[OT] Public Transit

[Colin McGregor]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.

Well, almost. As you can read in the following history of the
Bloor-Danforth line the Bloor Viaduct was built with an underground
streetcar line in mind:

-  transit.toronto.on.ca/subway/5104.shtml

The provisioning for a streetcar line under the Bloor Viaduct helped a
LOT, but the TTC did have to deal with sharp turns just west of the
viaduct (turns that would not have been an issue for a streetcar to
manage, but were for a subway)...

>> 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.

A bit of the history of the current CLRV (Canadian Light Rail
Vehicle), and how Toronto streets have a Swiss designed street car:

- transit.toronto.on.ca/streetcar/4503.shtml

Going forward, the next generation of TTC streetcars will be based off
the Bombardier FLEXITY streetcars:

- www.bombardier.com/en/transportation/products-services/rail-vehicles/light-rail-vehicles?docID=0901260d8000a536

So, the TTC is going for a more-or-less off the shelf design. If you
look at the various cities you will see that some cities have tweaked
the design one way or another, I kind of like the ship style motif
FLEXITY streetcars that were done for Marseille, France:

- www.bombardier.com/files/en/supporting_docs/image_and_media/products/BT-FLEXITY_Outlook_Marseille.jpg

>> Mediocrity: The Scarborough LRT

The TTC wanted to run streetcars where the Scarborough LRT runs (a
technology the TTC was/is comfortable with), but due to political
pressure they went with the current system, details to be seen here:

- transit.toronto.on.ca/subway/5107.shtml

What I think will go down as Brilliance: Design of the Sheppard line.
The trains that run on the Yonge-University-Spadina and the
Bloor-Danforth line are all 6 train cars long. On the Sheppard line
trains are 4 cars long (not enough demand at present to justify longer
trains). But if you pay attention to each of the stations on the
Sheppard line, you will see they have made it easy to convert stations
to 6 car operation (knock down a piece of wall and do some tile
work...).

>> 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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