Search results

I jut finished writing a Wikipedia article on Network 2011. It's the document that gave us the Sheppard subway, the Eglinton West line, and the DRL, and as such is the origin point for an awful lot of what we talk about here. Many here know far more about these things than I, so let me know...

Sheppard might not be a failure, but it is certainly overbuilt. It's short length has nothing to do with the low ridership numbers at most of its stations. As it goes further east, density only decreases and ridership numbers would be even lower. The current bus is the eighth most used, and that...

As someone working pretty directly with that machine, it had nothing much to do with the Vaughan campaign. Vaughan has a good organization of his own, and was never in any jeopardy, so there wasn't even any need for anyone else to get involved.

On the campaign trail Ford called for commercial taxes to be set at a level below the 905. He hasn't spoken much about that since getting elected, and it would open a huge gap in the budget. Ford isn't a fiscal conservative, he's a populist (As calls for unneeded police and subways prove). If...

Looking at the density map, a strong case could be made that the Flemingdon-Thorncliffe area along Eglinton East is the single part of the city most in need of higher order transit.

If he employs the Lastman strategy of hiking corporate rates, raising user fees, and raiding the reserves, he can close most of that gap. Especially if the province agrees to throw in a few million. The advantage Lastman had was a three year term. You can burn the reserves and delay spending...

There are two types of numbers that matter, rider counts and vote counts and the latter tends to take precedence. It's the same reason Sheppard was given priority in the Network 2011 plan. Transit planning in Toronto has to deal with three preconditions: *Etobicoke voters won't support transit...

Factors like connecting routes can skew the numbers somewhat, but they mostly shift riders from one nearby station to another. Chester with no routes has a low ridership, but Pape next door has a much higher ridership than the other Danforth stations. A line averages out to match the density of...

Thinking about the density maps on another thread, one way to evaluate routes is to compare only their middle sections, ignoring the terminuses and the sections downtown where they are mostly unloading passengers. This will give us a good measure of how useful it would be to build similar lines...

From the National Post: Good for them, mockery is always a much better tool than anger to deal with things like this.

The point is that Ford has been stating that “there was never a vote on council for Transit City, and if there was I’d like to see that,” but it seems that Transit City passed council by an overwhelming margin. Even if Miller and Giambrone were absent, I'm pretty sure they knew about the vote...

Here is a version of that map with all current subway stations, and their ridership added: You can talk about connecting surface routes all you want, but station usage does correlate with density. The big exceptions are the terminal stations, that do have much larger feeder zones.

Over the course of the election I spoke to several hundred people about transit issues, and this isn't true at all. You just have to mention that LRT will cost them fewer tax dollars, and any preference for subway quickly vanishes.

That's a great map. What most jumps out at me is why the heck a subway to Vaughan is taking priority over so many more needed projects. The big missing item, and one that might be affecting Vaughan, is employment. The financial district has over 100,000 jobs in some of those tracts, but is a...

Sounds like the next canvass will be in Malvern. Will be interesting to talk to people there and find out what they really think of the various options.

The 1 and 2 buses through downtown in mixed traffic used to always use artics when I was there, and traffic was never much more of an issue than normal. The big problem was their performance in the snow. Especially on hills, and the routes they ran along were always very flat. That might be a...

You mean for not getting reelected in 1995? Because the NDP was trying to build three subway lines when they were in office.

Exactly my point. Speed isn't the top priority. Frequency, close stops, extended hours, system integration, and price are also crucial. LRT beats subway on accessibility, and can also win out on hours and frequency. Indirectly it wins out on price, as we have to pay for subways one way or the...

LRT is still better than BRT on all three of those measures. The Ottawa Transitway hits 10,000 peak passengers per hour, more than any of the Transit City routes are planned to. But it takes 175 buses to do this. One about every 20 seconds. You'd have far fewer buses, and operators, needed to...

Do you have a link for that, because that "analyst" doesn't know what they're talking about. It was the old city of Toronto that was most opposed to amalgamation, in part because it would lead to suburban domination. Moreover, at the moment more taxes are collected downtown than are spent...