Dan416
Senior Member
I don't have much care about the particular alignment of the DRL. My only requirement is that it have a St. George-style transfer at Union with YUS.
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"Downtown Core Line" - Possible Alignments?
- Thread starter Whoaccio
- Start date
Ervin
Active Member
I think the primary reason why people go for Pape is because it's a good spot to extend it further north. Other than that it really doesn't matter much, except that the further east you push it the more expensive it becomes, and it may cause everybody to just use the DRL, abandoning the Bloor line. I'm also surprised by the number of people who insist that it have stops between the Bloor line and Don River. Can anybody justify it?
The reason I think it should be on Front street is because it is the most crowded street on the east side of downtown (especially at Jarvis and the future Don Lands where there is almost no service at all yet), and it lacks a street car. This would give the line a use beyond just being a relief line, it could bring in new ridership. Some people on other threads made good points on that the reason the city has been so weary about building the DRL is that it does not really bring in new ridership, this it does not pay for it self. This could help with that issue since it brings high capacity service to places that previously lacked in service, thus making reliance on public transport more viable.
I think you should keep in mind that the DRL isn't mean to replace the Bloor-Yonge transfer, it's just meant to be an alternative to people working at the southern end of downtown in order to relieve the congestion up north. I also don't really get your logic in using Richmond. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your only justification seems to be that with Richmond, the road closures would be less bothersome, which to me seems to lack foresight. The subway is after all an expensive investment, and road closures are a small price to pay. Unless of course you're suggesting that there should not be any stops on the DRL at all between the Bloor line and downtown, which is a good argument to make, but I still disagree on the grounds that it's a waste of valuable subway track.
The reason I think it should be on Front street is because it is the most crowded street on the east side of downtown (especially at Jarvis and the future Don Lands where there is almost no service at all yet), and it lacks a street car. This would give the line a use beyond just being a relief line, it could bring in new ridership. Some people on other threads made good points on that the reason the city has been so weary about building the DRL is that it does not really bring in new ridership, this it does not pay for it self. This could help with that issue since it brings high capacity service to places that previously lacked in service, thus making reliance on public transport more viable.
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LowerBay
Active Member
It's impossible to put a subway under King with the PATH system there. Are all you geeks good at is drawing lines on a map? Your best bet for a DRL is a short parallel line under Church St. from Bloor to Union with all the same stops that Yonge has, OR, a southerly extension of the Spadina subway under Spadina Av. (south of Bloor) to Union. By permanently uncoupling Spadina from University-Yonge, St. George will revert back to being a terminus and the University line can once again serve its original purpose as the DRL. Or, with ATO, the Avenue Road Y could be put back into service using the 3-branch system that ran in the 60s if Spadina is uncoupled. That would take Bloor-Danforth passengers directly downtown and YU and S passengers would still have direct downtown connections.
All of this talk about a wide sweeping DRL from the east and west simply will not happen in our lifetimes, so there's no point even talking about it. When we decided to keep streetcars back in '72, we effectively killed the Queen (DRL) subway. I won't get into the reasons why we kept them, but let's just say that a bunch of railfans at the time (who suffered from arrested development) couldn't part ways with the DING DING DING goes the trolley, RING RING RING goes the bell ...
All of this talk about a wide sweeping DRL from the east and west simply will not happen in our lifetimes, so there's no point even talking about it. When we decided to keep streetcars back in '72, we effectively killed the Queen (DRL) subway. I won't get into the reasons why we kept them, but let's just say that a bunch of railfans at the time (who suffered from arrested development) couldn't part ways with the DING DING DING goes the trolley, RING RING RING goes the bell ...
leopetr
Active Member
Why would we want to make Union into an even busier station? Union is already getting a second platform to handle existing transfer loads. If we also make it the transfer point between Yonge-University and the DRL, it will need a third platform and I think there might not be any room for one.
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Here's the best DRL alignment through the east side, IMO.
View attachment 4040
Going up to Wellington allows for a station just north of Union, making an easy connection between King and Union station as one station. Further west, there'd be a station at Simcoe St. with an easy connection with St. Andrew station. In the East, there would be a station right on Front St before Jarvis, to get right under the St. Lawrence market. Then's a station set between Trinity and Cherry, to serve the Distillery District and the Cherry streetcar/LRT. After that, it'd connect back with the Rail Corridor.
I'm sure I somehow messed up in embedding that image... I'm learning.
EDIT: If I could be enlightened as to how I might fix my image, it'd be greatly appreciated
I second this! Pretty much identical to the alignment I used in Move Toronto.
M II A II R II K
Senior Member
What about a Castle Frank connection and going up that Bayview highway route.
Dan416
Senior Member
The question is why wouldn't we want Union to be busier? It's not the busiest station. And what do you mean by a third platform? A DRL station at Union underneath the current station could be built such that it'd be a large central platform with connections to both the current available platform and the one 'under construction'. St. George is a busy interchange station and it makes do with "two" platforms stacked on top of one another. It's my favourite transfer station and it is my wish that Union be built in such a manner.
reaperexpress
Senior Member
As an alignment, I agree that it would be great to have it go to Union, but I have some concerns about the practical aspects. Mainly, that building the station would be IMMENSELY expensive. I don't know much about construction but that doesn't look like an easy project. The water table is pretty high in the area, and it would also be difficult to build the new station under the existing one.
I think the wellington alignment with either 2 or 3 stations in the CBD would be a good compromise. It would split the demand for people going to University or Yonge between two stations, so it wouldn't need as much capacity. But most importantly, it wouldn't be as expensive to build. If the 3 station option is chosen, they don't really need to make a fare paid tunnel from DRL Union to YUS Union because people could transfer at St. Andrew or King. And by that point, the streetcars would probably be POP so the fare-paid zones would not help anyway.
That's something else that I've been toying around with in my head. Dig it under Parliament, connect to Castle Frank (probably one of the easier stations to rebuild, and if you shut it down for a while not that many people would complain). Kind of a mirror image of the University-Spadina subway.
Another thing that I've been toying around with is the idea of separating the Yonge subway from the University-Spadina subway. The Yonge subway would end at Union (as it originally did), and the University-Spadina subway would connect with the DRL east, forming a wider, more symmetrical U around the Yonge line. So it would pretty much be a weird shaped U with a line down the middle of it.
This would allow the Yonge and DRL-Spadina subways to operate on different frequencies. There is a fairly large discrepency in demand between the two branches of YUS. This would allow them to operate more independently, and would allow for the DRL-Spadina line to operate on the same frequency, considering they would have roughly the same usage (nearly the same distance from Yonge at nearly every point along the line for each branch).
CDL.TO
Moderator
I know it's obvious, but Union is a busy station because a lot of people want to get there. It's technically the third-busiest station, but once you remove transferring passengers at Bloor-Yonge and St. George, it's clear that it's actually the busiest station in the system. It's unfortunate that back in the 50s that the TTC failed to design for future crowds, but that's not a very good justification for making people go out of their way when the station could be rebuilt to handle larger volumes. Minimizing the number of transfers people have to make will also reduce congestion when you look at it with a system-wide perspective.
That said, I don't think people should get too emotional about this topic. After all, it's only about a 7 minute walk from Queen to Front.
That said, I don't think people should get too emotional about this topic. After all, it's only about a 7 minute walk from Queen to Front.
And with the majority of the people using Union still walking that block or two north afterwards anyway, what's the reason why it needs to be directly underneath Union? Why not put the new station closer to their destination, instead of making them walk that extra bit? It's not like Union is going to be a major subway transfer node anyways. It's so close to the majority of people's destinations, it would be faster to just walk there than transfer trains to get there.
Transfer stations are only really used when the transfer utility is a more efficient way to get there than by foot. If the Financial District was centred around Bloor-Yonge, there wouldn't be nearly as many transfers AT Bloor-Yonge as there are today. But it isn't, and it's still more time efficient for people to transfer trains to get to the CBD than to walk. If the CBD was centred at Wellesley and Yonge, a lot more people would just say 'screw it, I'll walk from here'.
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Second_in_pie
Senior Member
I've toyed around with a Sherbourne or Parliament subway too (but in this case as an extension of a Portlands/Leslie Spit dream subway,) and I'm still torn. A Parliament subway would be great for that part of downtown (downtown by my definition.) But I don't think it'd have the right Downtown Relieving capacity that the sweeping Front/Pape DRL would have.. I'd like to see it happen, but in 50 years when we're looking at what areas would be good with a subway (versus what needs a subway.) That also fulfills my criteria of encouraging downtown development without sucking development potential out of the suburbs
Theoretically it would have more. It would have a higher density along the route, and the closer the transfer station is to Bloor-Yonge, the more people the line has picked up on the way to Bloor-Yonge. If the DRL were to go to Pape instead (which I still think it should, I'm just arguing the counter-point here), people who get on at Chester, Broadview, Castle Frank, or Sherbourne would have to backtrack in order to get to the DRL. If the DRL went to Castle Frank, only people at Sherbourne would need to backtrack. So that's an extra couple thousand riders over the course of rush hour that would have more convenient access to the DRL.
M II A II R II K
Senior Member
Yea it would be more beneficial if the Union Station platform was like the new Sheppard/Yonge platform.
Fresh Start
Banned
^^ Pape's close enough. Remember that the east-west segment of the DRL is important too. By closing the loop off too early, we're creating longer commute times aboard the streetcars in order to intercept the DRL. This is why I don't like the rail corridor alignment for the outer arms of the route, as that'll miss heading off feeder traffic from Parkdale/Swansea/South Etobicoke and Leslieville/Beaches/Southwest Scarborough.
The only relief line that makes sense is south along Spadina. Break apart S from YU and have train run straight down that corridor to Union with stops at Harbord, College, Dundas, Adelaide, Skydome en route. Then what of the University Line? Reopen the wye between Museum and Lower Bay such that one-seat trips from Kennedy to Finch (west-south-north - counterclockwise) and vice-versa (clockwise/south-north-east) would be possible.
The only relief line that makes sense is south along Spadina. Break apart S from YU and have train run straight down that corridor to Union with stops at Harbord, College, Dundas, Adelaide, Skydome en route. Then what of the University Line? Reopen the wye between Museum and Lower Bay such that one-seat trips from Kennedy to Finch (west-south-north - counterclockwise) and vice-versa (clockwise/south-north-east) would be possible.