Finch West Line 6 LRT

[afransen]

We do have a lot of non locals coming here to say we need subways subways subways but not realize that it’s not helpful for these neighborhoods.

For those hopping on for a few stops, this will be great. For those looking for a straight connect from Humber polytechnic to Finch West. The C-Train like service would be great. However the locals looking to take it a few blocks would have to take the bus instead.

C-Train stations were built cheaply in railway corridors, highway mediums or other fast flowing roads space approximately 2km apart. Access is near impossible without a car or taking a local infrequent route. So while the ride is great, you need to open a car to get anywhere fast. Plus those huge GO station like parking lots are insane. Totally not suitable for Toronto.

Using the bus to travel a few stops is generally fairly acceptable. The problem is when there is so much travel demand on the alignment that even with high frequency, buses are crowded with people traveling longer distances. Higher order transit has more expensive stations so they need to be fewer and far between, and it reduces the crowding on buses making more local stops.

 

[a2z]

The route maps within the Waterloo trains include the bus connections for each station, iirc.
I think that would be a nice-to-have for this line - esp. as some of the station names aren't the most straightforward (e.g. Emery, Mount Olive)

 

[Steve X]

LOL non-locals? Subways are what Toronto needs because this city moves the ridership of an entire region on a single corridor. They aren’t a luxury and they aren’t some ‘downtown elite’ toy. They’re basic infrastructure in a city like Toronto. So enough of this ‘out-of-towners don’t understand’ spin. That warped mentality….treating the outer boroughs as an afterthought while pretending only the core matters….is how Rob Ford got elected in the first place, and why Doug Ford is running the province now. When you keep giving the boroughs scraps, you feed the resentment that puts Ford-style politics in power.

Toronto is one city, not some downtown bubble with satellite towns attached. Build subways where the people actually live, move, and work, and stop pretending Calgary’s model can be cut-and-pasted onto a city that outgrows it every single morning rush hour.

Do you live on Finch and see how many people get on and off? They aren’t going downtown or across the city for their groceries are they? Something like the Scarborough subway would just help the elites get around while the locals are stuck on buses. I think you’re selfish for what you want to see.

Yes this line can be faster if they optimize a few things but 2km station spacing isn’t the answer for streets like Finch West or Jane.

They could build a subway like LRT on the hydro corridor instead for you and those who just wants to zoom by.

 

[T3G]

LOL non-locals? Subways are what Toronto needs because this city moves the ridership of an entire region on a single corridor. They aren’t a luxury and they aren’t some ‘downtown elite’ toy. They’re basic infrastructure in a city like Toronto. So enough of this ‘out-of-towners don’t understand’ spin. That warped mentality….treating the outer boroughs as an afterthought while pretending only the core matters….is how Rob Ford got elected in the first place, and why Doug Ford is running the province now. When you keep giving the boroughs scraps, you feed the resentment that puts Ford-style politics in power.

Toronto is one city, not some downtown bubble with satellite towns attached. Build subways where the people actually live, move, and work, and stop pretending Calgary’s model can be cut-and-pasted onto a city that outgrows it every single morning rush hour.

So, what, we should give the outer boroughs the most expensive, overbuilt toys possible just because they throw large enough temper tantrums?

In the old days, we did this crazy thing called planning transit around ridership and density. Now it's thoughts and feelings. If I lived along the 33 Forest Hill bus, and I got enough people to sign a petition saying that they felt like third class citizens, does that mean we should replace the 33 with a subway?

You know who should feel like a third class citizen? The people who live in the suburbs outside of Toronto, who have such comically poor transit that it makes even the 6 look like high class transit. When the Milton line, which takes an hour end to end and pre-COVID was the busiest GO train line outside of the Lakeshore corridor, isn't running, my commute can take anywhere from 1 hr 20 minutes on a good day, to 2 hours on a bad day. No one seems interested in helping us, any time a proposal is brought forth to do anything about the situation everyone always wrings their hands and says that the money is better spent elsewhere, and I'm supposed to support building subways to places where the density and ridership don't remotely justify them, all so that they don't have to feel like they're being slighted by the downtown elites? Give me a break. LRT is exactly correct for the built form of Finch West, all it needs is operational improvements.

 

[Steve X]

I just feel like the amount of comments made like you’re moving to a new house but I’ll come and decide that your dinner table should be replaced. How do you feel?

We can all agree they need to fix this slowness. Hopefully they will connect it to Woodbine GO sooner than later and have a fast connection downtown.

 

[robmausser]

The fix is quite easy - no idling at stops for 2-3 mins for no reason and true signal priority meaning that. The train should never stop at a red light - that should be the goal but this is Toronto, so not holding my breath.

Theres a third fix: running the trains as fast as Metrolinx did when they tested the line. As soon as the TTC got the keys the trains have been running significantly slower.

 

[Steve X]

Theres a third fix: running the trains as fast as Metrolinx did when they tested the line. As soon as the TTC got the keys the trains have been running significantly slower.

I feel like TTC imposed their own streetcar rules which slowed it down further.

 

[Kyle Campbell]

Out of curiosity, does the Line 6 Citadii shudder like it's going to go off the rails when it makes the turn at Humber College like the Ottawa ones do on a tight (really any) corner?

 

[ssiguy2]

Did some more fact checking.....

The Edmonton Valley Line operates very much like Finch. It uses the exact same low-floor Bombardier Flexity trains, has 13 km of track with 12 stations, runs mostly at grade but does the route in exactly 20 minutes and yet Edmontonians complain because it's too slow. Not only does this useless line have too many stops but there is NO excuse for these trains to be stopping at any lights. They only run every 6 minutes in rush hour and with today's technology, they should be able to run stop-free the entire length.

This is a scandalous waste of money and an affront to the long-suffering transit users in North-West Toronto.

 

[Transportfan]

So then why aren't the Ion or Edmonton or Calgary LRT stops deleted?

Gotta ask the people that wrote them...but IMO on-street stops don't really need articles.

 

[Amare]

Theres a third fix: running the trains as fast as Metrolinx did when they tested the line. As soon as the TTC got the keys the trains have been running significantly slower.

I've said it before, if the TTC isnt interested in operating the line (irrespective of lack of TSP) to it's full operational capabilities, than outsource the operations to someone who will. This clown show of neutered operations has gone on for too long with the TTC, and their operational ineptitude is horridly embarrassing.

Some internal operational competition (through another operator) would show people in this city, in a more glaring way, how pathetically bad the TTC is at operating LRVs. I've been all more than supporting of the TTC operating the line in the past, especially when Metrolinx orginally planned for the operations to be outsourced to another operator until the TTC and city complained about it. But unfortunately, the TTC has shown that they arent really serious about improving streetcar operations, and Finch West is looking to be much of the same.

It's the first day of operations so i'll spare them my scathing lambasting for now but if this continues throughout December, then I think we've seen enough evidence of what the operations of this line will be like.

 

[untitled space craft]

At risk of belabouring this point, I took the line today and was not impressed with its speed (or rather, its lack thereof). I recorded my trips using a GPS app and it told me that my average speed from Finch West to Humber was 10.8 km/h (57 min), and my average speed on the return leg was 12.6 km/h (48 min). Do keep in mind that this is a slight overestimate, as there was no GPS signal for the first 1-2 minutes the LRV spent ambling along underground at ~10 km/h, and the true average speed would be even lower.

The nice thing about this app is that it provides a very detailed trip summary, including a GPS trace and a speed/time graph. It's the graphs in particular that I want to share, in part to bring some data back to this discussion which seems to have wandered back into the tired debate of LRT/subway/second class citizens/etc.

First, the summary pages:

And now the graphs, enlarged and annotated by me:

The blue line represents speed. The orange line represents altitude, which for our purposes can be ignored (it's not very accurate, anyways).

I've used yellow "H"s to represent time spent at stops, and red "H"s to represent time spent waiting at red lights. I've also circled each time the LRV stopped at a red light before proceeding to a far-side stop.

The first thing that sticks out is the cruising speed of just 30-40 km/h. The line has a speed limit of 60 km/h, and it makes no sense to run the trains slower than they need to be. The line is literally built for 60 km/h operations--this is perhaps the lowest hanging fruit in terms of ways to speed up the line.

I've also heard that there is a 25 km/h speed limit through intersections. While I hoped for these graphs to show if this was the case, I don't have any definitive evidence of this, at least on the trips I took. However, there is some circumstantial evidence in that the only section where the LRV seemed to move with any sense of urgency is between Kipling and Islington, a dead-straight section of track where there are no intersections. There's also a moment in the return trip where the speed seems to drop when passing through an intersection, but I only caught that one instance. Of course, it's also possible that driving at a top speed of ~30 km/h makes the deceleration less noticeable. Eliminating this rule (assuming it exists) would be another way to speed up journeys without making any changes to the physical infrastructure.

Now we come to the issue of traffic lights. I will echo the calls for transit priority, because my god these things stop way too much. On the first leg, there were 10 instances of double-stopping, representing over half of the 18 stops!! It is absurd to think that we spent 2.5 billion dollars on this only for it to have the same problem as the streetcars.

All of this is to say that the line has no reason to be this slow. While it will never be subway speeds, it can (and should) definitely travel faster than 13 km/h!

 

[Westey]

What a depressing first day of service. Embarrassingly slow operating speeds, waiting several mins at red lights. What's the point of RSD if they need to torture riders by crawling along to be cautious? Province / city are run by idiots

I remember so many transit fans were so happy when the Wynne gov't signed the agreement for this transit line in the writ period before they were defeated. That way the line would be built as planned by the Transit City group and not be subject to Ford delays which might turn it into a SkyTrain / Canada line style service with 40m elevated platforms.
Those people got what they wished for.

 

[JSF-1]

I remember so many transit fans were so happy when the Wynne gov't signed the agreement for this transit line in the writ period before they were defeated. That way the line would be built as planned by the Transit City group and not be subject to Ford delays which might turn it into a SkyTrain / Canada line style service with 40m elevated platforms.
Those people got what they wished for.

Okay I get that the line is in need of improvement but there is absolutely zero indication this was ever going to happen. If anything the line would have gotten the Hamilton LRT treatment and be cancelled and then reinstated. Everyone from politicians to engineers knows that Finch West can only support a BRT or LRT, anything beyond that like a Light-Metro would be grossly overbuilt and make the Sheppard Line look like Line 1 in comparison.

 

[TRONto]

For those commenting on the extension to Woodbine, the city requested Metrolinx to prioritize it March 2024. If some of the insiders have any insight that'd be great but as far as I know this was the last news on this topic.
"b. request Metrolinx to advance planning of a Finch West Light Rapid Transit extension to Woodbine and beyond to Pearson International Airport."

https://secure.toronto.ca/council/agenda-item.do?item=2024.EX12.5