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Toronto Crosstown LRT | ?m | ?s | Metrolinx | Arcadis

nfitz said:
Car sharing doesn't work with baby seats, and frequent-enough trips to visit aging parents who selfishly live in the middle of nowhere. But I look forward to the day when I can be car-free, and the freedom that gives!
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I use car sharing with baby, now child, seats all the time and drive to parents in London and grandparents in Welland. For the equation to favor buying a car I think I would have to be making those trips more than once a month in addition to my normal weekend activities. I switch to car rental for longer durations. If there were two kids with different extracurricular schedules a car might be required as well.
 
EnviroTO said:
I use car sharing with baby, now child, seats all the time and drive to parents in London and grandparents in Welland.
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How does that work then? Children and car seat(s) at home. Car is about a 10-minute walk away. How do you get children and car seats to car ... or what to do with children when you get the car. I could see a couple of booster seats, which can be so light you can just clip them to a knapsack (did that once flying to Vancouver, when I realised the $30 booster seat was a lot cheaper than $14 times 14 days that Avis with no limits wanted ...).

And perhaps most importantly, how do you convince my wife to do this when she's doing groceries!

Serious question ... the car is 8 years old, and it's decision time.

EnviroTO said:
For the equation to favor buying a car I think I would have to be making those trips more than once a month in addition to my normal weekend activities. I switch to car rental for longer durations. If there were two kids with different extracurricular schedules a car might be required as well.
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The kids extracurricular schedules seldom involve cars. Most are walking distance, or along the streetcar line, or along the subway.

We're way off-topic though I'm afraid. Here, let me get it back on-topic ... we need to change the current design, and put Star-Trek-like transporters in each station. There ...
 
MrsNesbitt said:
I'd rather see "(Street)cars", an adorably animated re-telling of the fight to save Toronto's streetcar system in the 1970s. Hear that Pixar? New moneymaker right here.
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aquateam said:
That sounds like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", an animated movie about the conspiracy to tear up the streetcar tracks and replace streetcars with buses.
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This is why I suggested "Bikes." "Streetcars" can wait for another decade, such that those who watched "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" when they were young would have young children of their own.
 
ehlow said:
I've always found it strange that the 1994 Eglinton subway only went west from Allen, not covering Yonge-Eg or central Eglinton.
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It's all about increasing the number of people within X distance of a subway. Nevermind whether that subway is going to be an effective part of a transportation network. Building the central stretch doesn't push that goal, as those people are already "served", by two lines!

From what I've gathered, (probably via this forum) it was also a "build it and they will come" idea to increase usage of the Spadina line.
 
It should be noted that if the 1994 Eglinton West subway was built, it would have created a problem just like Sheppard. Recall that the original proposal was for a Sheppard subway from Downsview to Scarborough Centre, and a Eglinton subway from Eglinton-Allen to Renforth. But the NDP government, faced with budget difficulties and unable to afford both lines, had to make a choice: either pay for one line in its entirely, or chop each line to a stub. They chose the latter in order to politically please as many areas as possible. So they moved forward with a Sheppard subway from Yonge to Don Mills, and an Eglinton subway from Eglinton-Allen to Black Creek. That was the 1994 subway plan. The remaining segments of Sheppard & Eglinton were pushed into an unscheduled mythical 'Phase 2'. When Harris was elected, he scaled it back even further, cancelling the Eglinton stub and retaining only the Sheppard stub that is now today's Sheppard subway.

If Harris hadn't cancelled Eglinton, then we would have ended up with a Sheppard stub to Don Mills, and an Eglinton stub to Black Creek. The mess with Sheppard--where we're going to have an LRT-subway transfer forced at Don Mills, would have been repeated with Eg, or we would have to have built an entire Eglinton subway. Harris' cancellation at least allowed us to build the entire line as LRT from scratch.

Imagine if Sheppard had been cancelled too. Miller could have built a single Sheppard-Finch LRT from Humber College all the way to Morningside and people would have loved it.
 
The original plan had a brt on eglinton, it was replaced with a subway because politics. The brt only ran west of eglinton west, thus the subway plan only ran west of it as well.


The original plan also had sheppard to Vic park, it got cut back to don mills.
 
This is why putting LRT on Eglinton is such a bad idea. A developer wants to tear down the Celestica building at Eglinton/Don Mills and replace it with thousands of condo units. http://www.blogto.com/city/2014/08/crosstown_lrt_spurs_massive_redevelopment_proposal/ It looks like Celestica will move to new buildings which occupy the eastern end of the site rather than moving to somewhere else in the GTA.

My guess is the Real Canadian Superstore will get redeveloped, as will the Ontario Science Centre parking lot, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints parking lot. There are probably also a few strip plazas and maybe some low rise office buildings that could be torn down to build more density. Expect tens of thousands of new residents at least once all these sites get redeveloped. This proposal alone says 2,897 units (claims they will be all 3 bedroom, seems rather unusual to me) which seems to suggest we will have about 10,000 people living in this development alone.

Has anyone at Metrolinx or TTC thought about what building massive condo developments will do to this line? My guess is that you will get several thousand new riders westbound during the peak hour of 8-9am on weekdays from a development of this size. Add in demand from the existing 20,000 or so residents of the Flemingdon Park area (who might walk or use bus 100), people transferring from bus routes 25 and 54, and people coming from further east and I have a suspicion that the LRT, if we don't change it to a subway now like we did with the Scarborough RT in the 1980s, and with no downtown relief line, will be overcrowded west of Don Mills, west in AM rush hour and east in PM rush hour. The inaccurate ridership projections that the Miller administration created are probably totally invalid if huge condo developments of this size get built, as I suspect that they assume that very little or no new development gets built along Eglinton and are totally invalid if that is not the case.

Don't count on the downtown relief line being built to deal with this problem because it is so expensive, so unlikely to get built anytime soon. Even if that does built, I'm not sure whether a new north south line will exactly mean that an east west line isn't still really busy, particularly in the long term. (The 401 is much busier than the Don Valley Parkway for instance).
 
andrewpmk said:
Has anyone at Metrolinx or TTC thought about what building massive condo developments will do to this line? My guess is that you will get several thousand new riders westbound during the peak hour of 8-9am on weekdays from a development of this size. Add in demand from the existing 20,000 or so residents of the Flemingdon Park area (who might walk or use bus 100), people transferring from bus routes 25 and 54, and people coming from further east and I have a suspicion that the LRT, if we don't change it to a subway now like we did with the Scarborough RT in the 1980s, and with no downtown relief line, will be overcrowded west of Don Mills, west in AM rush hour and east in PM rush hour. The inaccurate ridership projections that the Miller administration created are probably totally invalid if huge condo developments of this size get built, as I suspect that they assume that very little or no new development gets built along Eglinton and are totally invalid if that is not the case.
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Right, when then modelled the ridership projections they assumed no population growth. Give me a break. While it might be reasonable to say that you feel their projections are a bit high or a bit low, to suggest that demand will be multiple times what's projected – seemingly so much so that even a subway will be packed – just because of your gut feeling is pretty weak.
 
jeffreym said:
Right, when then modelled the ridership projections they assumed no population growth. Give me a break. While it might be reasonable to say that you feel their projections are a bit high or a bit low, to suggest that demand will be multiple times what's projected – seemingly so much so that even a subway will be packed – just because of your gut feeling is pretty weak.
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Not to mention that Eglinton falls under Toronto's avenues plan, which calls for midrise, and not "Massive condo developments".
 
He is not entirely wrong though. I strongly suspect Eglinton will surpass ridership expectations by some distance, but they won't surpass capacity for the LRT.

I also think having Eglinton short turn at Laird instead of Don Mills will be a massive headache in the long-term.
 
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