unimaginative2
Senior Member
Yes Dentrobate, but there's been a sea change in recent years where we don't build subways to places where we don't want redevelopment. Queen East and West are among those places.
DRL should be run like the BD line, with stations every 450-700m. A compromise line I suppose would be running it along Queen Street between Dufferin and Broadview, however what I was considering was keeping the waterfront section in addition to Queen/King (possibly Dundas) in a continuous loop that wouldn't leave the downtown core. Feeder BRT lines along Dundas/Jane and Broadview/Overlea/Don Mills in effect save $$ for not having to build either Transit City nor DRL along those corridors, with relatively the same level of service as high-order rapid transit vehicles and dedicated rights-of-way.
Okay, I'm still really suggesting that you read up a little bit more on the city. Maybe even on this forum you could get out of the Transportation Issues thread and learn about some of the places for which you're trying to plan transit.
You've clearly got a slightly out-of-date MapArt map that you're using to plan your routes there, so you should know that Metronome fell through and the Rochester Ferry hasn't operated for years.
Other than the bizarre (and physically impossible) zig-zagging, virtually all of these stops are already included in the Downtown Relief Line plan.
The DRL Exhibition stop would be at Dufferin, serving both the Ex itself (a relatively minor destination for most of the year) and the busy Dufferin bus. If it takes the rail corridor route up to Dundas West (instead of continuing along the other rail corridor to Roncesvalles) it would run briefly underground up Dufferin to another stop in the heart of West Queen West. While I used to be a fierce Roncesvalles route partisan, some people ave made me come around to see the potential of the Dufferin/Rail corridor route.
Fort York would be at Bathurst and the rail corridor to connect with the streetcar route and be relatively close to the new condos in the area.
You've got to be kidding that you wouldn't put a stop at Spadina. That was the terminus station in the original DRL plan, and it's the junction point with the busiest surface route per mile in the entire system. Here's another thing you've got to keep in mind when planning transit routes: you want to have stations that allow for convenient transfers with other routes, including surface lines. That's why you build an Ex stop at Dufferin, with a major bus route, rather than Strachan and Lakeshore (aside from the obvious problems with diverting from the established corridor) which has no surface routes at all.
John and Union were both included in the original DRL plan. There's a case to be made for a stop at Church, and I obviously haven't done a detailed enough study of it to really determine whether it would be worthwile. There's a fair bit of development in that area, but there's no connection south to the East Bayfront and there's no connecting surface route, so it would be a somewhat marginal stop that would add to travel time. Your King East stop is an unnecessary diversion from an established and econcomical corridor along the railway routes. It would add hundreds of millions in cost for virtually no additional riders. The DRL plan included a stop at Sherbourne. I'd site it between Sherbourne and Jarvis with a walkway to both streets. If people from King want the subway, they can walk down a couple blocks. If they don't, the streetcar's still there. Jarvis/Sherbourne along the rail corridor would also serve the heart of the East Bayfront development area. Oh, and it's the Toronto Sun up there; the Star's at One Yonge.
I'm not sure what you mean by the streets you have bounding the "Distillery" station, but that's a much bigger area than a subway station. I assume you want it to be underground, even though there's vacant surface land a hundred feet away in the rail corridor. Any DRL-type route would have a stop at Cherry and the rail corridor, conveniently serving the West Don Lands, Distillery, and providing easy connections to the Cherry streetcar for the portlands.
There's something to be said for routing it along Lakshore instead of Eastern, as I mentioned before, depending on how much development is going on in the Filmport/McCleary Park area. There'd be a stop right around Filmport. Northbound there'd be a stop at Queen (for the streetcar) and Gerrard (for the streetcar and potentially-redeveloped mall) before getting up to Pape.
Light rail is a much better solution for serving the area east of Riverdale. There's usually not that much congestion on Queen east of there, so a reliably-managed streetcar route connecting with the DRL could provide a very competitive trip downtown, pulling people off the crowded BD and YUS lines.
So if the DRL, an actual serious, engineered transit route proposal is built, it won't be possible to have a parallel route that doubles travel times with unnecessary (and impossible) zig-zagging? You know, people can walk. A route doesn't have to slavishly follow one road: routes like the Spadina subway or the Sheppard extension to STC show that. But you can't run a line with diversions to the north, then sharp u-turns back south, then another u-turn back north. Not only is it uneconomic, it's physically impossible.
You talk about a loop line around downtown. Here you're once again falling into the trap of plunking down stations where you like them without figuring out where people are actually trying to go. Nobody wants to ride in a loop around downtown. The point of a subway line isn't a mass of stations. It's getting people from place to place. Sometimes stations won't be in the absolute ideal place, but that's just the way it goes.
Sigh...I really don't think you read any responses people make to your posts, so I'm obviously wasting my time. As many other forumers have also said, you would clearly not go through the trouble of diverting the line up to MCC unless you were operating a frequent, S-Bahn style service (every 20 minutes or better).
. Shaw and Sherbourne were included to show here the line could divert up towards Queen St and run east-west (back before I considered a loop line). You're the experts here, so you've convinced me DRL could work, my only concern was that the 'old' downwtown would still be streetcar dependent. 
