Finch West Line 6 LRT

[Westey]

I'd like to set the record straight on this.

The intention was to pillage the Finch West LRT funds for his Sheppard Subway extension. In no way was a future Finch West subway going to happen even if they got the votes. In fact Rob Ford only added the BRT-Lite proposal (that came before the Finch vote) because of the high ridership numbers on Finch. His original draft/plan was going to neglect Finch outright. Changing to BRT-Lite still freed up some money to throw in his Sheppard plan while retaining his anti-surface rail policy. And his anti-surface rail policy came from his belief that LRT vehciles were going to be interfering with traffic on Finch just like on Queen - it had nothing to do about transit speed or operations.

Rob Ford didn't want LRT interfering with traffic.
Transit enthusiast from a decade ago thought it was more important to have LRT interfere with traffic than for LRT run free from interference from traffic.
If someone would have said - hey Rob, how about building elevated for same price as on-street, he may have supported it.
No doubt, Ford didn't know what to do but he knew what was planned - what we have now - was not going to work and may as well punt the ball by a decade or two until something better is proposed.
(I suspect in Fords mind he thought subway may be warranted, by demand and not just politically, by that time).
I think Ford had the best proposal for Finch of anyone (if we call the talk of subway just rhetoric).

 

[Burnt creek]

Says the guy who wonders why a line using LRVs is called an LRT.

Sorry, I am not sure what you are getting at. I am not sure what I said about LRV, you might be thinking of another post by someone else. Maybe we clarify this at the next TFC game in march

 

[christine]

No doubt, Ford didn't know what to do but he knew what was planned - what we have now - was not going to work and may as well punt the ball by a decade or two until something better is proposed.
(I suspect in Fords mind he thought subway may be warranted, by demand and not just politically, by that time).
I think Ford had the best proposal for Finch of anyone (if we call the talk of subway just rhetoric).

You are mistaken and are giving him more credit than he deserves. Rob Ford didn't care about ridership numbers when he came up with the subway idea. Remember, he originally had nothing planned for Finch, then BRT-Lite and then all of a sudden a full subway line in a span of months. That kind of decision making is not evidence-based. His plans ignored studies from city staff, experts, the province and consultants.

Even if all the stars were aligned back then and an unsubstantiated decision was made to go ahead with a Finch Subway, you're overbuilding at the expense of other areas of the city that desperately need transit improvements. There is no infinite money glitch for transit plans.

 

[drum118]

Dec 7
Finally got around doing the videos for opening day

 

[ThenWhat]

Then why is it called an LRT? […]

Because "LRT" sounds so cool and modern. "Streetcar" is such an old fashioned and 20th century word. Who is going to invest in building a streetcar line?

And by the way the "R" in LRT stands for "rail", not for " rapid", in common usage. This in spite of what you find in various promotional materials.

 

[urbanclient]

Line 6 is not only slower than the 36 bus, it is also slower than the 41 + 996 TTC bus. It has also been calculated to be slower than taking Line 1 to Highway 407 station and taking the new 40M GO bus starting January 3, 2026. The upper range of the trip times on Line 6 (10.3 km) are exceeding Line 1 Vaughan to Finch (38.4 km) times, which is ridiculous.

We raced TTC's Line 6 on a bus and it was so slow we had time to stop for a snack

Toronto's newest transit line debuted on Dec. 7 to brutally bad reviews, and it seems that even a few weeks into service, the TTC has not ironed out …

www.blogto.com

To whom it may concern: only in North America are these called LRVs and LRT. In Europe this would be considered a street-running tram, which is directly analogous to a Toronto streetcar. Fighting over semantics just shows you've never set foot outside the continent. Line 6 is in every way a streetcar. LRTs even in the United States often have stronger grade-separation for most, if not all of its routing. Conversely, LRTs in Asia are virtually all light metros. See Kelana Jaya line in Malaysia and my metro vs. tram post below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelana_Jaya_line

I'd like to set the record straight on this.

The intention was to pillage the Finch West LRT funds for his Sheppard Subway extension. In no way was a future Finch West subway going to happen even if they got the votes. In fact Rob Ford only added the BRT-Lite proposal (that came before the Finch vote) because of the high ridership numbers on Finch. His original draft/plan was going to neglect Finch outright. Changing to BRT-Lite still freed up some money to throw in his Sheppard plan while retaining his anti-surface rail policy. And his anti-surface rail policy came from his belief that LRT vehciles were going to be interfering with traffic on Finch just like on Queen - it had nothing to do about transit speed or operations.

And pillaging funds for the Sheppard Subway extension would have been the right thing to do. I will die on this hill that Finch West did not deserve an LRT before transit improvements were made along other denser, more deserving corridors. A competent transit plan would have prioritized the many over the few. And while trying to help the few over the many, Line 6 ends up doing neither.

 

[A 6264]

And by the way the "R" in LRT stands for "rail", not for " rapid", in common usage.

Just took a look at what Wikipedia has to say about this. You're right, they have a page titled Light Rail, which says it's the same thing as LRT. Their pages for Toronto lines 5 and 6 identify them as light rail.
However, their article on line 3 Scarborough RT identifies it as "light rapid transit" in the infobox, and the phrase links to a page titled Medium-capacity rail system, which "typically resembles a rapid transit system", but doesn't have the word rapid in the label. Hmmm..... Further down the article it does say RT in the name, stands for Rapid Transit.
As for the Ontario line, they call it rapid transit (with 4 citations!) and avoid the LRT abbreviation. The page for Rapid Transit says the term includes MRT mass rapid transit, and RRT rail rapid transit.
Yes, I know Wikipedia is not an authority. But I'm willing to bet their choice of terms has been challenged in the past, and a concensus was reached, undoubtably with input from people on this forum. (But not me!)
But that may not be applicable to the Ontario Line, which could change status when it's actually built.

 

[urbanclient]

Just took a look at what Wikipedia has to say about this. You're right, they have a page titled Light Rail, which says it's the same thing as LRT. Their pages for Toronto lines 5 and 6 identify them as light rail.
However, their article on line 3 Scarborough RT identifies it as "light rapid transit" in the infobox, and the phrase links to a page titled Medium-capacity rail system, which "typically resembles a rapid transit system", but doesn't have the word rapid in the label. Hmmm..... Further down the article it does say RT in the name, stands for Rapid Transit.
As for the Ontario line, they call it rapid transit (with 4 citations!) and avoid the LRT abbreviation. The page for Rapid Transit says the term includes MRT mass rapid transit, and RRT rail rapid transit.
Yes, I know Wikipedia is not an authority. But I'm willing to bet their choice of terms has been challenged in the past, and a concensus was reached, undoubtably with input from people on this forum. (But not me!)
But that may not be applicable to the Ontario Line, which could change status when it's actually built.

This is already a polite way to put it: "Fighting over semantics just shows you've never set foot outside the continent." In essence: this debate is pointless and indicates ignorance of not just foreign terminology, but what a metro/subway even is. If people here actually put in the time to look into what these transit mode terms actually mean beyond just skimming, there wouldn't be these pointless "uMmM aCkTuaLY Line 6 uses LRVs so it must be an LRT" debates.

The Ontario Line will run with 3 metre wide, high floor trains. That alone makes it a full metro, rather than light metro or the North American tram "LRT". Only rolling stock with widths below 2.8 metres could be called light metro, and even then Montreal and Paris are notable exceptions. The Calgary and Edmonton systems that run on dedicated ROWs for portions would be analogous to Paris' tram-trains. Line 6 and the streetcars would be called trams in Europe (and the rest of the world).

"LRT" outside of Asia, is just a made-up North American term because apparently we didn't want to use the word "tram". LRTs just means light metro in Asia because "light rail" is the best translation of "light metro" in many Asian languages. Metro is short for metropolitan railway, and nobody literally calls it a "metropolitan" railway in Asia.

There are just two modes of local rail transit nowadays: metros and trams, everything else can be considered a variation of those two. And virtually noone is thinking of the distinction between metro and light metro besides forum dwellers. The older Beijing airport line technically uses light metro Innovia ART 200 rolling stock, but nobody goes around calling it "light" anything. It's just an express metro line that happens to serve the airport. For people in Copenhagen, their light metro system is just the "metro". If it ain't a metro, it's a tram. A stadtbahn is just an upgraded tram line, if upgraded at all. An LRT is just a tram line.

 

[jmi22]

I'd like to set the record straight on this.

The intention was to pillage the Finch West LRT funds for his Sheppard Subway extension. In no way was a future Finch West subway going to happen even if they got the votes. In fact Rob Ford only added the BRT-Lite proposal (that came before the Finch vote) because of the high ridership numbers on Finch. His original draft/plan was going to neglect Finch outright. Changing to BRT-Lite still freed up some money to throw in his Sheppard plan while retaining his anti-surface rail policy. And his anti-surface rail policy came from his belief that LRT vehciles were going to be interfering with traffic on Finch just like on Queen - it had nothing to do about transit speed or operations.

If you flip the concern over LRT's meeting cars at grade and thus slowing vehicular traffic, to see it as cars meeting LRT at grade and thus slowing transit operations (i.e having to stop at intersections), Ford and Mammo's concerns were quite explicitly about slow travel speeds, they just emphasized the impact a street running line would have on a different road user than you would typically emphasize.

For all the attacks on their intelligence Ford and the like endured for opposing Transit City and the viability of street-running LRT in Toronto, he sure was more right in the end than every planning and engineering "professional" who giddily cheered these farces along. Turns out just watching current operations (the downtown streetcars) gets you a clearer picture than a 1000 page business case based moreso in recollections of a Euro vacation spent riding trams than actual reality.

 

[urbanclient]

If you flip the concern over LRT's meeting cars at grade and thus slowing vehicular traffic, to see it as cars meeting LRT at grade and thus slowing transit operations (i.e having to stop at intersections), Ford and Mammo's concerns were quite explicitly about slow travel speeds, they just emphasized the impact a street running line would have on a different road user than you would typically emphasize.

For all the attacks on their intelligence Ford and the like endured for opposing Transit City and the viability of street-running LRT in Toronto, he sure was more right in the end than every planning and engineering "professional" who giddily cheered these farces along. Turns out just watching current operations (the downtown streetcars) gets you a clearer picture than a 1000 page business case based moreso in recollections of a Euro vacation spent riding trams than actual reality.

Car ownership rates and walkable street design in the inner cities of Europe do not apply to a suburb 20 km outside of Toronto's downtown.

Who would've expected such a wild revelation....

 

[JSF-1]

And pillaging funds for the Sheppard Subway extension would have been the right thing to do.

You and I both know that was never going to happen though, not with the political climate at the time where it was subways or nothing. Ford and by extension Glenn De Baeremaeker locked us into a quagmire that meant either we could only build what was already planned (Finch West and the EC) or build nothing at all. Your idea is noble but the political reality at the time was that Ford and Scarborough would have stone walled anything that took away from transit expansion in Scarborough including a possible extension of Line 4. So it was either we move ahead with the EC, Line 6, and the SSE or cancel all three and waste yet another decade where nothing is built, no subways, no LRT,s and no BRT's.

 

[M II A II R II K]

Sydney’s new LRT was bemoaned for taking over 50 minutes when it started but now only takes over 30 minutes so there’s hope yet.

 

[ThenWhat]

To whom it may concern: only in North America are these called LRVs and LRT. In Europe this would be considered a street-running tram, which is directly analogous to a Toronto streetcar. Fighting over semantics just shows you've never set foot outside the continent. Line 6 is in every way a streetcar. […]

Not sure if anybody is fighting over semantics. I must have missed something.

I would be perfectly happy to call Line 6 a streetcar. But the powers that be decided that would not do. Now that the money has been spent and the performance is what it is, perhaps TTC will give it a 500+ number and stop calling it LRT, as was previously done with Spadina and Harbourfront lines.

 

[wheelloader]

I rode 510 Spadina streetcar on Saturday then line 6 LRT on Sunday, just for comparison. I would say both speeds are slow and ride is not much different. The line 6 ride from Finch West to Humber took 50min and I sat on the seat right behind the driver cabin for the view of the track and incoming lights. I think we stopped at 2/3 of the intersections along the route however I suspect whether the TSP will actually speed thing up or not, much. I felt half of the stop we had to wait can be avoided, simply by the TTC operator to drive it 'normally'. So many times I felt the driver just feather the accelerator paddle then glide for the next light turning to yellow. Keep in mind that the traffic light for LRT turns yellow almost 5-6 seconds before the normal lights turns to yellow. It makes me feel that the driver is afraid of the LRT won't stop if she has to stop from full speed (I mean >30km/h). This is different from the Streetcar as the ride to stop is much normal, as long as it is not going through a cross with other streetcar intersect. I hope this is just a temporary things and they can bring the speed up eventually. Otherwise, the TSP will just make it a long green for pass through traffic on Finch.

 

[Bordercollie]

The station dwell times are too long. They are longer than subway dwell times.
The train only reaches 30kmph and has to stop at red lights.
The queen streetcar is faster.
I find that the Flexity fleet has a better ride.