freshcutgrass
Senior Member
And by the way...why does this line along with Spadina bunch up if it is running an entirely separate line?
The 510 suffers from a number of problems, which would make signal priority pretty useless. Between King & College (its busiest section), it crosses 4 other busy streetcar lines. It's a short line with high ridership, requiring too many vehicles close together to handle capacity (It is a line that will definitely benefit from the new streetcars).
The other major problem is that priority is actually given to cars on Spadina. The streetcar has to wait at the light for left turning cars to go through their signal cycle....then proceed through the intersection before they have to stop again to load/unload passengers. Repeat this at every stop.
We haven't quite reached the point in Toronto where we want to make our minds up about who gets the priority on streetcar lines. As long as we continue to think we can just do both, then both will not work and everybody on the street loses. And since streetcars are far and away the most efficient users of the road, the cars are the ones who are going to have to be the "losers" in this scenario. But we just haven't gotten up the guts to do it yet. In fact, our current mayor feels it is the streetcars that should lose....that's just how delusional we are here.....the solution right there in front of us, but we just don't want to deal with it. But we will.