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

kettal said:
The Richmond Hill GO track is a nightmare in terms of twists and turns, severely limiting the speed. Cooksville-Union does not have this problem.

With electrification, the Cooksville-Union corridor will have such a speed advantage over a 50 minute subway, that the very idea of using the subway for that journey would be a joke.

And if you're comparing the Yonge corridor's suitability for subway ridership with Dundas in Mississauga or whatever, you need a reality check.

MCC is a dot on a map, whereas Yonge is a high density continuous corridor. One is obviously a job for a subway while the other is regional rail.
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If ridership is an indicator of "reality" then I'm sure one of the others on this board will be more than happy to enlighten you that Hurontario is a busier corridor in the 905 than Yonge.
 
What's your point? We're not talking about the Hurontario Corridor, unless the subway you are dreaming of dumps people in Port Credit?

I just don't see how a subway to MCC could be considered a priority when an upgraded GO rail can take riders to Kipling station in 10 minutes, or downtown in 25 minutes.
 
Chuck said:
Despite the higher cost and the "myriad of minor stops", existing subway commuters from York Region outnumber RH GO riders by a ratio of 10:1. Maybe 5,000 currently use Richmond Hill and Langstaff GO stations, but at least 50,000 either drive or bus it to Finch each day.
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Wow! The population is only 162k.....so those penetration rates for transit are impressive!!! 40% of RHers use transit daily?
 
TOareaFan said:
Wow! The population is only 162k.....so those penetration rates for transit are impressive!!! 40% of RHers use transit daily?
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That's the not penetration rate for transit, it's the penetration rate for the subway. If you add in GO and YRT, you'd have a higher penetration rate.

The 50,000 is not only for Richmond Hill though. Considering that the Sheppard subway feeds into the Yonge subway, the overall catchment area of the Yonge subway includes Thornhill, Richmond Hill, Aurora, Newmarket, and most of Markham. It's more like 50,000 out of 600,000. But when you remove the far out areas that hardly contribute, it's probably more like 40,000 out of 250,000 using the TTC.

The reason why York needs the subway more than Mississauga has to do with the nature of the trips. As stated earlier, most people who board the subway at Finch are not even going downtown. Even when the subway reaches Highway 7, most people would still be spending 30 minutes or less on the subway. There's less along the Bloor line, which is why inbound travel from Mississauga is already dominated by the much faster GO train - everyone is going downtown. Mississauga would benefit most by a 20 minute express train to Union. York Region benefits most by a subway line that stops every kilometre.

In terms of travel to Toronto, transit planners in York have prioritized subway extensions. Peel has generally prioritized improvements to GO lines. The overall ridership may be larger in Mississauga, however different travel patterns require upgrades to different modes, that's all. Hurontario is busier than Yonge, but how many of those people are going to the subway? Almost everyone on Yonge is going to Finch.
 
Chuck said:
That's the not penetration rate for transit, it's the penetration rate for the subway. If you add in GO and YRT, you'd have a higher penetration rate.

The 50,000 is not only for Richmond Hill though. Considering that the Sheppard subway feeds into the Yonge subway, the overall catchment area of the Yonge subway includes Thornhill, Richmond Hill, Aurora, Newmarket, and most of Markham. It's more like 50,000 out of 600,000. But when you remove the far out areas that hardly contribute, it's probably more like 40,000 out of 250,000 using the TTC.

The reason why York needs the subway more than Mississauga has to do with the nature of the trips. As stated earlier, most people who board the subway at Finch are not even going downtown. Even when the subway reaches Highway 7, most people would still be spending 30 minutes or less on the subway. There's less along the Bloor line, which is why inbound travel from Mississauga is already dominated by the much faster GO train - everyone is going downtown. Mississauga would benefit most by a 20 minute express train to Union. York Region benefits most by a subway line that stops every kilometre.

In terms of travel to Toronto, transit planners in York have prioritized subway extensions. Peel has generally prioritized improvements to GO lines. The overall ridership may be larger in Mississauga, however different travel patterns require upgrades to different modes, that's all. Hurontario is busier than Yonge, but how many of those people are going to the subway? Almost everyone on Yonge is going to Finch.
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I was really just funning but there is a lack of statistical integrity in your earlier statement which clearly ties richmond hill go use of 5,000 (your number) with Finch subway use of 50,000 (again your number).....that clearly is an attempt to make the yonge subway the preferred transit option for RHers.

I think extending both subways north is the right thing.....I also think if they could find a way to extend the B-D subway west to 'sauga that would be a huge hit.
 
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Everyone is so worried about people in Richmond Hill itself, beyond the last station, that they forget about the other hundreds of thousands of people, especially those between Finch and Hwy 7 in the Yonge and Bathurst corridors, that will form the bulk of the Yonge extension's ridership. Chuck was not talking about Richmond Hill residents, he was talking about all of York Region...but there are no GO stations in York Region along the RH line south of Richmond Hill, and even if you added some, they'd be pretty useless to a huge number of people.
 
Essentially the Yonge extension will be a great asset to Thornhill residents more than Richmond Hill residents. Currently, Thornhill is a stone-throw from Toronto, but often residents have to pay 2 fares to get downtown. With the subway up YOnge st, they can walk, bike, drive, or be dropped off at a station and take the subway with 1 fare.
 
Chuck said:
That's the not penetration rate for transit, it's the penetration rate for the subway. If you add in GO and YRT, you'd have a higher penetration rate.

The 50,000 is not only for Richmond Hill though. Considering that the Sheppard subway feeds into the Yonge subway, the overall catchment area of the Yonge subway includes Thornhill, Richmond Hill, Aurora, Newmarket, and most of Markham. It's more like 50,000 out of 600,000. But when you remove the far out areas that hardly contribute, it's probably more like 40,000 out of 250,000 using the TTC.

The reason why York needs the subway more than Mississauga has to do with the nature of the trips. As stated earlier, most people who board the subway at Finch are not even going downtown. Even when the subway reaches Highway 7, most people would still be spending 30 minutes or less on the subway. There's less along the Bloor line, which is why inbound travel from Mississauga is already dominated by the much faster GO train - everyone is going downtown. Mississauga would benefit most by a 20 minute express train to Union. York Region benefits most by a subway line that stops every kilometre.

In terms of travel to Toronto, transit planners in York have prioritized subway extensions. Peel has generally prioritized improvements to GO lines. The overall ridership may be larger in Mississauga, however different travel patterns require upgrades to different modes, that's all. Hurontario is busier than Yonge, but how many of those people are going to the subway? Almost everyone on Yonge is going to Finch.
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lead82 said:
Essentially the Yonge extension will be a great asset to Thornhill residents more than Richmond Hill residents. Currently, Thornhill is a stone-throw from Toronto, but often residents have to pay 2 fares to get downtown. With the subway up YOnge st, they can walk, bike, drive, or be dropped off at a station and take the subway with 1 fare.
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True.....but the same could be said about people on the Mississauga Toronto border and, I guess, people on the Pickering Toronto border.
 
TOareaFan said:
True.....but the same could be said about people on the Mississauga Toronto border and, I guess, people on the Pickering Toronto border.
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That is absolutely untrue about the Pickering border.

A subway could never compete with the success or utility that GO already provides to Durham - Toronto travelers.
 
kettal said:
That is absolutely untrue about the Pickering border.

A subway could never compete with the success or utility that GO already provides to Durham - Toronto travelers.
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I never said that a subway was better than GO to serve that border.....you may have read that into my comment but I never said it (or meant it).

The earlier poster said

Thornhill is a stone-throw from Toronto, but often residents have to pay 2 fares to get downtown.

I just said that that is the same for the other borders too.....the fact that a group of people currently pay two fares is not, in and of itself, a justification for a subway extension.
 
It's not true for Pickering, where nobody lives near the border and where there's nothing on the Toronto side that they're going to in any number greater than what a GO bus on the 401 every once in a while would easily serve (STC, UTSC, Centennial...that's about it).

Mississauga (and Toronto) would benefit from fare/system integration, but even if this affected a larger total number of riders, they're less focused along one corridor. One reason Bloor and Yonge extensions are not too comparable is that the Bloor line parallels and intersects a GO line for basically the entire length, especially west of Islington, which means GO can handle a lot of the long and medium trips that the subway (+ extension) would do.
 
TOareaFan said:
I never said that a subway was better than GO to serve that border.....you may have read that into my comment but I never said it (or meant it).

The earlier poster said

Thornhill is a stone-throw from Toronto, but often residents have to pay 2 fares to get downtown.

I just said that that is the same for the other borders too.....the fact that a group of people currently pay two fares is not, in and of itself, a justification for a subway extension.
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Oh, okay.

Fare integration is never a good reason to build new mega infrastructure. Fare integration comes from simply integrating fares.
 
Does Finch Station attract more out of zone riders then Islington. I know both Islington has a lot of Mississauga Transit buses and Finch has a lot of York Region buses but I don't know which area attracts more riders to the TTC.

Personally I would like to see the Yonge line get extended and the Bloor Line westward toward the Mississauga border. It would take a lot of buses off the streets of Toronto helping commercial and private traffic move- helping our economy. All I know is that the two transit systems both add a lot of riders to the TTC and I hope both routes get invesment dollars for their projects.

I moved here to TO a few years ago from Vancouver and I think it was the first public meeting of the TTC at city hall I attended, a councillor, I didn't catch his name, made a deputation of extending the Bloor line to Sherway Gardens. I don't think anything came of this deputation but it makes sense to me. The Mississauga buses or future LRT could have its terminus there instead of Islington or Kipling and would benefit both transit systems. I am sure their are other ideas then Sherway Gardens, but, like I said that was the first deputation I heard.
 
TOareaFan said:
I was really just funning but there is a lack of statistical integrity in your earlier statement which clearly ties richmond hill go use of 5,000 (your number) with Finch subway use of 50,000 (again your number).....that clearly is an attempt to make the yonge subway the preferred transit option for RHers.
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I stated in that response that both numbers were tied to all of York Region. But in any case, the most recent of GO's annual reports that I could find states that in 2006, 7,800 people rode the RH line per day. If 2/3 live in York Region, that's about 5,000 trips per day. My subway estimate is based on the sum of all YRT bus routes serving Finch multiplied by 75%, Steeles East and West bus routes multiplied by 40%, plus 3,000 either parking or being dropped off at Finch. Therefore, about 5,000 people from York Region use the RH GO line, and 50,000 use the Yonge subway.

Also to put things into perspective, about 27,000 people use 3 all York Region GO lines per day, of which maybe 23,000 live north of Steeles. The Yonge subway is by far the single most important transit line serving York Region, and that's before it even reaches Steeles.
 
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