Each major city block (Queen to Bloor, Keele to Dufferin, Dufferin to Bathurst, Bathurst to Yonge, etc) takes me max of 23 minutes to walk. If I'm really walking quickly (which is often
) it's about a 20 minute walk.
Fresh Start--either you're elderly or have serious health issues.
You seem to forget that esp. on a retail strip like Roncy, walking has its own built-in "distraction factor", i.e. while one *can* do it in 23 minutes, few actually *do*. And yeah, one can be a 70s Participaction fascist and all, but...again, even that measly 23 minutes can be a real drag.
Yes, Roncevalles needs transit, for the sick, those laden with heavy groceries etc. But does it need an expensive tram system? No. A low floor bus every 20 minutes is fine. I would prefer in fact if that bus route looped around--from Parkside to Roncevalles or Coehill Drive/Windermere via the Queensway and either Bloor West or Annette/Dundas West perhaps?
Except that "every 20 minutes" is (at least "officially") less frequent than the Junction or Lansdowne or Ossington buses--and in psychological effect, it's closer to the abysmal, it's-not-worth-it every-half-hour Queensway frequency along Parkside. Though I understand what you mean, i.e. the last "replaced streetcar" in Toronto (Mt Pleasant) is served in a similar frequency. But Mt Pleasant is not Roncy, North Toronto is not High Park, N Toronto's Lululemon yummy-mummies aren't Alternative Grounds hippies or Cherry Bomb hipsters, etc. And it's all the more absurd when you propose Roncy-Swansea loops. The urbanism's way different here. (And when it comes to North Toronto, the less that can be said about the Yonge subway-stop superinterval btw/Eglinton and Lawrence, or Lawrence and York Mills, and the every-20/30-minutesness of bus service up there, the better--now,
there's a Class A argument against what you're proposing.)
Above all, you seem to totally disregard what I may call long-term transit psychographics, i.e. that which has bonded (the present reconstruction-caesura excepted) Roncy to a streetcar-line-paced schedule for an eternity--and, really, in quite a special way. It's no wonder Germans, Poles, etc settled here; it's got more of a Mitteleuropa feel, in the best sense, than anyplace else in Toronto. It *thrives* on a hop-on, hop-off street-transit-scaled pace. You can walk those 23 (or 20) minutes if you want to; but the magic is, you don't *have* to, and it doesn't mean you're a lazy lout to choose otherwise. If you must replace the "expensive tram system" here, let it be like the fabled Spadina Bus, not the Mt Pleasant bus--maybe at most, something continuous with the existing Junction bus, i.e. a Queen-to-Runnymede route; and the Junction bus already runs mostly at a "frequent service" pace, so the status quo remains.
Remember:
This. Isn't. Yonge. Compare the old King car or the present Roncy bus shuttle to the Yonge bus N of Eglinton; the latter is little more than a convenience to the elderly/infirm, the former is packed to the gills, even if it's only your 23 minute walking distance...
