[OT] Public Transit

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 01:41:24PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Toronto has always had bits of brilliant transit planning squished between
> large mounds of mediocrity.
> 
> Brilliance: Building capacity for trains under the Bloor Viaduct ages before
> the trains were designed.

That one was absolutely briliant.

> Mediocrity: Putting the northwest line in the ditch made by the Spadina
> Expressway cock-up.

I thought they always meant to have a subway/rail in the middle of
the expressway.  I consider that to have been a smart plan given they
were tearing up the area anyhow.

> Brilliance: maintaining streetcars in the face of political pressure and a
> continental shift away from them

Well some of them.  Of course one way streets have broken some of the
existing streetcar lines they used to have.

> Mediocrity: The Scarborough LRT
> 
> Brilliance: GO Transit, easily one of the best suburban commuter rail
> systems on the continent

It is absolutely awful.  The line up through weston may become great now
that they are resignaling it (after buying it instead of leasing access
to the line), so that they can run trains more than every 30 minutes.
Now if they will run more frequent service and both ways throughout the
day, then it can start to be considered a good train system.  As it is
it is probably the worst train system I have ever seen.

If you lived downtown and worked in markham, you can't take the train to
work, because they only service the other direction.  THe lakeshore lines
have service both ways throughout the day, but the other lines do not.

So if you think Go is one of the best on the continent, then clearly
the continenent has no good commuter train service.

> Mediocrity: Inter-system squabbling prevents logical and deeper integration
> of regional and local transit.

That is bad.  A few bits are slowly improving.  Some viva lines are now
allowed to operate full service in TTC area and accept TTC fare for that
(the viva orange between downsview and york university for example is
now considered TTC service so you can take the subway and then get on
the viva express bus up to the university using your metropass or the
fare you already paid for the subway).

> Too much of Toronto's transit grid is designed to go through Union Station.
> This mentality has prevented consideration of valuable *existing* resources
> (such as the east-west train lines parallel to Dupont and Steeles that could
> serve transit well but are untouched by GO.) The downtown-centric mentality
> that encourages this "vision" will hopefully be shaken away by finally being
> forced to listen to the suburban voices.

That is the biggest problem they have.  Who cares about union station
anymore, there is plenty of other parts of toronto people work in.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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