GO Transit: Construction Projects (Metrolinx, various)

[TripleQ]

Clarkson GO Parking Structure from yesterday

 

[Hipster Duck]

GO knows their current customer base, the current land use around stations, and how much of their current ridership transfers to GO train from local bus. Architecture aside, I don't see a big issue with parking garages and prefer them to expansive surface lots. Perhaps if the area around the parking garages change the lower levels could be eventually converted to retail. In Japan which has a much higher use of bicycles and transit there were still blue P parking garages at most of the JR stations in most of the Tokyo suburbs I visited when I went there a number of years ago were far more urban than our suburbs. The difference there was that there was some retail, some office, and some medium density residential right there at the station so it didn't look like the parking garage was there solely for the JR station.

GO may know their current customer base, but they are woefully ignorant of their potential customer base. There are a lot of suburbanites who would jump at the opportunity to live in a dense, transit-oriented community near the rail station they commute to. Developers can somehow profitably build TOD next to commuter rail stations in post-subprime mortgage-wracked exurbs of LA, so surely there's some untapped potential to build TOD in a place like Oakville, Richmond Hill or Markham.

GO is also completely bankrupt for ideas if they think that providing "free" (read: heavily subsidized) parking in increasingly gigantic (and expensive) parking superstructures is the only way to grow their business.

GO is a rapid transit operator that owns hundreds of acres of land adjacent to rail stations. Toronto is undergoing one of the largest development booms in its history and the value of land, especially land adjacent to rapid transit, is skyrocketing, because people want to pay a premium to live next to transit. Despite this, the only thing GO can think of doing with their land is building expensive, hard-to-readapt-or-demolish parking garages and not charge drivers to use them. I think they are holding a few more cards in their hand than what they can see.

 

[diminutive]

GO may know their current customer base, but they are woefully ignorant of their potential customer base. There are a lot of suburbanites who would jump at the opportunity to live in a dense, transit-oriented community near the rail station they commute to. Developers can somehow profitably build TOD next to commuter rail stations in post-subprime mortgage-wracked exurbs of LA, so surely there's some untapped potential to build TOD in a place like Oakville, Richmond Hill or Markham.

You'd need quite a lot of TOD to replace parking lot capacity, though. At least for each parked car you're guaranteed a rider (more if carpooling), whereas in any given TOD project a sizeable portion of residents wont commute daily since they're out of the workforce or don't need to. Considering a station like Clarkson has 2,500 spaces, you'd probably need over 3-4k residents to get an equivalent ridership base. That's a very big TOD project.

Most projects in the US are nowhere near that. From what I've seen TOD commuter rail projects tend to be a handful fo 'New Urbanist' townhomes, never more than a couple hundred units. You would need to be building Park Place scaled communities adjacent to structures, not sure if that would work out economically.

That said, I'm not sure how GO expects to meet its long term ridership projections if most users rely on station parking. Worse, it'll be a super heavily peaked service. Why spend money building parking structures which require you to spend more money to boost capacity for 2 hours a day?

I'm not sure how GO goes about changing from a park-n-ride commuter operation to actual rapid transit since it's chicken and egg.

 

[innsertnamehere]

With presto I expect it to move closer to being a bus transfer from local bus lines, rather than parking at the station, sort of how the suburban portions of the TTC subway network operate.

 

[Woodbridge_Heights]

You'd need quite a lot of TOD to replace parking lot capacity, though. At least for each parked car you're guaranteed a rider (more if carpooling), whereas in any given TOD project a sizeable portion of residents wont commute daily since they're out of the workforce or don't need to. Considering a station like Clarkson has 2,500 spaces, you'd probably need over 3-4k residents to get an equivalent ridership base. That's a very big TOD project.

Most projects in the US are nowhere near that. From what I've seen TOD commuter rail projects tend to be a handful fo 'New Urbanist' townhomes, never more than a couple hundred units. You would need to be building Park Place scaled communities adjacent to structures, not sure if that would work out economically.

That said, I'm not sure how GO expects to meet its long term ridership projections if most users rely on station parking. Worse, it'll be a super heavily peaked service. Why spend money building parking structures which require you to spend more money to boost capacity for 2 hours a day?

I'm not sure how GO goes about changing from a park-n-ride commuter operation to actual rapid transit since it's chicken and egg.

Chicken and egg, maybe. However it must begin with GO realizing that it does serve two distinct markets. The suburban, commuter rail, peak period only riders; and the regional rail, rapid transit, travel at most if not all hours of the day riders. GO's focus has obviously been on the commuter rail market with little attention paid to regional rail.

Stations like Kitchener, Milton, and Barrie will never see the type of demand (or won't at least for a few decades) to warrent all day 30 to 60 min frequency service, and especially not when GO chooses to use massive 10 and 12 car trainsets. Stations in the inner core though, like those in the 416 and even some in Mississauga, are ready for all day regular service, and in fact I'd argue it is a requirement for these areas to have this type of service before people in the area will even consider riding the GO. It makes little sense for someone in Etobicoke, for example, to use the GO and then be stuck to their schedules when the TTC is also available nearby and runs nearly 24 hrs a day.

TOD doesn't have to be plopping 5 to 10 000 people within 500 m of the rail station either. It can include building transit link (Bus, BRT, LRT) to the station and spreading the development out along one or two primary arterials.

 

[EnviroTO]

GO is also completely bankrupt for ideas if they think that providing "free" (read: heavily subsidized) parking in increasingly gigantic (and expensive) parking superstructures is the only way to grow their business.

GO is a rapid transit operator that owns hundreds of acres of land adjacent to rail stations. Toronto is undergoing one of the largest development booms in its history and the value of land, especially land adjacent to rapid transit, is skyrocketing, because people want to pay a premium to live next to transit. Despite this, the only thing GO can think of doing with their land is building expensive, hard-to-readapt-or-demolish parking garages and not charge drivers to use them. I think they are holding a few more cards in their hand than what they can see.

GO Transit, which is Metrolinx, is aware of where they want to go and you can see that in the mobility hub design documents and parking is part of it, and land use changes is the other part. These garages are only a single building with all the neighbouring property there for intensification. GO getting rid of surface lots for development and not building a garage as part of that is not realistic because the 200k daily riders they have are primarily car drivers. It isn't reasonable to expect all those people who live in the suburbs for the purpose of cheaper non-condo properties to be wooed by intensification at the station, nor is it reasonable to think you could get 200,000 people living in walking distance of the suburban rail network. If people who are paying for a car to sit in GO's lot all day wanted to live in a condo close to transit which takes them downtown then why wouldn't they just live downtown?

 

[Hipster Duck]

You'd need quite a lot of TOD to replace parking lot capacity, though. At least for each parked car you're guaranteed a rider (more if carpooling), whereas in any given TOD project a sizeable portion of residents wont commute daily since they're out of the workforce or don't need to. Considering a station like Clarkson has 2,500 spaces, you'd probably need over 3-4k residents to get an equivalent ridership base. That's a very big TOD project.

Most projects in the US are nowhere near that. From what I've seen TOD commuter rail projects tend to be a handful fo 'New Urbanist' townhomes, never more than a couple hundred units. You would need to be building Park Place scaled communities adjacent to structures, not sure if that would work out economically.

That said, I'm not sure how GO expects to meet its long term ridership projections if most users rely on station parking. Worse, it'll be a super heavily peaked service. Why spend money building parking structures which require you to spend more money to boost capacity for 2 hours a day?

I'm not sure how GO goes about changing from a park-n-ride commuter operation to actual rapid transit since it's chicken and egg.

I'm not saying they abandon park and ride - that will always be a large part of GO's ridership - I'm just saying they have the opportunity to explore other options. If GO is going to spend millions building reinforced concrete parking structures, the added cost of designing these structures to incorporate future highrises on top of them is relatively small compared to the payout.

I think the economics of building a high density community are better than you think. The two strikes against building something like Park Place usually come down to NIMBYism and fear of increased car traffic. With respect to NIMBYism, many GO stations are located far from existing residential areas, so the threat of NIMBYism is generally reduced. With respect to increased car traffic, building a masterplanned community surely imposes less traffic volume on local roads than hundreds of commuters leaving the station parking lot during a narrow window of rush hour.

With presto I expect it to move closer to being a bus transfer from local bus lines, rather than parking at the station, sort of how the suburban portions of the TTC subway network operate.

Presto will help, but GO needs better physical integration with local surface transit routes. Port Credit station, for example, is a 350 m walk from the far-side 19 stop at Hurontario and Park Ave. Why isn't the platform and the station house closer to Hurontario? Same with Cooksville. Why don't any buses on Kingston Road turn into Guildwood? There is space for a lay-by for TTC buses on the westbound side of Finch near the (long walk) from Old Cummer GO station. Why isn't it used, and why must connecting passengers walk 150 meters to the east? Things like the placement of the platform at Langstaff station (facing away from the YRT transit terminal and towards the parking on the south side of the 407), or the connectivity that is Oriole GO station, shows you how much GO thinks about integration.

 

[doady]

You'd need quite a lot of TOD to replace parking lot capacity, though. At least for each parked car you're guaranteed a rider (more if carpooling), whereas in any given TOD project a sizeable portion of residents wont commute daily since they're out of the workforce or don't need to. Considering a station like Clarkson has 2,500 spaces, you'd probably need over 3-4k residents to get an equivalent ridership base. That's a very big TOD project.

Clarkson GO station already saw 4,938 riders per day as of 2001. http://www.dmg.utoronto.ca/pdf/tts/2001/validation2001.pdf (p.39)

TOD isn't just for GO. It benefits local transit as well. And local transit to GO stations is never going to be great if they are surrounded by parking lots.

That said, I'm not sure how GO expects to meet its long term ridership projections if most users rely on station parking. Worse, it'll be a super heavily peaked service. Why spend money building parking structures which require you to spend more money to boost capacity for 2 hours a day?

It kinda explains why progress toward improved non-peak service is so slow. Not just the diversion of funding away from improving the actual train service to building more parking, but also if GO relies on park-and-ride for ridership, then there's really no point in improving non-peak service since there will never be enough ridership from park-and-ride facilities alone to support that level of service.

Erindale has around 800 parking spaces, and ridership was already over 1,800 in 2001, let alone 2013. Why GO felt a need to concentrate on parking here I don't understand. I guess the fact that most riders here don't park-and-ride scares GO?

Likewise Cookville has 1,459 spaces and ridership reached 2,489 in 2001. I will be mad if they build a parking garage here, beside the LRT, before building a pedestrian bridge across Hurontario.

 

[diminutive]

Erindale has around 800 parking spaces, and ridership was already over 1,800 in 2001, let alone 2013. Why GO felt a need to concentrate on parking here I don't understand. I guess the fact that most riders here don't park-and-ride scares GO?

Aren't you undercounting ridership? Park and ride users will logically use the station twice per day (AM core bound, PM 905 bound). 800 park-n-riders using Erindale twice per day would be 1,600.

Indeed, most of the ridership numbers you mentioned are suspiciously close to park-n-ride-spaces * 2 (Clarkson 2,500 spaces vs. 5,000 riders, Cooksville 1,500 spaces, 2,500 riders).

Hipster Duck -

I don't disagree, just think a lot of "TOD" in the USA has been pretty stupid. Usually the projects seem to involve building a small handful of new urbanist schlock units then calling it a day. They tend to reinforce my opinion that most transit capital projects in the USA are ways of subsidizing real estate developers.

I'm a little more skeptical of the barriers to Park Place type economic surrounding GO stations, at least at current or imagined GO service levels.

Priority has to be how to simultaneously develop GO into a rapid transit network and build an appropriate local transit feeder network. A modest bus feeder route would easily provide more ridership than most TOD projects. As it is though you'd have to be masochistic to take a 905 bus to a GO station every day for work. We need to expand our idea of 'TOD' from the immediate station vicinity to the larger passenger watershed.

 

[diminutive]

Chicken and egg, maybe. However it must begin with GO realizing that it does serve two distinct markets. The suburban, commuter rail, peak period only riders; and the regional rail, rapid transit, travel at most if not all hours of the day riders. GO's focus has obviously been on the commuter rail market with little attention paid to regional rail.

Yes, indeed.

The problem there is that it's somewhat impossible to serve both destinations such as Kitchener or Barrie and have a denser inner city portion. Even with EMUs and such, the travel time would be intolerable.

Most suburban/regional rail systems in Europe and Asia tend not to stretch more than 40km from the core for that reason.

I'm not sure why GO is so intent on serving far flung communities which have very few residents even working in the GTA.

Seems like it would be more practical to service outlying markets with express buses. They could be quicker than current train routes, and leave the existing tracks to focus on the denser parts of the network and not the 80 people who use Kitchener station.

TOD doesn't have to be plopping 5 to 10 000 people within 500 m of the rail station either. It can include building transit link (Bus, BRT, LRT) to the station and spreading the development out along one or two primary arterials.

Yes, exactly.

 

[doady]

Aren't you undercounting ridership? Park and ride users will logically use the station twice per day (AM core bound, PM 905 bound). 800 park-n-riders using Erindale twice per day would be 1,600.

Indeed, most of the ridership numbers you mentioned are suspiciously close to park-n-ride-spaces * 2 (Clarkson 2,500 spaces vs. 5,000 riders, Cooksville 1,500 spaces, 2,500 riders).

Nope, riders board a station once per day. They generally board at Union for the return trip.

If you look the numbers for all the GO stations, they add up to 68,677. The GO rail system gets 137,796 total.

Add up the station numbers for Milton, it is only around 10,000 boardings. Milton gets 20,000 boardings per weekday.

Clarkson gets approximately 5,000 riders, meaning only around half of them use the park-and-ride facilities. Likewise, most of the people who use Erindale GO station do not use its park-and-ride facilities.

You're not seriously suggesting that no one walks or takes transit to Clarkson of Cooksville GO station, are you?

 

[diminutive]

Nope, riders board a station once per day. They generally board at Union for the return trip.

Ahh, kk, in your last post you said ridership, not boardings, so I assumed that's what you were talking about.

You're not seriously suggesting that no one walks or takes transit to Clarkson of Cooksville GO station, are you?

No, but it seems quite clear that GO is very reliant on park-n-rides.

 

[Woodbridge_Heights]

Yes, indeed.

The problem there is that it's somewhat impossible to serve both destinations such as Kitchener or Barrie and have a denser inner city portion. Even with EMUs and such, the travel time would be intolerable.

Most suburban/regional rail systems in Europe and Asia tend not to stretch more than 40km from the core for that reason.

I'm not sure why GO is so intent on serving far flung communities which have very few residents even working in the GTA.

Seems like it would be more practical to service outlying markets with express buses. They could be quicker than current train routes, and leave the existing tracks to focus on the denser parts of the network and not the 80 people who use Kitchener station.



Yes, exactly.

It would seem to me though that serving inlying (central?) areas can and should be more profitable than serving outlying areas.

The routes wind up being shorter. Therefore shorter routes result in less wear and tear on the mechanicals of the train (fewer service hours) per route. Also shorter routes take less time per route which means less hours to pay train operators and/or service agents per route. These alone result in lower costs to the operator, combine that with the ability to operate the train on more revenue routes per service, and employee hours brings costs down and revenue up.

For example a 1 hr route from say Kitchener to Union would result in x kms of service for the equipment and 1 hr of salary for the engineer/service agent, against ~1400 passengers. Meanwhile a train leaving some hypothetical station in Toronto (I am not going to go out and find said station) that is 30 mins between it and Union results in: for the same 1 hour of engineer/service agent salary. You get potentially 2 routes one in towards Union and one back out where y is the kms of service for the train, and total kms of service is y*2, y is less than x and possibly y*2 is also less than x. Ridership would be likely less than 2800 (passenger capacity of one train) but is much greater than 1400. So you've nearly doubled your revenue while keeping your costs the same or even slightly lower.


I know you are agreeing with me I am just expanding on my previous point.

 

[dowlingm]

I'm not sure why GO is so intent on serving far flung communities which have very few residents even working in the GTA.

Contested Liberal-Conservative electoral contests.

 

[dunkalunk]

re: Kitchener

The problem with these trains is related to both time it takes to get to Union making all station stops (Over 2 Hours), and the time of day they leave in the morning (before 7AM).

Kitchener does not have a large number commuters whose final destination is Union, and a commuter service to Kitchener does not adequately serve the potential demand there. There are just as many people coming in from Toronto to Waterloo Region as you see going in the opposite direction. You see so much outside talent coming into the region to the point where you see companies such as Google, Manulife, ect. running express buses in from Toronto.

If there is the space on the track to run a train express from Georgetown with a stop at say... Bramalea, you'd see the popularity of this service increase. Likewise if GO were to run a train out of Kitchener on Friday evening and return on Sunday evening.

The only viable option to get from Kitchener to Toronto in a reasonable amount of time and flexibility by transit continues to be Greyhound. Otherwise, if you have a car, you may as well drive. As it has been said before, GO seems completely unaware of the potential demand for a true regional rail network.