TTC would charge yet again on Presto if I waited for the "shuttle bus" so I and a lot of others walked up to Bloor, well some of us, most of them couldn't walk that far.

It's a shit way to run a system, and my patience grows ever thinner. How Toronto Council think they're doing this right boggles the mind. $Billions for subways to nowhere? No problem, but a fraction of that to improve the third busiest route in Toronto? Oh, here's $1.5M, now run along sonny....

 

[Towered]

In fact, the bus replacements for streetcars do. It was very shortsighted back in the day when the Bloor streetcar loop at Keele was torn up. One escalator is left on the south side of the station, the one on the north side is long gone, and unfortunately, the access for a streetcar loop to be re-established where it was is now blocked by development on the south side.

I think it would unlock a lot of potential ridership for very low cost. Just build new tracks from Howard Park up to Bloor, which isn't far. As for development in the way of a new loop, no problem - expropriate the necessary property to the south. It's just an ugly gas station anyway. Easy.

 

[micheal_can]

I am in agreements that they need to continue to work on the King area before moving on to other areas. Make King stand as what is possible so that other parts of the city want it as well.

 

[steveintoronto]

I think it would unlock a lot of potential ridership for very low cost. Just build new tracks from Howard Park up to Bloor, which isn't far. As for development in the way of a new loop, no problem - expropriate the necessary property to the south. It's just an ugly gas station anyway. Easy.

Have you seen the traffic on Parkside in peak? It's going to have to run beside it, or under, or under and beside it, like as was done at Christie Pits. A loop could be built underground on the SW corner of Bloor and Parkside, but the investment must reflect more than just service for College, which is pretty light west of Roncy. It must serve King, it's prime raison d'être, and for the loss of parkland, it's going to have to be an 'expressway' to balance the eco lost for eco gained.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Looking back in history, we had the Yonge Street pedestrian mall. It ended because of two things: the 1974 TTC strike and opening in 1977 of the Eaton Centre.

From link.

As the mall grew from a week-long festival to something resembling a permanent closure, it also drew the ire of transportation planners. Despite organizers’ valiant efforts to make the mall work within Metro Toronto’s overall traffic plan — opening cross-streets to east-west traffic, diverting buses, deploying dozens of traffic police — officials like Commissioner of Roads and Traffic Sam Cass still viewed the mall primarily as an obstacle, not just to traffic, but to their vision of a more efficient city. Behind Cass’s yearly predictions of “chaotic traffic jams” and other dire consequences of continued closure were long-frustrated plans for downtown Yonge Street to be converted into a one-way arterial for commuter traffic.

An end — and a beginning
The growing debate over the mall’s impact on Yonge Street’s decline — was it a solution, or part of the problem? — meant that, when it was abruptly removed to help cope with the 1974 TTC strike, there was no immediate move to have it reinstalled. That year, a report contracted by the City recommended a permanent mall; but while several proposals were drawn up, including a sensible 1977 compromise option that preserved two lanes for traffic, it proved impossible to get all the various stakeholders fully onside. Similar patterns were playing out in other cities, too; it was becoming clear that small-scale pedestrian improvements weren’t the panacea for downtown problems they had appeared to be a decade earlier.

As the years passed, the heady days of the early malls started to seem like just another 1960s pipe dream. Toronto did get a mall on Yonge in 1977 — the privately-owned, air-conditioned shopping mecca of the Eaton Centre — and it was popular, although no one thought it felt like Paris, or that it would transform city life.

Even if it never lived up to the futures imagined by its most ardent supporters, the Yonge Street Mall was by no means a failure. It demonstrated just how much Torontonians could appreciate new public space, street entertainment, and a break from the usual strict separation of uses. Over the past 40 years, dozens of street festivals similar to the 1971 Yonge mall — if not the more ambitious later ones — have become an integral part of Toronto summers. Some things haven’t changed: drivers and the police still gripe, and sometimes people don’t know how to behave. But on the whole, we’ve assimilated these little shake-ups of the urban order into our vision of city life, and in that respect, the Yonge pedestrian mall of the 1970s was a beginning, not an end.

The Yonge Street pedestrian mall ended because of the automobile disciples.

 

[Towered]

Have you seen the traffic on Parkside in peak? It's going to have to run beside it, or under, or under and beside it, like as was done at Christie Pits. A loop could be built underground on the SW corner of Bloor and Parkside, but the investment must reflect more than just service for College, which is pretty light west of Roncy. It must serve King, it's prime raison d'être, and for the loss of parkland, it's going to have to be an 'expressway' to balance the eco lost for eco gained.

Building that short extension from Howard Park to Bloor underground is massive overkill and would make the costs needlessly soar.

I would also add that ridership is light west of Roncy because it doesn't go anywhere useful. That would change radically with a connection to the subway.

 

[aquateam]

Building that short extension from Howard Park to Bloor underground is massive overkill and would make the costs needlessly soar.

I would also add that ridership is light west of Roncy because it doesn't go anywhere useful. That would change radically with a connection to the subway.

Maybe a DRL station instead of a streetcar tunnel to Bloor

 

[steveintoronto]

I would also add that ridership is light west of Roncy because it doesn't go anywhere useful. That would change radically with a connection to the subway.

So where are you going to run this streetcar line without it getting fouled in traffic, or further fouling a major north-south feeder?

You could run it beside Parkside, which I can see from my window, btw, or bury it. Using lePage's white glue and sticking ideas on a map doesn't work very well. What you're more likely to end-up with is buses, not streetcars, unless, as stated prior, the King line is extended up Parkside, which has some very real challenges, but can be done...*beside the road*.

Meantime, for all those so easily satiated by their own hysterical hype, exactly what I warned of is coming to pass:

By BEN SPURR Transportation Reporter
Thu., Feb. 15, 2018

Public support for the King St. streetcar pilot has slipped, although a plurality of Toronto voters still approve of the project, according to a new poll.

The survey conducted by Forum Research earlier this month found that 42 per cent of respondents support the pilot, which aims to improve transit service on King by restricting car traffic on the street.

That’s down from a poll Forum conducted in November, shortly after the pilot began,which found 50 per cent of voters backed the experiment.

The portion of those who said they strongly approve of the pilot has also decreased, from 33 per cent in November to 24 per cent this month.

Conversely, the portion of voters who oppose the project has increased by five percentage points, from 24 per cent to 29 per cent. Those who strongly disapprove remained roughly unchanged at 17 per cent.

Just more than one-fifth said they neither approve nor disapprove. [...]

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/tr...ot-dips-after-restaurant-owners-protests.html

Jumping up and down and proclaiming how donuts can travel to Mars doesn't make the shiny coating any more nutritious. There's a hell of a lot of work yet to be done to make King a success.

 

[Streety McCarface]

So where are you going to run this streetcar line without it getting fouled in traffic, or further fouling a major north-south feeder?

You could run it beside Parkside, which I can see from my window, btw, or bury it. Using lePage's white glue and sticking ideas on a map doesn't work very well. What you're more likely to end-up with is buses, not streetcars, unless, as stated prior, the King line is extended up Parkside, which has some very real challenges, but can be done...*beside the road*.
.

You could run it through high park, potentially as far as High Park Subway station if there is absolutely no room along Parkside.

 

[steveintoronto]

You could run it through high park, potentially as far as High Park Subway station if there is absolutely no room along Parkside.

That's not going to happen. I outlined running it up *beside Parkside Dr* to Keele since intrusion onto the Park, which might not be legal by the terms of the grant of the park to the City, btw, would be minimal. And this is *NOT* going to be done purely for the sake of the College car. The only cause significant enough is for a clearway for the King car to get up to Bloor. The College car would benefit by tying into that route.

Addendum: Quick search for the City's stipulations for being warded High Park:
"18 acres (7.3 ha) of High Park was later given to Metro Transportation when The Queensway was built in the early 1950s. This was in contravention of stipulations by original High Park owner John Howard that the lands be used for parkland only. Metro officials searched for descendants of Howard to obtain their consent.[28]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Park

That would continue to be problematic, albeit a case could be made for the 'expansion' of Parkside Dr to allow a streetcar clearway. That there are remarkably few turns into the park west off of Parkside, and one would disappear altogether (the College loop, which would be traded back to the park) would bode well for a clearway being immediately to the west of Parkside, and perhaps below the grade of Parkside such that the streetcars could tunnel under the Keele and Bloor intersection and loop under Keele station and the gas station on the corner.

 

[facepalming_brooklynite]

You could run it through high park, potentially as far as High Park Subway station if there is absolutely no room along Parkside.

That's not going to happen. I outlined running it up *beside Parkside Dr* to Keele since intrusion onto the Park, which might not be legal by the terms of the grant of the park to the City, btw, would be minimal.

Also, much of the Eastern edge of High Park along Parkside Drive between Howard Park Ave and Bloor is characterized by a rather steep ravine down to Spring Creek. I doubt that tunneling is possible there. I remember a few years ago the westernmost lane of Parkside Drive was closed because part of the road had collapsed into the ravine.

 

[steveintoronto]

Also, much of the Eastern edge of High Park along Parkside Drive between Howard Park Ave and Bloor is characterized by a rather steep ravine down to Spring Creek. I doubt that tunneling is possible there. I remember a few years ago the westernmost lane of Parkside Drive was closed because part of the road had collapsed into the ravine.

There's also a very powerful aquifier under the north-east corner. Tunneling there is out of the question, albeit the aquifier is a good 50 metres or more down. It has an incredible pressure, and flow. What would have to happen is that lower than grade shelf is built along the edge of Parkside. Removal of a fair number of trees would be necessary, and few people understand, for better or worse, how High Park has already been highly mutilated. In the big scheme of things, this would only be peripheral, but an affront none-the-less, but Roncy just hasn't the room or nature to move streetcars the way needed for King to work the way it should. Ditto Broadview. The ends are very severe limitations.

 

[Towered]

Well there you go - run new tracks up Parkside itself. An inconvenience to car drivers, but so be it. Transit planning in this city has suffered from catering to them for far too long anyway.

 

[BMO]

Well there you go - run new tracks up Parkside itself. An inconvenience to car drivers, but so be it. Transit planning in this city has suffered from catering to them for far too long anyway.

Extending the line to Keele would likely be a waste, and needlessly redundant. There are no trip generators, aside from High Park itself, between Roncesvalles and Bloor via Howard Park and the low-density development makes it very difficult to justify. You could easily access High Park quicker by connecting to Line 2. You'd be better off putting any money on enhancing the connection between College Street to Dundas West Station to be able to accommodate more streetcars so that the 506 can terminate there.