andrewpmk
Senior Member
And you will pay the cost difference due to the technical complications?
Queen is 350 meters from King. Get over it and stop sulking. There's is benefits associated with a Queen alignment also.
I don't think that the city is properly comparing the King and Queen routes though. There is also the Front/Wellington route which is similar to the King route but has the major advantage that shutting down streetcars is not required during construction. This study obviously has its biases. It considers destinations like Ryerson University, the hospitals, City Hall and Eaton Centre important (fair enough) but ignores destinations further south like CityPlace, CN Tower, Air Canada Centre, Rogers Centre, Exhibition Place, etc.
This is almost certainly not going to be the last study of the DRL and Metrolinx will probably do its own studies and recommend different routes. There is bound to be a Queen vs King fight at city council at some point. Also this study is looking at the Pape to downtown section in isolation. This is a mistake because the western extension needs to be considered when choosing a route. There is not much development along Queen Street West because everything has a heritage destination and there is a lot more development on King Street West. If we are going to spend $10 billion or more on the DRL it has to be done properly.
It may only be a few hundred metres but I think that it is large enough that it will make a significant difference to ridership. A Queen route serves roughly the area between King and Dundas, while a King route serves roughly the area between the railway tracks and Queen. If a Queen route is chosen then residential areas along the waterfront will be a long walk from the new subway and residents of those areas will not use it. This will make those residents heavily dependent on GO trains and streetcars. A Queen route will be too far to walk from the Air Canada Centre, Rogers Centre and Exhibition Place. Additional GO stations could be added at Spadina, Liberty Village, the Unilever site and Gerrard but my guess is that the GO trains will be very crowded, particularly if express trains do not stop at these stations.
My speculation is that part of the reason for choosing Queen is to separate the DRL from "SmartTrack" so that "SmartTrack" has higher ridership numbers and so that the two lines together serve a larger area. However if "SmartTrack" or the Lakeshore line charge TTC fares and have high frequencies, they are going to get very crowded. Building the DRL along Queen is going to make a Union Station GO tunnel more of a necessity.