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

The theory is that criminals are using the Skytrain to make the getaway after committing a crime, and a largely unmanned system has nobody watching to catch the bad guys. Putting in fare gates would force them to man the stations.

The whole notion is ridiculous - would you expect someone to break in, steal a bunch of electronics, then try to make a getaway on public transit - but it is what it is. Fare evasion is very low, somewhere around 4% I believe. The Vancouver Sun ran a story about it when I was back home at Christmas and the evasion rates are really about on par with what they think they are in Toronto. Despite sometimes seeming like another planet, it is a Canadian City and the locals dutifully line up to pay their fares even when nobody's watching (a lot of people have passes anyways)
 
So they'd put in fare gates, and no one would use them to make crime getaways? What, because criminals don't have bus passes?

Come on ... are Vancouverites really stupid enough to believe something like this? I don't think so ...
 
Unless the stations have side tracks for trains to stop at and the middle tracks would be the regular tracks for other trains to bypass the stations, that way there would only be extra tracks in the stations only. This would also have the additional benefit of one train being stopped for some reason doesn't hold the whole line up.
 
M II A II R II K said:
Since it's not built yet perhaps they can include express trains in it.
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If any line should be 4-tracked in Toronto it should be the DRL (east and west). The DRL east is going to avearge at least 20,000 pphpd on opening, which is double the minimum needed for subway. Add a couple extra tracks to that, and it could easily be 30,000 pphpd. I have no doubt in my mind that the demand is there.

The only catch is, in order for a 4 tracked DRL to be truly effective, it would need to go at least from Eglinton to Eglinton, hopefully going out to the airport as well (an express subway to the airport would be pretty awesome, and I'm pretty sure Weston residents would be in favour of that, haha).
 
M II A II R II K said:
Unless the stations have side tracks for trains to stop at and the middle tracks would be the regular tracks for other trains to bypass the stations, that way there would only be extra tracks in the stations only. This would also have the additional benefit of one train being stopped for some reason doesn't hold the whole line up.
Click to expand...

Works well with BRT, not so much with fixed rails. If you have switch problems, the line is screwed.
 
gweed123 said:
Works well with BRT, not so much with fixed rails. If you have switch problems, the line is screwed.
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If you have switch problems, the whole track is FUBAR anyway, regardless of where the stations are. Pocket tracks have been a long mainstay in the rail industry for passing. There is very little difference putting a station platform on one to any other siding use.
 
M II A II R II K said:
Would be cool to not only have express routes but several to choose from to allow more stations to be express.
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It would be interesting to see this applied to Davisville, Summerhill, and Rosedale on the Yonge line, just so that every 2nd train could run express from Eglinton to Bloor, only stopping at St. Clair. It would in essence turn the Yonge line north of Bloor into an express subway, because north of Eglinton it pretty much already is an express subway.
 
Rainforest said:
1) Let's not forget that many older subway stations, including all YUS stations south of Bloor, have no fare-paid connections to surface routes.

2) We don't even know at this point how the Eglinton - STC line, if built according to the new plan, will handle fares. There was an idea to use POP on all Transit City routes, but with Eglinton going fully grade-separate, they might change that and install automatic entrances at all stations. STC stations are in the fare-paid zone already.
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There are pros and cons to making the stations on the Eglinton-STC line fare-paid areas. One of the biggest pros I can think of is the fact that each LRV trainset will have much more capacity than the surface routes south of Bloor and will be dumping larger amounts of people off at Kennedy, Eglinton, and Eglinton West stations. If those transfers are switching from the non-fare-paid LRT platforms to the fare-paid subway platforms, it could cause a bottleneck and make those transfers more difficult and time-consuming. Transfers should be kept as seamless as possible.

Which gets me to the biggest con - making every station along the line a fare-paid zone accessible only through automatic entrances would make it difficult/impossible for bus-to-LRT paper transfers. It would also make extending the line at-grade beyond Black Creek more difficult if we eventually decide to go down that route.


nfitz said:
They could always do the fare paid areas like they do on the Canada Line in Vancouver. They simply paint a line on the floor, and if you cross it without proof of payment, you can be ticketed.
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I like this idea. It's a good compromise and easy enough to implement. I do think that the busier stations (Scarborough Centre, Kennedy, Eglinton, Eglinton West, possibly some others) should remain fare-paid zones in the tradtional sense: manned gates, connections to surface/subway routes within the fare-paid zone, etc. This infrastructure already exists at the four stations I've highlighted above so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
 
With the new legacy fleet replacements coming there will be POP routes all over the core interacting with all sorts of other routes. Eglinton's fare policy will be decided there.
 
gweed123 said:
It would be interesting to see this applied to Davisville, Summerhill, and Rosedale on the Yonge line, just so that every 2nd train could run express from Eglinton to Bloor, only stopping at St. Clair. It would in essence turn the Yonge line north of Bloor into an express subway, because north of Eglinton it pretty much already is an express subway.
Click to expand...

That will end up as a big news story about how locals are pissed off that they have to wait in the sun or in the freezing winter, the train is delayed, and that train bypasses their station since its express (this applies to the stations that are outside). Almost as controversial as transit city, because to bypass the stations, you need less capacity, unless you are proposing a really expensive method of building two more set of tracks that split and meet, you will have an even more stressed Yonge line
 
Hume fumes about lost Finch LRT

I can't say that video was very convincing.

"The true beauty of the LRT is that it would have connected all these disparate parts."

Meanwhile, he showed half-empty buses on wide open roads... I wonder what time of the day it was.
 
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