"Downtown Core Line" - Possible Alignments?

[gweed123]

Your argument doesn't make sense to me. Union is more of a destination than Bloor-Yonge: tons of people get off at Union (in terms of GO passengers anyway who never take the TTC). So it'd be in even less danger than B-Y of ever having overcrowding problems with the DRL there.

I'm just saying that with so many people entering/exiting/transferring/passing through the station at once, it could potentially overwhelm the station. Having 3 options inside the downtown for DRL passengers to enter/exit/transfer will spread the peak hour load out more evenly, reducing the likelihood of an overcrowding.

The dispersion of passengers in the AM rush hour once they've exited Union is more or less 1 directional (North). By spreading this out, you not only reduce the load on the DRL @ Union itself, you also reduce the load on the pedestrian infrastructure that has to carry it. Remember, assuming the DRL goes through Union, a lot of these passengers WOULD have gotten off at King and walked west when they used to use YUS, but now they're getting off at Union and walking north, along with the YUS/WWLRT and GO crowds.

 

[rbt]

If you use that logic, then you should put the subway into Finch rather than Queen, King, or Union, because there are even more passengers there!

The Yonge line extension is exactly this and that's the project that is to generate funding for the DRL.

Which is to say, we want a subway at Finch so badly that we are willing to build a second one downtown to do it.

 

[M II A II R II K]

With only one interchange between YUS and DRL, I can just see that station potentially becoming another Bloor-Yonge (although I don't see it ever handling quite as many passengers as B-Y does now).

They'll probably build the stations as large as Sheppard/Yonge with 3 platforms so it'll probably have the capacity to handle even more passengers than Bloor/Yonge.

 

[kEiThZ]

King and Queen are already overcapacity and cannot even be put into dedicated ROWs since there is no room...

There are innovative solutions. Recall the King St. Transit Mall that was on the table as little as a year ago. It only died because of Transit City. That would have dramatically improved service for downtowners. Not just that, it would have been highly compatible with and supported improved streetlife.

...and have far lower capacity compared to the waterfront lines proposed as a result.

Your right about that. However, that's largely because the new LRVs will be replacing the current streetcars and dramatically increasing capacity. The WWLRT will also be providing relief to several streetcar routes along the way as passengers transfer to it instead of continuing all the way downtown on a streetcar.

It's rather poor analysis to exclude the mitigating factors that will significantly reduce pressure on streetcar lines through the core. The WWLRT will provide a some relief to 501 riders and could result in a permanent terminus at Lakeshore or at least plenty of short-turning there instead of going up Roncesvalle. Keep in ming that the largest beneficiaries of the poorly named Waterfront West LRT will be residents who use the 501 and 508 for travel into the core. That should significantly ease crowding on those lines.

As a relief line, the priority should be about servicing the existing areas more than the new areas.

That's why we bought new, higher capacity streetcars. Council didn't even debate a subway line to relieve streetcar routes. Nor was the DRL proposed as relief for the streetcar routes by the TTC. The DRL was only made a condition for the building of the Finch extension. As such the priority is Yonge-Bloor. The TTC obviously feels that the new LRVs will provide more than enough relief to the existing streetcar routes. And I'd agree with them. I think the perception of crowding on thse routes will change significantly once the new LRVs are deployed.

While King is clearly the most urgent, and has (by a wide margin) more development, Queen should not be considered insignificant either. The sum of all these innercity neighbourhoods along with gentrification potential in downtown's Ontario Housing communities, could easily trump the demand level for mass transit that Cityplace would.

If you admit that King is the most urgent, than why would we build a subway on Queen? And as Scarberian has pointed out, gentrification has worked to reduce population not increase it. When have you ever had a gentrifiers who added density? I can't think of an example in Toronto. And gentrifiers who also tend to be wealthier are also less likely to take transit. Another downward pressure on transit use along Queen. Replace the streetcar which has 300 m spacing with a subway with 1km spacing and they might not bother taking transit at all.

 

[kEiThZ]

I could list out literally dozens of condominium/loft infill projects mentioned on this very website that are either recently completed or are under construction as we speak. This is all going on in spite of not being promised a new subway. Add up the demand for mass transit that these new communities will place on a system already choking with too many riders through the innercity, and then explain to me where ultimately is in a worse position, today and 25 years from now?

Loft infill and condo projects here and there don't make communities. CityPlace is 44 acres. The distillery district is 13 acres. Those are communities. Lofts and mid rise condo won't add significantly to transit demand. Second to houses, lofts are about the lowest density housing you can build.

And now your argument seems to be shifting from Queen street to concern about the inner city. If the concern is about the inner city, than virtually any of the alignments will do. And if you really want to be picky than King, which has the most streetcar ridership and the highest density of riders (given the length of Queen) should be the preferred alignment throug the inner city.

Cityplace is only one neighbourhood. Once it is built it's history.

And you suggest I put out non-sequiturs, straw men and false dichotomies?
You just wrote off nearly 8000 residents who are already there. There's already 5000 units there. And there are another 2500 coming on stream by 2011-2012. I believe there's only three buildings left to build (Panorama and Parade East and West).

Whether it actually generates enough transit-oriented commuter traffic to the levels worth sustaining a subway line through it remains to be seen.

If it has the ridership to impact three streetcar lines, we can be fairly sure that it can sustain one subway stop.

Anyway, we'll set aside CityPlace for now and agree to disagree since even my preferred alignment does not run through the neighourhood (I just don't think it's logical to write off entire neighbourhoods because of a narrow worldview).

The downtown core as a whole needs rapid transit, not just the southernmost periphery.

I disagree. Most of the riders today are along the southern periphery as evidenced by streetcar and subway ridership on King. Should they not get priority?

Also is it not obvious that anyone desiring points off central Dundas (e.g Chinatown or Regent Park) may opt to walk it down to a Queen Line as well? They likely would not were the alignment anymore to the south.

That's a penny wise, pound foolish strategy. We'd help out a few thousand riders from Chinatown or Regent Park by putting the line on Queen while forcing hundreds of thousands of riders to transfer back to YUS (which really means they'll not use the DRL) or walk to King and lower. How is that fair?

The demand speaks for itself. 501 Queen- 43,500; 505 Dundas- 35,200; 506 Carlton- 41,200; 504/508 King- 53,100. Roughly two-thirds of these routes' ridership stems from the innercity. We could also throw in the north-south feeder routes which number in the tens of thousands on-board per route everyday.

You're again conflating the idea of helping relieve congestion in the core with the Queen subway. Nice try. The best alignment to relieve all those streetcar lines would be the one that intersects all of them. How will a Queen subway help out the busiest corridor on your list: King? At least a King alignment will intersect all those streetcar lines.

The only credible evidence we should be citing is that which indicates what transit use conditions are now, and not what they could be based on computed algorithms.

You're absolutely right. Please refer to my earlier post about subway and streetcar ridership and tell me where you'd put the line.

http://www.urbantoronto.ca/showpost.php?p=317654&postcount=662

And here's where you've lost me. Kilometre apart spaced subway stations are less pedestrian friendly than a streetcar stopping every 300 metres.

That same argument could be used for Queen street. Why would we want a less pedestrian friendly solution for such a vibrant street? And that does not even take into account the devastating impact of construction on the character of Queen.

Like I said earlier, the DRL I'd advocate for is only 7 stops from Pape-Union. That it necessarily has to follow the CNR alignment in order to achieve this is where I disagree. A fan-shaped DRL swinging up several streets en route to the Bloor-Danforth introduces mass transit to far more priorty communities than the CNR ROW alone could. Think about it, only the Portlands is really excluded from the catchment of a more northerly aligned DRL (West Don Lands in fact extends upto Queen & River Sts). St Lawrence, Distillery and Riverside would all have common stops to both proposals.

Portlands in the East. Liberty Village and CityPlace in the West. And Portlands is no small neighbourhood. The city has had to break it into three neighbourhoods to manage development. However, I agree with you that those are not nearly as important as the amount of riders currently riding the YUS loop (most of which lies between King and Front).

So what's wrong with them walking south via the climate-controlled PATH network? A hypothetical Queen-Bay Station takes into account that the CBD isn't the be-all/end-all of desirable hot-spots within downtown. City Hall, Eaton Centre, the Opera House plus interchanges with Osgoode & Queen Stns are valid reasons to support such a stop location.

As Scarberian pointed out, they won't walk, they'll take the subway. And a decade later, we'll be right back where we started with Yonge-Bloor. If you really want to build the Queen as a DRL, the only way to truly provide relief in that case is to take it all the way to Kennedy in the East.

Tunneling through a natural aquifer is more costly. Most of the land around the rail corridor southwards is fill, there is no base rock til several metres down literally at water table level. And beneath Wellington there's a matrix of parking structures and building foundations to contend with. King's even worse in this regard. All the elevation drops and sloping the subway right-of-way would have to make to get through this area is engineerially difficult and very expensive. You could not build a St Lawrence Stn if the line had to directly stop at Union, and worse still, mitigating all the railway properties east of Parliament would mean having to tunnel underneath them deep, under the Don River basin deep!

There's challenges to be sure. But it'll be nowhere as expensive or as difficult as people make it out to be. We have built one of our busiest subway stations south of Front and we have a streetcar tunnel that's being extended even further today. Neither of those is experiencing your earlier proposed exaggerations of flooding, electrical issues or collapsing tunnels. And if the streetcar tunnel is proof the cost to build through the aquifier will not be prohibitive either.

I agree with you though, that cost would climb when building in and around Union station. As for Wellington, there's a solution: expropriate the garages. Or go underneath them. It would not cost significantly more to tunnel deeper. And if you ever seen some of London's tube stations, even a deep Wellington alignment will seems like a cake-walk.

Queen with its typically low- to mid-rise structures lack these significant subsurface obstacles.

Except as pointed out earlier, with all the designated structures on Queen, we'll have a tough time constructing the line and all the required entrances and such too. Just like the subsurface challenges on Wellington or Front should not be minimized, the surface challenges on Queen should not be either. And the biggest challenge: the impact of construction on the merchants. How many of them would support ripping up Queen for half a decade and cutting off streetcar service as well in that time period?

 

[Whoaccio]

Can people please stop with quote wars? You can quote the thesis statement only and get more or less the same effect, you don't need to respond to each and every point directly. They are a real PITA to read through, for me at least. Anything with more than 4-5 quotes just seems excessive.

 

[kEiThZ]

^ How else do you respond to posts attempting to throw everything but the kitchen sink to make their argument stick? There's no cogent thesis in many of their advocacy arguments.

 

[GraphicMatt]

Maybe we can come to a consensus if we work backwards, starting with alignments that clearly are not appropriate.

I'll start:

- College
- Dupont
- Middle of the Gardiner
- Leslie Spit - Toronto Island - Airport - Ontario Place - Food Terminal - Sherway

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

As Scarberian pointed out, they won't walk, they'll take the subway. And a decade later, we'll be right back where we started with Yonge-Bloor. If you really want to build the Queen as a DRL, the only way to truly provide relief in that case is to take it all the way to Kennedy in the East.

Actually, I don't know about that - there is plenty of pedestrian traffic flow up the PATH from Union Station to destinations that can be served by both King and Queen station, so clearly walking distance isn't that big an issue. In fact (not to say I prefer Queen as an alignment) it might even be more effective in some ways since it will basically drop people off at the northern edge of the financial core, which is not served by any subways.

When you think about it, E-W TC would actually work quite well as a feeder system for radial subway lines from the core (say DRL up Don Mills instead of LRT north of Eglinton, maybe equivalent up Jane?)

AoD

 

[gweed123]

Can people please stop with quote wars? You can quote the thesis statement only and get more or less the same effect, you don't need to respond to each and every point directly. They are a real PITA to read through, for me at least. Anything with more than 4-5 quotes just seems excessive.

Here's my summed-up argument:

Reasons for a Wellington-Rail alignment and against the Queen Alignment:
1) Serves up-and-coming neighbourhoods of Liberty Village, CityPlace, West Donlands, and the Portlands (to a certain extent).
1)b) Queen St is a stable neighbourhood, with limited redevelopment potential (ie a single strip of RC that is severely limited in height)

2) Redevelopment potential along the rail corridor provides even more brownfield development opportunities. Unused or underused industrial sites are a goldmine for redevelopment if a subway was in place.

3) The DRL needs a fairly large distance between stops. Using the rail corridor can accomplish this, because by and large it is only crossed at major arterials.
3)b) Queen is a localized street, and therefore needs localized transit. The options for a DRL along Queen are either a) closer station stops (akin to B-D), or b) larger gaps between station stops. The former would drastically reduce the speed (and effectiveness) of the DRL, and the latter would not be responding appropriately to the localized nature of the street (just look at Yonge between Eglinton and Lawrence, retail in the middle is worse off than retail closer to the stations).

4) A Wellington alignment through the car addresses the importance of including Union station in the alignment, but does not rely soley on it. The creation of 3 new platforms (Union @ Wellington between Bay and York, south end of King platform from Yonge to Church, and south end of St. Andrew platform from University to Duncan) better distributes this peak hour load of passengers, both on the subway system and the pedestrian network.
4)b) A Queen alignment would provide access to the Eaton Centre, Opera House, etc (as was previously stated). However, these are not large peak-hour generators. The Eaton Centre already has 2 subway stations directly connected to it. Access to the Eaton Centre is not an issue.

5) Using Wellington and the rail corridor will cause significantly less disruption that using Queen. Wellington is not a major transit route, nor is it even really a major street. Compared to losing Queen, Richmond, Adelaide, or King for a couple years, Wellington is the best option. Many of the parking garages that use Wellington also have exits onto King or Front, so they will be able to still function. Streetcar service on King and Queen will be unaffected during construction.

Using the rail corridor outside of the downtown will allow for it to travel along at surface level for periods. There is the other option of building the DRL as an elevated line overtop of the existing rail line. This would eliminate the need to tunnel, and would disrupt rail traffic below even less. This would be especially good for station sections, as building an elevated station is degrees of magnitude less expensive than building an underground station.

5)b) Using Queen would involve shutting down sections of Queen for years at a time. The streetcar service would have to be re-routed onto a combination of Richmond and Adelaide, which business owners would not care for. Also, the larger station stop spacing that would result would be unfair to business owners who used to have a streetcar stop right in front of their door, but now have to walk 300m to reach the nearest station.

The short version: Queen street needs an LRT subway with closer station spacing. The DRL needs an HRT subway with larger station spacing in order to be faster, and to effectively relieve Bloor-Yonge. The two are incompatible, and trying to fit a square peg into a round hole will not work. They are completely separate projects with separate ultimate objectives, they should not be mixed, and compromised into something that is sub-optimal for BOTH projects.

The short, short version: Queen not right. Build DRL somewhere else.

 

[kEiThZ]

Actually, I don't know about that - there is plenty of pedestrian traffic flow up the PATH from Union Station to destinations that can be served by both King and Queen station, so clearly walking distance isn't that big an issue. In fact (not to say I prefer Queen as an alignment) it might even be more effective in some ways since it will basically drop people off at the northern edge of the financial core, which is not served by any subways.

Good point. However, I would say that the pedestrian traffi exists today largely because we don't have fare integration. I should hope that by the time the DRL is pressed in to service, this issue would be resolved. How many would prefer to walk then if they could swipe a card and take the YUS?

The other issue is the fact that the walk is being imposed on TTC riders in this case not GO riders. If you are already on the system, why would you choose a line that leads to a longer walk when there's clearly an alternative.

When you think about it, E-W TC would actually work quite well as a feeder system for radial subway lines from the core (say DRL up Don Mills instead of LRT north of Eglinton, maybe equivalent up Jane?)

I wholeheartedly agree. And if we truly had integrated services TC would be feeding GO stations as well. I would rather see the Don Mills and Jane LRTs scrapped and traded for subways. Just put in a progressive program in place that builds a stop or two every year and grow the line beyond it's initial Union (or Queen or King etc.) to Pape initial stub. In the absolute fantasy scenario it would go all the way to Sheppard for me!

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Good point. However, I would say that the pedestrian traffi exists today largely because we don't have fare integration. I should hope that by the time the DRL is pressed in to service, this issue would be resolved. How many would prefer to walk then if they could swipe a card and take the YUS?

Actually, even if you do have fare integration, why would anyone want to hassle with waiting for another subway train, get jam packed into it (during rush), ride for one (or two stops) and get off at a station where you still have to walk to get to your destination when you get just walk in comfort from the station you got off at originally and get there in about the same amount of time?

The other issue is the fact that the walk is being imposed on TTC riders in this case not GO riders. If you are already on the system, why would you choose a line that leads to a longer walk when there's clearly an alternative.

Same reason as above - negligible time savings and quality of the walk. Case in point - under sub-optimal boarding conditions (e.g. Yonge line south of Bloor) you'd get increased pedestrian movement along sites that are served by the subway - it's not worth the hassle to try to get on for minimal benefits.

AoD

 

[GenerationW]

Assuming smaller stop spacing in the downtown core portion of the DRL, I would choose King. In addition to relieving YUS, why not build something that also completely eliminates the need for this overloaded streetcar route?

 

[kEiThZ]

Perhaps the coming experiments with route splitting will yield insight into how services can be improved and the true state of overcrowding on the 501 Queen.

 

[Paleo]

I don't see why a "single intersection point" with YUS is dangerous. How many transfers are we expecting from YUS to DRL and vice versa?

Union is a busy station during rush hour. Outside of that it's not that bad at all. With renovations I don't see how Union could possibly be overloaded by the DRL. On one hand, people say it's not important because it's a hub not a destination. On the other hand, people say the DRL will overload Union. So which is it?

Why must there be so many disingenuous dichotomies presented in every thread...