So your logic is "not many people at 12:30am will use it, therefore it isn't worth building"? Pretty sure that an LRT along Finch at 12:30am would be just as empty...
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Finch Avenue West: Opportunities for Improved Bus Service
- Thread starter W. K. Lis
- Start date
So your logic is "not many people at 12:30am will use it, therefore it isn't worth building"? Pretty sure that an LRT along Finch at 12:30am would be just as empty...
Sure there can be. It's called building a parallel express route. If you take 30-50% of the riders currently using Finch off of Finch, you've freed up capacity. You can keep the same number of stops on Finch proper, but create a separate route for those wanting to bypass all those stops.
But I do agree that artics are needed along Finch regardless.
Justin10000
Banned
A hydro corridor is pretty desolate with nothing around it. How will it be an attractive destination for riders?
Electrify
Senior Member
You know, all this talk about "duplicate service" got me thinking. Besides for a 2km stretch west of Yonge St. with the 125 Drewery bus, there is no west-east service between Finch and Steeles. This means those who are mid-block either have to walk up to a kilometer to access these routes. Even if a BRT along the hydro corridor stopped at the few local streets which cross this stretch (Alness, Sentinel, Tobermory, Norfinch), it would still improve transit access greatly in these areas.
M II A II R II K
Senior Member
The Hydro corridor could be used as a Commuter Rail corridor, so it doesn't matter so much what's around it since it would be more for long distance travel.
nfitz
Superstar
What's the advantage to moving commuter rail there from the east-west line they've been planning for decades just north of Steeles?
M II A II R II K
Senior Member
Why decades....
nfitz
Superstar
Why decades?? Because this is Toronto and we plan all these lines without ever building them. Every new leader that comes to power cancels what his predecessor was doing. In this case it was cancelled by Premier Miller as soon as he came into office to replace Premier Davis. Though Premier Peterson also chose to keep the project dead.
I have no doubt that Hudak would kill Eglinton if he were elected - simply because that's the tradition.
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denfromoakvillemilton
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Then again, the LRT would look nice.
denfromoakvillemilton
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Sad really. This city has so much potential and we keep screwing up.
It's not meant to be a destination, it's meant to be a rapid way to get across the city. It's a line connecting a series of nodes. And look at the employment map that was posted on the last page, quite a few of those large circles are within walking distance of the hydro corridor.
I think commuter rail would be overkill. Part of the reason it would work well as a BRT is because:
a) Buses could hop on and off the roadway whenever they want. Think about it, a bus runs local in a neighbourhood, and then runs express to Finch West station via the Hydro Corridor Busway.
b) The BRT can be built incrementally. You start off with a simple roadway with at-grade intersections. No overpasses, no underpasses, no elaborate stations. Bare bones, relatively low capital cost. After a couple years of operation, you determine where the 'problem spots' are. Locations where the at-grade interesections are creating a choke-point for buses (or for cars on the N-S road). Locations where larger stations are needed, etc. You do an overpass here, an underpass there, a new larger station there. None of these upgrades would be a significant capital expenditure, yet incrementally the line would be upgraded to a fully grade-separated busway.
You can't do this with LRT, not without causing significant disruptions to the service. When building a BRT underpass, you re-route the road temporarily 10m further south, build the underpass, and then rip up the temporary road.
EDIT: For those who say the incremental strategy is not a good idea, I will give you the example of the Southwest Transitway extension in Ottawa. When Fallowfield station was built in the late 90s, it was the southwest terminus of the Transitway. It had no rapid transit connection to it at all (seriously, the bus lanes to connect it to the rest of the Transitway wern't even there). It was a bare bones station with a Park N Ride. It wasn't until the mid 2000s that the Southwest Transitway extension was built, which connected it to the rest of the Transitway using a dedicated ROW directly beside Woodroffe through the Greenbelt.
The Transitway has since recently been extended to Barrhaven Town Centre, so the station was rebuilt with a more favourable alignment as a thru-station as opposed to a terminus. The Transitway crosses Fallowfield Rd at-grade en route to Barrhaven Town Centre. The Transitway (and the station) was designed with eventual grade-separation in mind. The station has been placed far enough back from the road to allow for a sufficiently smooth grade change to pass under Fallowfield Rd. In this case, the at-grade configuration is a temporary arrangement until the funds and demand for grade-separation are there. If the line is designed with grade-separation in mind, it can be done relatively smoothly.
Also, they recently did an underpass underneath Strandherd Rd, which caused some minor distruptions, but the road was open nearly the entire time (only closed periodically at night). So the impacts of grade-separation on the road you're separating from can be minimized as well.
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BoAd
BoAd
Issue for using the hydro corridor: Spanning the G. Ross Lord Reservoir. There's no way to do it (or even do the studies) without spilling boatloads of gravy.
Run it along Finch West for a block or so along curbside lanes. Just east of the subdivision next to the resevoir, there's a small hydro corridor that runs N-S into the main hydro corridor. Use that to connect back up to the main E-W corridor. It may slow the route down a little bit, but it'll save boatloads of gravy (as you put it). Ottawa does this all the time. The Transitway flips back and forth between curbside lanes and dedicated ROWs all over the place, even in the suburbs. You do whatever is easiest and cheapest first, and then you do incremental upgrades as they become needed.
It could be that 10 years after opening they find out that they really do need to span the resevoir, in which case they start doing studies to bridge it. Meanwhile, the busway still runs normal operations. It's a lot easier to address these issues individually afterwards (when they don't attract much public attention), then it is to fit everything into the original proposal.
Oh and PS: 2km of the Hydro Corridor Busway is already built. So we'd have a 2km head start.