scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
Those numbers are for the Transfer City plan, though, not what Metrolinx might be considering. An Eglinton subway, an Eglinton RT extension, even a fully grade separated streetcar, would all see ridership beyond what Transfer City says it would. Of course, that 52.8M riders figure will be bandied about as if it's representative of existing demand and would be applicable no matter what is built along Eglinton, no matter where stations are located and how fast vehicles go, etc. The same thing happened with Sheppard - people use that 45,000 daily riders mark as what ridership for an extended line would be, too, so you get journalists and politicians and city officials and internet transit geeks saying we can't extend the subway because ridership is only 45,000 a day (because with subways, everything has to be at maximum capacity, whereas with LRT, even 10% full is good enough).
An important thing to note is that much of these ridership figures consist of rides that do not currently exist. The Eglinton corridor can only reach any of these forecasts by seeing new residents move into redeveloped areas, new jobs, new stores, by luring people out of cars and off the highways. Of course, since they don't represent "real" existing demand, these rides don't need to be along Eglinton and can be created or moved elsewhere - condos can get built anywhere, crosstown travel can be done on other routes. Yet, it's obvious that the city thinks the Eglinton corridor is important for redevelopment and generating "crosstown travel," and thinks it's certainly worth spending billions on, which makes their rebuffs of Metrolinx' or others' suggestions to consider other options so perplexing.
Eglinton's potential ridership could be cannibalized by other projects, the projected new jobs and residents may never materialize, fewer people than expected may switch from other routes, etc....it's definitely a case of not needing a subway unless they build a subway. But if Eglinton is so important, why not just build a subway and dramatically boost Eglinton's redevelopment and crosstown travel appeal? "Oh, no, there won't be money left over," they whine, but in the context of a $55 billion plan, there will be almost $50 billion left over, more than enough to build whatever is desired. It's the denial of other options and the refusal to match up the transit plans with the planning visions that are really strange: if the province offers even the slightest hint that it'd support and pay for something more than an LRT line, why not listen to them? It's not like the city isn't already *entirely* dependent on the province to pay for the tunneled streetcar...and it's not like a $3B tunneled streetcar has no possibility of being shortened or delayed or cancelled.
