Toronto Ontario Line 3 | ?m | ?s
- Thread starter JasonParis
- Start date
dunkalunk
Senior Member
I know one problem many people have with a Queen Street subway is the lack of connectivity to Union Station. One possible solution would be to extend the Harbourfront Streetcar tunnel to Queen Street and create a loop under Nathan Phillips Square (if necessary, new vehicles don't require a loop) This would also give the PATH its own transit system.
It could look something like this:
link.
Thoughts? (please concentrate only on the LRT connection between Queen and Union)
It could look something like this:
link.
Thoughts? (please concentrate only on the LRT connection between Queen and Union)
Last edited:
urbanfan89
Active Member
If you can do so without demolishing the YUS Union subway platforms, it sounds promising.
PATH is small enough not to require its own transit system. I'll admit once taking the subway from Queen to Dundas, but if you can walk, you can walk through PATH.
PATH is small enough not to require its own transit system. I'll admit once taking the subway from Queen to Dundas, but if you can walk, you can walk through PATH.
D
Darren B
Guest
I actually thought of a shortened subway line runing fro Queen/Bay(City Hall) to Union. It could be 2 cars longs, and no stops in between. I thought of that after using the 'shuttle' in NYC.
D
Darren B
Guest
Just because there is PATH doesn't take away the need for transit in certain areas. PATH or no PATH people can still walk above ground for most months of the year. The Queen's Quay streetcar north makes a lot sense
andomano
Active Member
One problem some people might have with the Union alignment might be the lack of connectivity to Queen!
Woodbridge_Heights
Senior Member
There's actually a proposal on SSC to run streetcars along Bay between the Union loop and Bay station, even potentially continuing along Davenport/Dupont to Dupont station. It would be part surface, part undergroud and would use the planned expanded Union loop. It's very similar to what you are proposing, although I wonder how the DRL would impact the feasability of this line.
**Edit**
Comment re andomano above.
There was a similar post earlier in the thread which I meant to come back to but never did. Basically it can be argued that we need both a Queen subway and a DRL, Queen would be much more local with close stop spacing while the DRL would have wider stop spacing similar to the B-D (maybe wider). In fact we should have at least one of these lines right now and it is the lack of transit investment, and subway construction for the past 30 odd years that we don't.
Just imagine what our city would be like if we had both lines!
Last edited:
unimaginative2
Senior Member
That was another one of the ideas examined during the Downtown Relief Line study. It was dismissed even faster than the Queen subway alignment. The reasons were that it cost almost as much as a new subway and didn't serve any new areas, and more importantly that its capacity was limited to the capacity of the surface section of the LRT. That means that they would have to spend a fortune on a tunnel for a route that just has the capacity of the surface section on Queens Quay.
D
Darren B
Guest
We do have a DRL running to UNion, its called GO transit, and it has expres service to midtown TO. Thats why I think Queen is the better line. I heard buildigs along Queen west near Osgoode were intentionally built with sound dampners in the foundation because of the potential for the subway
dunkalunk
Senior Member
Why not just run more frequent short line trains between Union and Queen?
Disparishun
Active Member
I don't think that's quite right. We have a near-"DRL" called GO transit with express service to midtown, it's true.
But final steps are needed to turn it into an actually-existing express -- fare integration, some physical realignment, some electrification, and so forth.
My (uneducated) sense is that doing this would be less expensive than some of the megaplans being mooted (Spadina extension, Yonge extension, DRL, Transfer City), so there's bang for the buck. But there appears very little will to chase that bang. For instance, would a frequent two-way downtown express train connected to the Sheppard subway line and to the Finch express bus relieve the Yonge line? Sure. Is it worth letting people use it for a TTC transfer, say -- an extreme example, but an interesting one -- and subsidizing more heavily instead? I have no idea. But I do wish someone were talking about it at the same level as these other big plans. It is potentially as important, and I am not sure that the Metrolinx plan quite gets us there or focuses on the intra-Toronto benefits.
Uncle Teddy
Senior Member
That would be a waste of a lot of money for little effect as we already have this in the YUS line (Queen to Union and Osgoode to Union).
W. K. Lis
Superstar
From The Star of February 7, 2009:
A futuristic vision for the TTC - from 1910
With remarkable prescience, a century-old report anticipates Toronto transit's current predicament
February 07, 2009
Iain Marlow
Staff Reporter
The tale of the present-day TTC's mediocrity seems to have been a tale foretold – for a fee, to be precise, by a New York City consulting firm called Jacobs & Davies, Inc.
In 1910, the company's engineers produced a report for Toronto's council on the feasibility of an underground rail network, recommending the system's creation with reference to the flourishing underground systems in London and New York.
Three things about the report are noteworthy, nearly 100 years after it was submitted.
First, noting the "fan-shaped" nature of Toronto's development, it favoured the construction of a subway that looks astonishingly similar to the downtown "relief" line featured in Metrolinx's regional transportation plan from 2008 and debated by council in late January: "We believe the wisdom of this proposal is indubitable ... some diagonal routes would seem to be strongly needed, and of course the longer they are delayed the more expensive this surgical operation will become..."
Second, the report predicted the current situation of Toronto's public transit under the city's control: "...we would not be understood to favour municipal operation, as we are convinced that such operation, even with the best will in the world, is usually incompetent and wasteful and unsatisfactory to the public."
And third – ironically, considering this report resulted in city council commissioning another report, which ultimately voided the first – it prophesied the difficulties associated with having transportation subject to the political whims of councillors, noting the difficulty in creating and sustaining a rail network "with ever changing government."
In late January, city councillors voted 31-13 to ask Metrolinx, the provincial agency tasked with rolling out the region's transit system, to prioritize the "relief" line over a Yonge line extension into York Region – moving it from a 25-year plan into a 15-year one. The line is designed to loop from Pape or Donlands down through Union Station and back up again to Dundas West.
The move symbolizes the desire of some councillors to thicken the downtown core's strained transit network over expanding into the suburbs. But York Region's vice-president of transit and Metrolinx's chair both seemed anxious about Toronto not playing by the regional plan's rules. And so again, the debating continues; meanwhile the TTC rusts.
But as the century-old report implies, we should not be surprised by the state of the TTC, which acts heroically under the strain. Toronto's public transportation has a surplus of demand and dissatisfaction and a deficit of money and political courage. "Maybe we do have the system we deserve, given the inattention we've paid to it and the lack of investment that has occurred over a number of decades," says Eric Miller, director of the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto.
"We need a much more complete system, a much denser network, a higher frequency system, more high-order transit, both within the city itself and out into the 905."
We're behind, but we know that. In Toronto, we have underserviced neighbourhoods, subsidized routes into the city's fringes, and unreliable service in the core. In rush hour, the subways and streetcars are bursting.
"Sure, it's nice to have a seat, but in any big city in the world, people stand," says Paul Bedford, Toronto's former chief planner and a board member of Metrolinx. "The collective `we' is going to have to figure out how bad we want to invest in building the transit networks we need. That so-called relief line, as far as I'm concerned, is just one of many lines that makes total sense ... You've got to build a network.
"But you can dream all you want if you don't have the funding sources."
The cobweb-like networks of London or New York are not always comfortable, either. But there is a sense that they befit the cities they lay beneath. They were created in the heady days when businessmen invested in subway systems for profit, not for the public good. Toronto already suffered from poor service and belligerence from the Toronto Railway Company, and privatization did not seem the route to take.
The first subway line was not the result of a funding of "vision" by politicians. The TTC dug from Union Station to Eglinton Ave. only after a surplus piled up during World War II, when gas was a luxury, there was a surge in ridership, and the TTC was unable to invest in new bus tires, let alone new streetcars.
So they proposed a subway under Yonge and Queen Sts. The Yonge line was opened in 1954, and they eventually built the other line on Bloor St. instead of one along Queen St., but by then things were changing. Rates of car ownership have soared, suburban sprawl and highways have rolled out across North America, and urban landscapes have shifted to favour the automobile, says Scott Haskill, a senior planner at the TTC.
Though Haskill is hesitant to draw comparisons between starting new lines then and now, it appears that we only rolled up our sleeves to dig a new subway line after the impetus of a global war. And although surveys, Haskill says, show riders don't mind fare increases as long as it means they will get better service, some of the funding moves for the larger networks, such as London's congestion charge, required politicians to take huge risks. Heading into a global recession, it's unclear whether money and valour will be readily available.
Bedford estimates, in published journal articles, that the transit system Greater Toronto needs would cost around $100 billion. Such a network would require stratospheric levels of funding. That could mean charging tolls on all the 400 series highways, the Don Valley Parkway, and the Gardiner, which Bedford estimates would raise almost $1.5 billion a year. More might have to come from a greater share of the gas tax, part of the income tax, and portions of federal or provincial sales taxes.
"This type of revenue menu," Bedford writes in Planning Futures, "is neither unique nor radical. It is how major urban transit systems are built, funded and sustained in major city-regions around the world."
For Steve Munro, an influential transit critic, the issue is simple: If we want people to climb out of their cars and onto the TTC, public transit cannot loom as an uncomfortable, off-putting obstacle between points A and B.
"We have to not make do with `just good enough,'" Munro says. Because talk of road tolls and increased fares has continued without anyone really having a clear idea of what it would be like to have a truly great public transportation system. The system must morph into a pulsing facet of the city, as distinct and pleasant as Queen Street's bistros.
"The goal is to make it easy to get around the city," Munro says. "The TTC has done such an appalling job of showing what good is."
Last edited:
Earlscourt_Lad
Active Member
Why not just walk the kilometre?
Tewder
Senior Member
Brilliant post, thanks.
Toronto's transit crisis is a cautionary tale of the accrued effects of public apathy and negligence on the part of our political leaders who should have been planning for growth and implementing a vision responsibly decades ago. Simply put it has been a recipe for disaster: public apathy and governing negligence.
Now, instead of talking about facing the real financial needs and challenges of public transport infrastructure we muddy the waters, yet again, with special-interest bickering and demands, the likes of calling for bike lanes and infrastructure as some fantasy alternative to mass transport (see the Jarvis thread in the issues section for those examples).
It's pathetic that we find ourselves begging and fighting so desperately for a DRL when it seems so painfully logical that it should be fast-tracked immediately with a rubber stamp. The debate should be over how soon and how many lines are adequate rather than wrangling over the exact route of the one and only line we may or may not get in the next thirty years. In the meantime gridlock is unbearable, the money continues to be thrown at ineffective politicized projects, and we continue to pollute our environment, not even taking into consideration the projections for growth over the next 10 to 20 years. Enough. We should be shaking our heads in disbelief and mobilizing to demand political heads for the complete and utter lack of responsibility of City and Provincial governance. All Toronto mayors who didn't act are to be held responsible and let history judge these 'rois faineants' - Miller included - accordingly!