Richmond Hill Yonge Line 1 North Subway Extension | ?m | ?s | Metrolinx

None of your "on paper" or "how far along was it?" spin/equivocation/pivoting changes the fact you are wrong and filling the thread with disinformation. You said the buses were in mixed traffic south of 7. Now, the fact that the BRT lanes end for small section of a historic village core north of Major Mac changes nothing and it's not what you said before.

I'm way past expecting a mea culpa. But I'm still hoping you will stop. Please.
 
Last edited:
Don't really get the need for circular arguments, or why this comes across as a sore spot. South of Steeles, as far as I can tell, was never a done deal. So effectively mixed-traffic. North of Steeles to 7 had huge opposition, with reason. Pols like councillors, mayors, MPPs tend to listen and often agree. Hypothetical to say it wouldn't have proceeded, but it was quickly shelved and didn't proceed so there's that. Regardless it's a lower-tier bus system with intermittencies in its segregation. Had they been a bit bolder/forward-thinking and planned a rail system I'm sure issues would've been resolved more dynamically. Likely not being all on the surface. Also it does seem a bit rich for you of all posters to bemoan disinformation.
 
You're full of it. It's only a circular argument because you're incapable of going, "Jeeze, yeah, guess I don't know what I'm talking about," and moving on. Instead you blather on about the segment north of Major Mac, which has nothing to do with the subway and I've had to school you on what you didn't know, just like I did about Langstaff Gateway back in the day.

"Never a done deal," whatever. "Effectively mixed traffic," whatever. "Lower-tier bus system," because 5km north of the subway we're talking about they're not widening Yonge Street through a heritage area? Non-sensical. "Huge opposition," even though I showed you the council minutes for the expropriations, which were already approved at committee.

These are transparent excuses, equivocations and distractions and evasions. None of them change the facts about what was concretely planned and set to be implemented. I've got plenty of respect and tolerance for people with different opinions but you are saying things that are not correct, and that's beyond frustrating and it's not contributing to the discussion. The "sore spot" is that you accuse YR of doing things they didn't do and provide an alternate history that then substantiates false conclusions. Your opinion on their failure to plan a rail system is meaningless when you don't understand they evaluated a rail system and chose a BRT that could be upgraded to LRT, when they -not you- deemed it was warranted.

I've proved what you said about the stretch of Yonge from 7 to Finch is WRONG. Everyone can see it, in black and white. It's done. It will only be a circle if you keep going on about things that are not true, so I'm asking you to help out and stick to opinions on the actual things happening here. There's plenty of em, and everyone else is able to do it.
 
Rainforest said:
In addition to PATH train system, they also have a system called "New Jersey Transit": https://www.njtransit.com, https://www.njtransit.com/pdf/rail/Rail_System_Map.pdf . It is a commuter rail system, that shares the Newark Penn station with the PATH trains, but then takes a more northerly route and arrives to a terminus at New York Penn Station, basically in the middle of Manhattan and located underground.

Of course we see a bit of a jurisdictional quirk there: one bank of the Hudson river belongs to the State of New York, the other bank to the State of New Jersey. I guess that's the reason New York and its subway system didn't expand across Hudson, even though the lines do extend north and east of Manhattan. Instead, two rail systems PATH and NJ Transit, based on mainline rail, were created.
Click to expand...

You're right, it's not the best example. Not only is it a different state, but there's a huge topological barrier between the two. A better comparison would be to look at where the New York City Subway stops at the north end of the city. There are 4 lines that extend up to the top of the Bronx, with the closest two stopping about 400m from the border, and the furthest to about 2.5km from the border. Point is, not a single NYC Subway line extends into Westchester County, which much like the Toronto-York Region comparison, is in the same State/Province and has a border that is more or less arbitrarily drawn (doesn't follow a major water course or other topographical feature).

This is all despite the fact that the NYC Subway is actually owned by the State of New York, a model that DoFo wants to largely emulate.
 
gweed123 said:
You're right, it's not the best example. Not only is it a different state, but there's a huge topological barrier between the two. A better comparison would be to look at where the New York City Subway stops at the north end of the city. There are 4 lines that extend up to the top of the Bronx, with the closest two stopping about 400m from the border, and the furthest to about 2.5km from the border. Point is, not a single NYC Subway line extends into Westchester County, which much like the Toronto-York Region comparison, is in the same State/Province and has a border that is more or less arbitrarily drawn (doesn't follow a major water course or other topographical feature).

This is all despite the fact that the NYC Subway is actually owned by the State of New York, a model that DoFo wants to largely emulate.
Click to expand...
While this is a true statement, it is a greater distance from south Manhattan to Westchester County than from Union to HWY 7. There's also arguably a greater demand for the subway north of Finch than there is extending any one of the 4,5,6,B,D,2,3 trains north. Most stations up there only see about 4-5K passengers per day.

Despite this, I never understood why they didn't extend the A into the Bronx, there is definitely a gap in service on the West Side.
 
WislaHD said:
I want to reinforce this point.

Whatever our feelings are about extending this line into York Region, it is ludicrous to not extend it to Steeles. It just makes total sense.
Click to expand...
Hey, that would be a one-stop subway!
 
Interesting article in the New York Times about Peter Calthorpe and autonomous cars. Part of his point is that anything that only moves single people won't fix congestion at all while an autonomous transit system can.

It's relevant in that this is basically what he proposed for the Langstaff Gateway centre, in order to funnel people to the subway, once there was population and density to justify it. Certain people, ahem, have much derided the very concept here but given how much technology has changed since he tabled the idea here over 10 years ago, and given where it's likely to be in 20 or 30 years when it could be under consideration for Yonge/7, it all seems slightly less Jetsons-esque than it used to.
 
I don't really see the relevance. What Calthorpe proposed for Langstaff after being given the job by Markham in their haste to concoct a downtown was PRT - personal rapid transit. Basically a system of pod-like cars on a fixed guideway separate from the road system. This is literally what was shown in the master plan, and what he proposed in numerous locations elsewhere. What he's musing here is reserved bus lanes not unlike we see today, except they'd be operated sans driver.

No question automated/driverless vehicles is the direction we're going. And on a fixed grade-separate system it's been done for decades (even here in TO with Line 3 and later Link at Pearson). But simply proposing bus lanes within the surface road network - whether they have a driver or not - isn't that crazy of a concept.
 
44 North said:
What he's musing here is reserved bus lanes not unlike we see today, except they'd be operated sans driver.
Click to expand...

Oh, sigh. Yes, you are right in a broad sense but the fact that he proposed something that is rail-based - which was basically prototype-level technology at the time - as part of a very-long-term plan doesn't mean it's baked in. It's neither crucial to the design nor is it narrowly defined. It was a potential answer to the challenge of having an area where cars are marginalized, but where you still have to get people to the central transit node, just across the street.

What's relevant (I think) is that it was an autonomous transit system, and so is what he's talking about here. Maybe everyone will have jetpacks for 2041 and then this will be even less meaningful; I dunno. But these ideas about how to build TOD are evolving as the technology shifts. Langstaff was "state-of-the-art" on paper, in 2007 when Google had yet to build a self-driving car. And you're right that some of Langstaff's ideas are somewhere between ambitious and impractical. But the core idea is to design a neighbourhood that minimizes auto use and whether it's PRT or ART or whatever it comes next, it's interesting to watch. That's all I was saying.
 
Or maybe we could connect blocks of high density development with a central transit hub through good bike infrastructure like Holland? Why reinvent the wheel?
 
Neutrino said:
Or maybe we could connect blocks of high density development with a central transit hub through good bike infrastructure like Holland? Why reinvent the wheel?
Click to expand...

The Langstaff plan has bike facilities and active transportation too. None of this is mutually exclusive. It pretty much throws in the kitchen sink, as far as TDM measures go. I recall, for example, YRT wanted the roads widened a bit to accommodate their buses. But the core idea was to have smaller buses in narrow ROWs from the outset, potentially going to PRT when the whole thing was up and running.

The core question, to come back to the article, was how automated transportation is going to change the shape of our cities; including those not yet built. Langstaff was a bit ahead of the curve in terms of envisioning any kind of autonomous system at all. What it will look like when it's all done, who knows.
 
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
What's relevant (I think) is that it was an autonomous transit system, and so is what he's talking about here. Maybe everyone will have jetpacks for 2041 and then this will be even less meaningful; I dunno. But these ideas about how to build TOD are evolving as the technology shifts. Langstaff was "state-of-the-art" on paper, in 2007 when Google had yet to build a self-driving car. And you're right that some of Langstaff's ideas are somewhere between ambitious and impractical. But the core idea is to design a neighbourhood that minimizes auto use and whether it's PRT or ART or whatever it comes next, it's interesting to watch. That's all I was saying.
Click to expand...

But even if it was relevant that entire article and Calthorpe's *newly-invented* concept doesn't amount to much. All it's showing is BRT or BRT-lite. In other words a bus in a reserved or diamond lane. Still taking up two full lanes of road space, still requiring capital to build the infrastructure, still stopping at red lights, or requiring storage and maintenance. The only diff is that it's autonomous. Using the definition of the word, bus drivers seem pretty autonomous as it is.

Other than small operational savings, and maybe slightly better fuel economy or smoother ride, there's virtually zero difference from a service or capital investment standpoint between his driverless bus and a regular bus. The autonomous aspect is superfluous.

That being said with the automated facet you can do neat things like have buses operate at 0:05 headways going 200km/h a finger-width from either bumper, danger free. All theoretically doable once the human element removed. But disadvantages like homeless smoking or sniffing paint or layabouts punching each other up - all going unchecked (and all things I've witnessed drivers deal with). However such a system and its drawbacks are not really what he's discussing. When it comes to transit this chap either discusses things that are zany, or already exist but acts like he invented - such as this instance. Even using the ART acronym seems like a copy since it's already been used by Bombardier for years.
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top