You do realize that most of those neighbourhoods could be equally well served by a King alignment through the core (and Queen in the east end). Moreover, only a hand full of your list come even half way to what's going on at CityPlace.
King and Queen are already overcapacity and cannot even be put into dedicated ROWs since there is no room, and have far lower capacity compared to the waterfront lines proposed as a result. As a relief line, the priority should be about servicing the existing areas more than the new areas. While King is clearly the most urgent, and has (by a wide margin) more development, Queen should not be considered insignificant either. The sum of all these innercity neighbourhoods along with gentrification potential in downtown's Ontario Housing communities, could easily trump the demand level for mass transit that Cityplace would.
Lest we forget, Spadina is walking distance from both the Central Business District and Union Stn; has a very frequently ran streetcar route at its doorstep today; and will soon have new Breemer-Front West LRV and LRT routes running through this communities. Combined headways during rush hour for the 509/510/513/515 and WWLRT could be as frequent as every minute. And best of all the spacing of stops will be closeknit, which is of most convenience to local pedestrians.
And if the argument that you and Northern Magnus bring up about "potential" is to be applied fairly, then what about your list? Corktown is still a work in progress. Ditto for Regent Park. And the latter is even more of a work in progress than CityPlace.
I could list out literally dozens of condominium/loft infill projects mentioned on this very website that are either recently completed or are under construction as we speak. This is all going on in spite of not being promised a new subway. Add up the demand for mass transit that these new communities will place on a system already choking with too many riders through the innercity, and then explain to me where ultimately is in a worse position, today and 25 years from now?
Cityplace is only one neighbourhood. Once it is built it's history. Whether it actually generates enough transit-oriented commuter traffic to the levels worth sustaining a subway line through it remains to be seen. The downtown core as a whole needs rapid transit, not just the southernmost periphery. Also is it not obvious that anyone desiring points off central Dundas (e.g Chinatown or Regent Park) may opt to walk it down to a Queen Line as well? They likely would not were the alignment anymore to the south. That's the vantage point Queen has over a Wellington/Front/CNR alignment; a wider catchment net of potential riders.
Improbable based on what? If the city feels it necessary to build a LRT for Waterfront West instead of prioritizing improvements for the downtown streetcars, it's obvious where the planners think the demand is.
The demand speaks for itself. 501 Queen- 43,500; 505 Dundas- 35,200; 506 Carlton- 41,200; 504/508 King- 53,100. Roughly two-thirds of these routes' ridership stems from the innercity. We could also throw in the north-south feeder routes which number in the tens of thousands on-board per route everyday.
I am not going to suggest that what you are saying is patently untrue. But I would definitely not resort to rhetorical terms like "improbable" without the evidence to back it up.
The only credible evidence we should be citing is that which indicates what transit use conditions are now, and not what they could be based on computed algorithms. This is the same issue I have with the RHC proposal.
Lastly on this point, just as it would be fair to consider the impact of a Queen subway on other streetcar lines like King, the reverse is also true. A line that intersects Queen twice is likely to significantly relieve Queen. Who would take a streetcar all the way to Yonge or University when half way through your ride you can catch a subway that'll get you there in minutes.
This I agree with, except to say some may want to avoid the hassle of a transfer if both streetcar and DRL and destined for the same place. Fare integration on the GO coupled with 5-minute headways coming to the Georgetown and Lakeshore corridors could also do the same job of intersecting Queen twice as a CNR alignment would. As a Relief Line, the priority should be to follow as closely as possible the corridor or corridors that are not capable of meeting the demand levels today. Duplicating GO Transit service with a local subway through the same corridor(s) doesn't introduce improved transit to neglected preexisting choke points in the system.
The fact that there's a bunch of LRT/streetcar routes servicing those areas means there's sufficient demand for transit there. One could argue it's far more efficient to service that much demand with a subway stop instead of three streetcar routes.
And here's where you've lost me. Kilometre apart spaced subway stations are less pedestrian friendly than a streetcar stopping every 300 metres.
It's always an assumption that it's all about the waterfront. It's not. That's where all the new growth is to be sure. But there are other reasons to choose the other corridors. For example, my support of King, Adelaide or Wellington is based on current ridership on King and lack of capacity at Union. It's also important for me that the target market (commuters from Scarborough and East York) be able to access stations south of the DRL with less stops than the combination of Bloor-Danforth and YUS, because that'll have yield the speed to make the line attractive.
Like I said earlier, the DRL I'd advocate for is only 7 stops from Pape-Union. That it necessarily has to follow the CNR alignment in order to achieve this is where I disagree. A fan-shaped DRL swinging up several streets en route to the Bloor-Danforth introduces mass transit to far more priorty communities than the CNR ROW alone could. Think about it, only the Portlands is really excluded from the catchment of a more northerly aligned DRL (West Don Lands in fact extends upto Queen & River Sts). St Lawrence, Distillery and Riverside would all have common stops to both proposals.
But then you'd tack on a 5 min walk for them which could be quite tedious in the Winter. Given that most of the ridership on YUS is bound for King, St.Andrew and Union, wouldn't it make sense in your example to actually send them straight there. What could be better than sending riders straight to King and Bay?
So what's wrong with them walking south via the climate-controlled PATH network? A hypothetical Queen-Bay Station takes into account that the CBD isn't the be-all/end-all of desirable hot-spots within downtown. City Hall, Eaton Centre, the Opera House plus interchanges with Osgoode & Queen Stns are valid reasons to support such a stop location.
While I don't support a rail corridor alignment, I'll call BS on this scaremongering. Even the TTC has not raised red flags about the technical risk of such an alignment. It was infill decades ago, since then the YUS line and the TTC streetcar have been in operation without significant hiccups. And they were built to significantly lower engineering standards than what's demanded today. Have there been tunnels collapsing or electrical surges, etc? Lastly on this point, subways are built through bedrock. They aren't built through top soil. That it's infill won't matter when you are tunneling below the infill.
Tunneling through a natural aquifer is more costly. Most of the land around the rail corridor southwards is fill, there is no base rock til several metres down literally at water table level. And beneath Wellington there's a matrix of parking structures and building foundations to contend with. King's even worse in this regard. All the elevation drops and sloping the subway right-of-way would have to make to get through this area is engineerially difficult and very expensive. You could not build a St Lawrence Stn if the line had to directly stop at Union, and worse still, mitigating all the railway properties east of Parliament would mean having to tunnel underneath them deep, under the Don River basin deep!
Queen with its typically low- to mid-rise structures lack these significant subsurface obstacles. It's not scaremongering BS to point out these basic elements of the topography of where we're planning to build these things; and why there are factually-based reasons to critically oppose a CNR alignment that transcends my bias.
