I'd say that 36,000 pph is insufficient even without seeing the photos of the crowd. Probably double that and you might get close to moving everyone through the station. I get it, there's staffing issues, but we were downtown last year for NYE and it was a crush load crowd then too.
Imagine a hypothetical weekend day where there is an event at Rogers Centre, and SBA, that's nearly 100,000 people along counting fans & event staff. Add in other venues such as Sony Centre etc, and that people have begun to return to the entertainment (club) district, and other hangers on just because. Now we are probably looking at 200,000 to 300,000 people. Not to mention BMO field, bud stage, Coca Cola Colosseum.
For NYE I wouldn't be surprised if there were close to 750,000 people DT.
Yeah given that a single event at the Skydome could be 50,000 people on an ordinary day it's pretty safe to say the NYE influx was well over 200k.
In addition to GO there's also Line 1, which should normally be able to run 30,000 pph on each side of the U, with 1000 people per train and 30 trains per hour. But given the general rowdiness and incompetence of NYE crowds, I don't think there's any way they could get a train through the downtown stations every two minutes. So maybe they could achieve 20 tph, for a total of 40,000 pph on the subway.
Even then, NYE is extreme in that there is a fairly "hard stop" after the event, where everyone tries to get home in a fairly short time. The Raptors parade was in daylight in good weather. So a more gradual pace was manageable.
There may be unique individual events that draw crowds which the transit network can't handle, and we can't build our transit system for one-of peaks. But it would be very enlightening to know how close this event came to being a new record.
Although the subway may have actually been at its limit (assuming they tried to run at least 15 trains per hour), the GO network was nowhere near its infrastructure capacity. They were only running 1 train per hour on most lines, and the most frequent line was only 4 trains per hour.
Assuming all 12-car trains, the capacity of the ordinary PM peak service is:
6 tph (18,000 pph) Lakeshore West
3 tph (9,000 pph) Milton
4 tph (12,000 pph) Kitchener
2 tph (6,000 pph) Barrie
2 tph (6,000 pph) Richmond Hill
2 tph (6,000 pph) Stouffville
4 tph (12,000 pph) Lakeshore East
Total = 69,000 pph
And even that is nowhere near the limit of the infrastructure. We have run as much as 8 tph on Lakeshore West, 6 tph on Milton and 4 tph on Barrie in the past.
So in total with the subway and GO, we could have been running about 140,000 pph for that peak hour (100k GO + 40k subway) which is double what they actually ran.
The other half of the question is how many people try to go home during that peak moment, rather than staying downtown and going home later. I assume that a fairly large proportion of the crowds would head to bars or other parties and not head home during that 00:30-01:30 peak hour anyway, so it's not like we'd need to achieve 750,000 pph to carry the crowds.
Perhaps if GO Transit were also free on the 1st and overnight parking rules were waived, it would encourage more people to crash at a friend's place and go back home the following morning, which would spread out the demand so much that the ordinary holiday service on the 1st could probably handle it.
