[OT] Public Transit

[Evan Leibovitch]

On 28 October 2010 12:05, JOSE <jtc-vS8X3Ji+8Wg6e3DpGhMbh2oLBQzVVOGK at public.gmane.org> wrote:


> Montreal certainly has a far better subway layout than toronto.  I think
>> their train service is actually better too, but I am not entirely sure
>> about that.
>>
>
Montreal's subway has some very nice design features but a couple of really
awful ones.

In terms of layout, the Métro certainly covers more territory. But its blue
line is barely more used than Toronto's sheppard line, even though it stops
right near one of my childhood neighborhoods in Outremont. But its routes
have also been even more politically driven (consider how much the green
line curves west of Atwater to avoid touching Westmount, and for that matter
any other traditionally Anglo areas). The commission also named a major
transfer point after Lionel Groulx, a really nasty xenophobe and
anti-semitic catholic priest.


Things Montreal did right:

- tunnels are deeper than stations, so trains get a gravity boost when
leaving stations and a gravity slowdown when entering them.

- Its transfers at Lionel-Groulx (and I think at Snowdon) are very clever,
so that most people don't need to go up or down a floor to switch (I wish
St. George could be done that way...)

- From the very beginning the Metro went outside of Montréal proper
(Longueuil) and it now goes into Laval -- decades before the Toronto subway
ventures out of 416.

- Nicely designed stations (compared to Toronto's traditional bathroom-tile
motif)


Things Montréal's subway does worse than Toronto's

- really horrible bus-to-Metro and Metro-to-bus transfers, especially in the
Montreal winter. The TTC really got this right, and at some newer stations
(such as Kipling) it's REALLY fast.

- rubber tires. The ride isn't really much better, but the system always
smells of burning rubber and occasionally they explode

- smaller cars and smaller tunnels -- much lower capacity than Toronto's

- really, REALLY long exit corridors in some stations. Think of the tunnel
that connects the two lines at Spadina, and some are longer than that.

On the balance  I like Toronto's system better. Uglier, but far more
functional and efficient.

- Evan
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