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"Downtown Core Line" - Possible Alignments?

What is your prefere alignment for a new E/W subway through Downtown


  • Total voters
    231
Network Scope Considerations

My take:

1. There have, in the past, been many calls for improvements of some form or another to the Queen and King streetcar services, but except for a few failed pilot projects, nothing ever really happens with these. There's always too much fear of disruption and/or of the actual results of the improvements on the streetscape in the more radical proposals such as the King St. "Semi-Mall" (which had the alternating one-way streets... I find that idea rather interesting). King is bursting at the seams and is absolutely incapable of keeping up with demand. New LRVs will help, but won't be a permanent solution. Queen, particular when you include the Queen East Kingston Road services, has more complicated issues to resolve and is currently a disaster.

2. Queen's Quay W. has gotten a dedicated ROW streetcar service along it since the DRL was last studied. Another is also proposed for Bremner, and the line is proposed to extend along Queen's Quay E. as part of the master planning for the East Bayfront and Lower Don Lands, which will see branching routes down Cherry and Commissioners, of which service should be consistent on both since this ties into the services coming from Cherry north of the railway in the West Don Lands project. Given how narrow the Queen's Quay and Lakeshore corridors' catchment area is between the railway and the lake, LRT services here are the best-fit for servicing these areas, especially when combined with the expanded services of GO Transit in the area. The Cherry LRT will inevitably become a connecting route to the DRL to provide high-quality access and service to the Portlands well-suited to the level of demand that can be expected to originate from it.

3. GO Transit is talking with the City, at the City's request, about getting stations added at Liberty Village and at Cherry St. There's the potential for another GO Station somewhere around Pape, but depends on what DRL alignment does get selected. The Liberty Village station has the ability to intercept GO Rail traffic from Barrie, Bolton, Georgetown, and Milton corridors, and would also be a short walk from the Exhibition station (but the Ex is going to have at least 3 LRT connections later as well, including a dedicated ROW to north of Front/Bathurst when the bridge is reconstructed), offering potentially massive alleviation of Union Station pedestrian congestion by intercepting GO Commuters before they get to Union. The same can be done around Pape with a new station intercepting Stouffville and Lakeshore East traffic.

If the DRL is extended north towards Eglinton, it becomes possible to intercept ridership from the Richmond Hill and Seaton lines as well.

4. The PATH currently heads north from Union, in a variety of directions, but all to the north of Union. The large volumes of people, which are not only in the PATH but also on the surface along streets like Bay (I've tried to walk north against this crowd in the PM peak when they're heading south, it's surreal), are all heading north of Union station, suggesting that their final destinations are all north of Union, typically (but not exclusively) towards the King St. area. If this traffic can be intercepted from the GO lines east and west of Union Station, the pedestrian demands will be much better distributed and much easier to manage and navigate, with good, moderate flows in both directions.

5. The point of a network is to provide travel options, not to have every line converge on a common point, which inevitably becomes a choke point or pinch point. Taking a DRL to Union is going to increase pedestrian congestion and make a complicated situation worse than an alternative alignment further north.

6. The ROI would not be maximized by running one corridor directly along another. A higher ROI would be yeilded by the network branching more for a wider coverage and offering more choices and destinations. Adding more GO Stations with higher frequency GO Train Service will yeild results comparable to adding a subway station in the same spot, if well-designed.

7. As a Relief Line, the priority should be to follow as closely as possible the corridor or corridors that are not capable of meeting the demand levels today. This approach is what made the Bloor-Danforth and Yonge lines so successful (as well as what made the Spadina line less successful north of St.Clair W.).

While there are significant large-scale developments in large quantity along the waterfront, LRT services in dedicated ROWs with diverse streetscapes designed to serve the projected levels of demand from these developments and distributed across various modes (ped., bike, transit, car (in that order of priority IIRC)) are already included in the plan and shouldn't be over-capacity anytime in the foreseeable future. By contrast, King and Queen are already overcapacity and cannot even be put into dedicated ROWs since there is no room, and have far lower capacity compared to the waterfront lines proposed as a result. As a relief line, the priority should be about servicing the existing areas more than the new areas. While King is clearly the most urgent, and has (by a wide margin) more development, Queen should not be considered insignifant either.

8. The potential for the DRL to run at the surface in the rail corridor is limited. It was more realistic in the 1980s but now the network and core has changed. The maximum subway slope is 3.5%. There happens to be an LRT tunnel underneath Bay St., at about the same depth as the Union subway platform. A DRL would have to go under that tunnel. The change in elevation required is about 20m. This would require the DRL to plough down at a full 3.5% slope immediately from Jarvis to make it under that tunnel, which would make a Jarvis station impossible because the subway alignment would have to go up a bit and then slope down in advance of hitting Jarvis in order to descend as quickly as possible (subways can't go from a 0% slope to a 3.5% slope on a dime). If the subway is also expected to be in a tunnel east of Cherry (this is to get under the yard as I understand it?), then this stretch from roughly Cherry to Jarvis is about 1.2km at grade. This would also suggest the alignment would go under the Don River? I would think a short bridge across the Don River would be much more preferable (and much cheaper), and I think that such can be done if it cuts across the West Don Lands north of the railway (but understandably not realistic if crossing the yards). As for the west side, another 1.25km can probably be squeezed out at-grade between Spadina and Strachan, but there's developments in the way beyond that on either side (or if the alignment goes to the Exhibition, such a station must be underground, or at least in an open cut, to swing under Dufferin immediately after). So while 3.5km might have been possible in the 1980s, it's max 2.5km now. When one considers that roughly 1.5km or so is being added to the route length by going further south, plus the reality that a new DRL Union Subway Station would be an extremely deep and expensive station, plus the costs of going under the Don instead of over, there isn't necessarily a cost savings for this option anymore.

9. Crowd control is much easier when the connections between GO, Yonge Subway, and University-Spadina subway are separated, and this improves network reliability, too, as a common point at Union would see a problem at Union potentially cause problems across the entire network.

Contrary to previous posts about the necessity of expanding stations connecting to a DRL in the core, this is not necessary because the existing loads on the Yonge and University lines will drop substantially since traffic has been diverted to the new line, meaning that the capacity expansion needed is already included in the construction of the new DRL station's platform area. Just include additional exits to the new platform that don't go through the existing station (which is required by code nowadays anyway).

10. King and Queen alignments would cause intolerable levels of disruption due to construction, even if only at stations, likely with severe adverse impacts on the streetlife that makes these places what they are today. Furthermore, King Station and St.Andrew Station are technical nightmares that would require stations as deep as an alignment through Union.



CONCLUSION:

Richmond-Adelaide alignment provides best service to the existing and overstrained core, the best crowd-control and diversionary performance from TTC, GO, and PATH traffic, with the least adverse impacts to streetlife from construction. If a shallow alignment is possible, it has other further advantages.
 
(from the advocacy thread)

I sincerely hope this doesn't happen. I don't really see the point of building a glorified GO line through the densest part of Toronto. I've got nothing against GO but if we are going to spend the requisite billions on a grade separated rail line, cheapening out on stations makes no sense.

soo true, the line shouldn't just be for commuting to and from the downtown core, it should help and improve the areas it runs through. I believe the fron line would not be as sefull as teh queen or even a more northern route, because they have the ROW streetcars, which king/queen/dundas don't have the luxury of implementing, so creating a subway to cater to the waterfron condos that already have a pretty decent transit system (well more decent than most parts of toronto), this s why I htink the queen line coul dnot only alleviate pressure on Yonge-bloor but also alleviate alot of the pressure on the local streetcars as well.
 
(from the advocacy thread)

I sincerely hope this doesn't happen. I don't really see the point of building a glorified GO line through the densest part of Toronto. I've got nothing against GO but if we are going to spend the requisite billions on a grade separated rail line, cheapening out on stations makes no sense.

Or...gasp...spend 25% more to build both express and local tracks. Express service will allow Pape station to be a 5 minute subway ride from downtown, while local tracks serve everything in between.

Secondly, I suggest freeing ourselves from the mindset that one subway line must operate on one street. The DRL should maximize the potential for transfer free travel, and should therefore serve as many large destinations as possible. How about something like this:

NewPicture3.jpg
 
and plus lol how many trip generators are on dundas east??, atleast further south there's the distillery district and st. lawrence market.
 
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I feel like there's a bit of a loss of perspective in this thread -- Dundas (@ Yonge) is just over 1 km away from Front St (@ Yonge), which is less than a 15 minute walk - the study will tell us more, but I'd wager a lot of commuters already walk that far once they get off transit to get to their offices. They're even closer together in the East side, with Queen being less than 500 m away from Front St at Jarvis and Sherbourne.

There's really not a lot of development on Dundas on the east side yet (Though a subway station under One Cole would probably do wonders for the Regent Park development). The smart money on the east side of Yonge is absolutely to stay south (near Front). That way you hit the Distillery and St Lawrence neighbourhoods, which seem to be growing like crazy.

I don't think it needs to go THROUGH Union, it just needs to be NEAR Union - close enough that we can have a fare-paid route that allows an easy transfer to YUS.

They also might want to look at expanding/improving the PATH as they're digging stuff up.
 
^ I wonder how many buildings garages and underground areas you have just demolished :eek:
Eliminating garages would be a good thing wouldn't it? I've heard complaints about damaging the PATH system ... and I'm not sure the concern there - you just rebuild the tunnel as part of the new construction.

Not that I agree with this alignment.
 
One reason I am partial to an Adelaide or an otherwise more northern route as opposed to the railcorridor is the Harbourfront LRT. By which, I mean, if we take a route like Queen or King the already existing streetcar is probably already as close to "LRT" that it will get. South of the rail corridor, the Harbourfront LRT actually has some fairly good bones which, with a bit of polishing up (why does the train travel @ 5km/h in the tunnel?!?!), could easily be pretty decent.

The problem with the proposed WW LRT connection to Union loop is that the cost estimates keep rising.

Therefore, I wonder if it would be more cost-effective to connect WW LRT to the western wing of Downtown Relief line, rather than directly to Union. Say, if DRL West has a station near Queen / Dufferin (before continuing north-west), WW LRT would need just about 1.5 km of tunnel between Roncesvalles and that subway station.

That should be quite a bit cheaper than building a fully grade-separate right of way from Roncesvalles to Exhibition, or a tunnel under Bremner.

One potential drawback is the loss of direct connection to Union. But it should be noted that the trip via Union loop involves a long pedestrian tunnel to get to the subway or GO or just exit TTC. In contrast, the new subway / LRT station at Queen / Dufferin could be built with a provision for cross-platform transfer, and then DRL can take passengers to several downtown destinations, rather than just Union.
 
My take:
1. There have, in the past, been many calls for improvements of some form or another to the Queen and King streetcar services, but except for a few failed pilot projects, nothing ever really happens with these. There's always too much fear of disruption and/or of the actual results of the improvements on the streetscape in the more radical proposals such as the King St. "Semi-Mall" (which had the alternating one-way streets... I find that idea rather interesting). King is bursting at the seams and is absolutely incapable of keeping up with demand. New LRVs will help, but won't be a permanent solution. Queen, particular when you include the Queen East Kingston Road services, has more complicated issues to resolve and is currently a disaster.

As many have argued here before....many of those folks on those LRVs will get diverted to the DRL even if a Front/Wellington alignment is chosen. Without taking the effect of that diversion into account, it's not a fair assumption of how much ridership there will be on Queen and King in the future.

2. Queen's Quay W. has gotten a dedicated ROW streetcar service along it since the DRL was last studied. Another is also proposed for Bremner, and the line is proposed to extend along Queen's Quay E. as part of the master planning for the East Bayfront and Lower Don Lands, which will see branching routes down Cherry and Commissioners, of which service should be consistent on both since this ties into the services coming from Cherry north of the railway in the West Don Lands project. Given how narrow the Queen's Quay and Lakeshore corridors' catchment area is between the railway and the lake, LRT services here are the best-fit for servicing these areas, especially when combined with the expanded services of GO Transit in the area. The Cherry LRT will inevitably become a connecting route to the DRL to provide high-quality access and service to the Portlands well-suited to the level of demand that can be expected to originate from it.

It's just as reasonable to ask...why not save the money of building all those LRTs and give them a subway stop. 1 station in the portlands is a hell of a lot cheaper than a whole LRT line.

3. GO Transit is talking with the City, at the City's request, about getting stations added at Liberty Village and at Cherry St. There's the potential for another GO Station somewhere around Pape, but depends on what DRL alignment does get selected. The Liberty Village station has the ability to intercept GO Rail traffic from Barrie, Bolton, Georgetown, and Milton corridors, and would also be a short walk from the Exhibition station (but the Ex is going to have at least 3 LRT connections later as well, including a dedicated ROW to north of Front/Bathurst when the bridge is reconstructed), offering potentially massive alleviation of Union Station pedestrian congestion by intercepting GO Commuters before they get to Union. The same can be done around Pape with a new station intercepting Stouffville and Lakeshore East traffic.

If the DRL is extended north towards Eglinton, it becomes possible to intercept ridership from the Richmond Hill and Seaton lines as well.

But it's not Union station congestion we are worried about. It's congestion at Bloor-Danforth line interchanges that we are concerned about. With the redesign of Union, the station will be able to handle all those commuters coming in, there is no need to divert them to Liberty Village and then have them do what exactly?

4. The PATH currently heads north from Union, in a variety of directions, but all to the north of Union. The large volumes of people, which are not only in the PATH but also on the surface along streets like Bay (I've tried to walk north against this crowd in the PM peak when they're heading south, it's surreal), are all heading north of Union station, suggesting that their final destinations are all north of Union, typically (but not exclusively) towards the King St. area. If this traffic can be intercepted from the GO lines east and west of Union Station, the pedestrian demands will be much better distributed and much easier to manage and navigate, with good, moderate flows in both directions.

Again, the line is not meant to relieve pedestrian traffic north of union, it's meant to relieve rush-hour passenger loads at Yonge/Bloor. The DRL push by the city is a direct result of studies suggesting that Yonge/Bloor upgrade costs might exceed $1 billion. Passenger traffic can be handled easily. I am sure that the PATH and surface streets though busy have not reached the point where they can't take any more pedestrians. Moreover, placing the line anywhere north of King would still not relieve pedestrian traffic north from Union as most GO users would find it easier to walk a block or two north or would transfer to the YUS loop to get to King and Queen streets.

5. The point of a network is to provide travel options, not to have every line converge on a common point, which inevitably becomes a choke point or pinch point. Taking a DRL to Union is going to increase pedestrian congestion and make a complicated situation worse than an alternative alignment further north.

Actually the point of a transportation network is to facilitate the most efficient travel for the maximum number of users possible. If most of those suburbanites who are riding the DRL work along Front/Wellington, then there's really no point dropping them off on Richmond or Adelaide is there?

As to your assertion that Union is a choke point, I prefer to think of it as a transport node or hub for the core.

6. The ROI would not be maximized by running one corridor directly along another. A higher ROI would be yielded by the network branching more for a wider coverage and offering more choices and destinations.

They only place the two corridors would overlap would be at Union in a Front/Wellington alignment. Any other alignment further north yields two overlapping nodes. So by your definition this would be poor ROI.

Adding more GO Stations with higher frequency GO Train Service will yield results comparable to adding a subway station in the same spot, if well-designed.

No they won't. After MO2020 is complete at best Lakeshore service will be every 10-15 mins. That does not compare to a subway. And stop spacing for GO would be inadequate for the core. Any closer and you slow and degrade service for riders from outside the core. Any further apart and you fail to service sufficient areas. Besides which there are no effective GO lines south of Gerrard and east of Pape....and that's where the first phase of the DRL will be providing local service.
 
7. As a Relief Line, the priority should be to follow as closely as possible the corridor or corridors that are not capable of meeting the demand levels today. This approach is what made the Bloor-Danforth and Yonge lines so successful (as well as what made the Spadina line less successful north of St.Clair W.).

How so? Last I heard BD was perpendicular to YUS. And with the exception of St.George and Spadina, they don't overlap on any segment.

As a relief line, it should provide relief to the network. Whatever alignment does that, get's my vote. IMHO, that would entail debate on how far east the transfer should be to catch passengers from the east early enough.

While there are significant large-scale developments in large quantity along the waterfront, LRT services in dedicated ROWs with diverse streetscapes designed to serve the projected levels of demand from these developments and distributed across various modes (ped., bike, transit, car (in that order of priority IIRC)) are already included in the plan and shouldn't be over-capacity anytime in the foreseeable future. By contrast, King and Queen are already overcapacity and cannot even be put into dedicated ROWs since there is no room, and have far lower capacity compared to the waterfront lines proposed as a result.

But if the line shifts all the non-local riders off the Queen and King streetcars then service for those routes will be adequate.

As a relief line, the priority should be about servicing the existing areas more than the new areas. While King is clearly the most urgent, and has (by a wide margin) more development, Queen should not be considered insignifant either.

Actually, given that we build subway lines to last half a century or more, the goal should be to serve future development. As for the significance of development on King and Queen, like I posted earlier please refer to the Waterfront Toronto plans that are likely to bring in tens of thousands of residents and tens of thousands of workers. There is nothing like it in Toronto at present. All the development along King and Queen may not equal up to just one of the developments in Waterfront Toronto's portfolio.

8. The potential for the DRL to run at the surface in the rail corridor is limited. It was more realistic in the 1980s but now the network and core has changed. The maximum subway slope is 3.5%. There happens to be an LRT tunnel underneath Bay St., at about the same depth as the Union subway platform. A DRL would have to go under that tunnel. The change in elevation required is about 20m. This would require the DRL to plough down at a full 3.5% slope immediately from Jarvis to make it under that tunnel, which would make a Jarvis station impossible because the subway alignment would have to go up a bit and then slope down in advance of hitting Jarvis in order to descend as quickly as possible (subways can't go from a 0% slope to a 3.5% slope on a dime). If the subway is also expected to be in a tunnel east of Cherry (this is to get under the yard as I understand it?), then this stretch from roughly Cherry to Jarvis is about 1.2km at grade. This would also suggest the alignment would go under the Don River? I would think a short bridge across the Don River would be much more preferable (and much cheaper), and I think that such can be done if it cuts across the West Don Lands north of the railway (but understandably not realistic if crossing the yards). As for the west side, another 1.25km can probably be squeezed out at-grade between Spadina and Strachan, but there's developments in the way beyond that on either side (or if the alignment goes to the Exhibition, such a station must be underground, or at least in an open cut, to swing under Dufferin immediately after). So while 3.5km might have been possible in the 1980s, it's max 2.5km now. When one considers that roughly 1.5km or so is being added to the route length by going further south, plus the reality that a new DRL Union Subway Station would be an extremely deep and expensive station, plus the costs of going under the Don instead of over, there isn't necessarily a cost savings for this option anymore.

Who said we are looking to cut construction costs? Given the timeframe that we build a subway for and the cost of the project, at best the challenges you put forward would inflate the costs by upto 10% or so. While that's significant, it's probably not enough to offset billions in lost productivity by putting the line further away from tens of thousands of commuters and their offices.

9. Crowd control is much easier when the connections between GO, Yonge Subway, and University-Spadina subway are separated, and this improves network reliability, too, as a common point at Union would see a problem at Union potentially cause problems across the entire network.

I never knew crowd control was a problem in Toronto. Those 905 ruffians and outer 416 barbarians descend on Union by the thousands daily and there never seem to be any issues. Other than that, you premise in flawed. Crowd control is easier at a single point than dispersed over a wider area.

As for network reliability. If union were to fail, it's likely it would only fail on one of it's lines (DRL or YUS). And that line alone would be effected. That's the same for any other node. Do problems on the Yonge line mean that there are no Bloor-Danforth trains at Yonge/Bloor?

Contrary to previous posts about the necessity of expanding stations connecting to a DRL in the core, this is not necessary because the existing loads on the Yonge and University lines will drop substantially since traffic has been diverted to the new line, meaning that the capacity expansion needed is already included in the construction of the new DRL station's platform area. Just include additional exits to the new platform that don't go through the existing station (which is required by code nowadays anyway).

Actually, regardless of the alignment, we will have people transferring at stations and those stations will need to be modified to accommodate the increase in traffic. Moving the riders to a new line, relieves Yonge/Bloor, but not the rest of the YUS loop as many riders will still be transferring and riding around.

10. King and Queen alignments would cause intolerable levels of disruption due to construction, even if only at stations, likely with severe adverse impacts on the streetlife that makes these places what they are today. Furthermore, King Station and St.Andrew Station are technical nightmares that would require stations as deep as an alignment through Union.

Most of the route will be tunnelled not cut-and-cover, with the exception of the stations. Regardless of which alignment is picked, there will be disrutpion. It does not make sense to locate a multi-billion dollar subway line where nobody will be disrupted, because that means there's nobody there to ride the thing! Besides which, disruptions have to be taken in stride. They're rough for a few years but the rise in property value and increased customer traffic more than make up for any disruption to business during the construction phase. I doubt any business on King would suddenly close shop just because they got a subway line.


CONCLUSION:

Richmond-Adelaide alignment provides best service to the existing and overstrained core, the best crowd-control and diversionary performance from TTC, GO, and PATH traffic, with the least adverse impacts to streetlife from construction. If a shallow alignment is possible, it has other further advantages.

Flawed premises. Flawed arguments. Flawed conclusion.

Welcome to UT by the way. As you can see we debate passionately around here.
 
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(from the advocacy thread)

I sincerely hope this doesn't happen. I don't really see the point of building a glorified GO line through the densest part of Toronto. I've got nothing against GO but if we are going to spend the requisite billions on a grade separated rail line, cheapening out on stations makes no sense.

This is a very important point imho. If the goal is just to get people from Scarborough or Etobicoke to Union more quickly, then the far more sensible option is to integrate TTC and GO physically and fare-wise. While the two agencies have clearly demonstrated that they can't play nice together thus far, the cost of forcing them to do so is far less than the cost of a new subway line. The beginnings of an "express" infrastructure shuttling longer-haul commuters from the 416 and 905 to and from Union are well in place. Downtown Relief may also require finishing the job. The DRL is only part of the Downtown Relief solution.

As for the proposed subway line itself, the DRL should serve dense corridors with trip generators and density along its routes (including GO and subway transfers, employers, residences, and attractions). Obviously, Union is one of those major trip generators and in this respect favours the Front St alignment.
 
As many have argued here before....many of those folks on those LRVs will get diverted to the DRL even if a Front/Wellington alignment is chosen. Without taking the effect of that diversion into account, it's not a fair assumption of how much ridership there will be on Queen and King in the future.
Wellington would divert King ridership... Queen, much less so, it depends a lot on demographics and said demographics' sensivities to distance from stations.


It's just as reasonable to ask...why not save the money of building all those LRTs and give them a subway stop. 1 station in the portlands is a hell of a lot cheaper than a whole LRT line.

Because one subway stop provides vastly less service than a network of LRTs through the neighbourhood(s), which means it isn't reasonable at all to ask one to replace the other, especially when the master planning has come as far as it has already - it's a good plan - and that access to the whole district can't be adequately provided by a single station anyway. The neighbourhoods are designed to be transit oriented through the LRTs, and are therefore an essential part. Furthermore, these neighbourhoods don't require the capacity of a subway anyway - the demand levels will remain well within the capabilities of LRT. Check the studies by BA Group.


But it's not Union station congestion we are worried about.
Maybe you aren't worried about it... but GO Transit is, and so is the TTC, since they're building a second platform for a reason. This is a complex problem that goes well beyond Bloor-Yonge.

It's congestion at Bloor-Danforth line interchanges that we are concerned about. With the redesign of Union, the station will be able to handle all those commuters coming in, there is no need to divert them to Liberty Village and then have them do what exactly?
The redesign doesn't provide unlimited capacity at Union Station. However, the Metrolinx projections show that the demand is going to go beyond what the renovations are designed to accomodate, and this is a really serious concern. If Liberty Village has a GO station added to it, and connects to a DRL there, the DRL can take a decent chunk of the load off of Union Station, then Union Station has a chance of coping well by keeping people away from it.



Again, the line is not meant to relieve pedestrian traffic north of union, it's meant to relieve rush-hour passenger loads at Yonge/Bloor.
It can and should do both. If there are so many people using it in one direction that it becomes unusable for the opposite direction, then that is a problem and is not sustainable. Businesses could also suffer from overcrowding in the PATH. If the demand is taken off the PATH, it can continue to do the job it was designed to do, but if everything comes into Union, then PATH's ability to perform is threatened. There's a lot of merit to the strategy of divide and conquer, and ridership demand is no exception.
The DRL push by the city is a direct result of studies suggesting that Yonge/Bloor upgrade costs might exceed $1 billion.
Actually, those studies haven't been done yet, they've only just had the contracts for those studied awarded (or are in the process of being awarded).
Passenger traffic can be handled easily. I am sure that the PATH and surface streets though busy have not reached the point where they can't take any more pedestrians.
This seems to be an unsupported argument.
Moreover, placing the line anywhere north of King would still not relieve pedestrian traffic north from Union as most GO users would find it easier to walk a block or two north or would transfer to the YUS loop to get to King and Queen streets.
That's dependent on whether the full GO load is coming in to Union Station in the first place. However, that statement you just made reinforces the point that the DRL need not go to Union, since many GO users do walk the two blocks north to their final destination. However, by that same logic, that huge load of passenger traffic can be taken closer to their destination and be put onto a less-strained part of the PATH or streetgrid walking in the less-congested reverse-peak direction to reach their final destination through a DRL diversion. So yes, it actually would relieve pedestrian traffic north from Union, particularly those that currently walk north-east or north-west from Union.



Actually the point of a transportation network is to facilitate the most efficient travel for the maximum number of users possible. If most of those suburbanites who are riding the DRL work along Front/Wellington, then there's really no point dropping them off on Richmond or Adelaide is there?
But most of them won't be bound for Front, more would be bound for King, and many would also be bound for Queen. Just check out the TTC ridership figures. Union is at 80K... King and St.Andrew are at about 60K each, 120K combined. Queen isn't far behind either. Even Dundas has high demand, although Osgoode's isn't as high as the others.

As to your assertion that Union is a choke point, I prefer to think of it as a transport node or hub for the core.
You still don't seem to realize that the capacity of a hub does have limits, and that's why I wouldn't run a DRL through Union... it would push the demand above the hub's capacity limit. Divide and conquer is a critical component in the design of this line.



They only place the two corridors would overlap would be at Union in a Front/Wellington alignment. Any other alignment further north yields two overlapping nodes. So by your definition this would be poor ROI.
If it hugs the rail corridor the whole way, there will be 5 overlapping nodes (Riverdale, Cherry St., Union, Exhibition, Liberty Village). However, if it goes between Queen/King, then it only crosses 2 (Riverdale and Liberty Village), neither of which is Union Station, which allows ridership to be diverted away from Union to reach other high-demand areas of the core.



No they won't. After MO2020 is complete at best Lakeshore service will be every 10-15 mins.
GO has previously talked about frequencies as ambitious as every 5 minutes. That is subway frequency. Such a frequency isn't possible with the current rolling stock as acceleration/braking is too slow, but if only being applied on Lakeshore, the existing stock can be shifted to other lines' service improvements.
That does not compare to a subway. And stop spacing for GO would be inadequate for the core. Any closer and you slow and degrade service for riders from outside the core. Any further apart and you fail to service sufficient areas. Besides which there are no effective GO lines south of Gerrard and east of Pape....and that's where the first phase of the DRL will be providing local service.

No, the DRL would be more likely to follow the rail corridor between Gerrard and Pape when not ICTS. The reason previous proposals went down to Pape/Eastern is for a yard for the ICTS rolling stock. As a subway, the DRL would be able to use Greenwood Yard and would not bother going to Pape/Eastern since it will eventually be part of the surrounding Portlands LRT network eventually anyway. The DRL would be most likely to take the rail corridor upto just before the Don River, at which point it can branch off north of the rail corridor.

GO Station spacing wouldn't be bad, as we'd be looking at Exhibition - Union - Cherry - Riverdale - Danforth. "Degrading service for riders from outside the core" is an empty argument as GO runs express service in addition to local service on Lakeshore anyway. Nothing stops GO from servicing both.

How so? Last I heard BD was perpendicular to YUS. And with the exception of St.George and Spadina, they don't overlap on any segment.
Which is completely irrelevant and you clearly missed the point altogehter. The success of Bloor-Danforth and Yonge subways are rooted in the fact that they were run in already established transit corridors that were bursting at the seams. New development wasn't the main point, the main point was that there was no alternative to providing reliable service in the existing corridor, with growth expected to continue regardless of whether a subway was there or not.

Before the subway appeared, demand on Yonge was so high, it looked like this:
ser71item15073_800.jpg


Queen Subway was supposed to come before Bloor, but demand on Bloor shot up high ahead of Queen and the TTC, after a long fight with City Hall, forced a change in the plan to have Bloor go first. It is because of the sky-high ridership that existed before the subway was built that these subways perform so well.

As a relief line, it should provide relief to the network. Whatever alignment does that, get's my vote. IMHO, that would entail debate on how far east the transfer should be to catch passengers from the east early enough.
It isn't prudent to focus on just one route though. Yes, Yonge south is the main corridor seeking relief. No one disputes that. However it is worth pointing out that going farther east actually lowers the amount of people that you will divert, not increase, since people hitting the Bloor-Danforth line west of where the DRL connects to it are most likely stay on Bloor-Danforth instead of backtrack, unless routes continue south of Danforth, of which the 64 Main is the only one I'm aware of that does so.
 
A while ago, someone here mentioned the idea of splitting the YUS line (can't find the reference).. is this crazy talk or actually doable? I am not so well versed in subway affairs but this sounds interesting to me, as YUS is basically two lines going to Union anyway. You could have transfer points at King, Union, and St Andrew; continue the Yonge line on westward from St Andrew and University/Spadina eastwards from King.
 
But if the line shifts all the non-local riders off the Queen and King streetcars then service for those routes will be adequate.
Yes, but you won't shift the non-local riders off of it if the DRL doesn't take them close enough to where they want to go. Like I said, King will still be alleviated, but Queen wouldn't get as much.



Actually, given that we build subway lines to last half a century or more, the goal should be to serve future development.
The Spadina subway and the Sheppard subway were built to spur new development... and they don't do so well as a result. So this idealogy is flawed. We need to go back to the methodology Bloor-Danforth and Yonge were based on for the DRL in order to ensure it gets the highest ridership. By taking the DRL through the middle of the Yonge line's most heavily used stations (Queen and Dundas to the north, and King, St.Andrew, and Union to the south) gets the maximum relief value, and directly alleviates the streetcars on King and Queen at the same time.

Besides, the developments along the waterfront don't need a subway to spur those developments as they're already in progress - including the infrastructure to support them (LRTs).

As for the significance of development on King and Queen, like I posted earlier please refer to the Waterfront Toronto plans that are likely to bring in tens of thousands of residents and tens of thousands of workers. There is nothing like it in Toronto at present. All the development along King and Queen may not equal up to just one of the developments in Waterfront Toronto's portfolio.
This still wouldn't result in Bloor-Danforth levels of ridership. The fact of the matter is that this isn't an established transit corridor that is bursting at the seams. Furthermore, these communities are masterplanned in such a manner as to put transit first. A lot of great planning has gone into the LRT networks that will serve these communities. Maybe you would like to refer to these plans yourself? The demands of these communities will remain within the capabilities of LRT because there has been a lot of attention put into making the communities walkable, cyclable, and having people live within a walkable distance from work. The leftover demand for transit and auto will be very manageable without a subway. These LRT networks should be looked at as a potential feeder network for the DRL. Instead, you seem to see this as a one-or-the other, whereas I see it as a harmonious co-existence between the two with one supporting the other and vice-versa.



Who said we are looking to cut construction costs?
CDL.TO
Given the timeframe that we build a subway for and the cost of the project, at best the challenges you put forward would inflate the costs by upto 10% or so. While that's significant, it's probably not enough to offset billions in lost productivity by putting the line further away from tens of thousands of commuters and their offices.
You'll have to justify how it would be billions in lost productivity by putting the line further away from tens of thousands of commuters when those same commuters will still be close to dedicated ROW LRTs and also that tens of thousands of other commuters will be brought closer to the line and provide added alleviation to the existing non-ROW streetcars. You are not recognizing that the proposed Bremner, Queen's Quay East, and Cherry/Commissioners LRTs will not be over-capacity as they have greater capacity being in a ROW than King or Queen ever will, and therefore don't need relief provided by a subway.



I never knew crowd control was a problem in Toronto. Those 905 ruffians and outer 416 barbarians descend on Union by the thousands daily and there never seem to be any issues. Other than that, you premise in flawed. Crowd control is easier at a single point than dispersed over a wider area.
Really? Wow, then you must support the renovation of Bloor-Yonge to make sure as many people as possible get funnelled through that single point. You shouldn't even support a DRL at all if that's your philosophy.


As for network reliability. If union were to fail, it's likely it would only fail on one of it's lines (DRL or YUS). And that line alone would be effected. That's the same for any other node. Do problems on the Yonge line mean that there are no Bloor-Danforth trains at Yonge/Bloor?
Crowding chain reactions will be far messier if a single point of failure is created at Union instead of dividing it between 2 or 4 stations. Divide and conquer I tell you! :)



Actually, regardless of the alignment, we will have people transferring at stations and those stations will need to be modified to accommodate the increase in traffic. Moving the riders to a new line, relieves Yonge/Bloor, but not the rest of the YUS loop as many riders will still be transferring and riding around.
This is seriously flawed logic. If that were true, building the DRL would be completely pointless. If between Queen and King, everybody that usually gets off at Osgoode, Queen, St.Andrew, and King, even those bound for Wellington or even Front, would not need to transfer at all to YUS. Only those bound for College, Queen's Park, St.Patrick, and Dundas would transfer, and getting to those would be in the reverse-peak direction where there is ample room for them. This leaves ample capacity in the existing stations for the demand patterns in a DRL-enabled network. No renovations would be necessary beyond the connecting stairways and (if applicable) walkway tunnels.


Most of the route will be tunnelled not cut-and-cover, with the exception of the stations. Regardless of which alignment is picked, there will be disrutpion. It does not make sense to locate a multi-billion dollar subway line where nobody will be disrupted, because that means there's nobody there to ride the thing!
I already said "even if only at stations."

That's actually what makes Richmond-Adelaide so convenient. Although not all, lots of the properties along those two either face the perpendicular streets, or are the "backsides" of the buildings whose fronts actually face Queen or King. Richmond and Adelaide being semi-highway like in nature because of their 4-lane-one-way and DVP-connecting characteristics, make for a bit of a less-lively corridor within downtown (they're not pedestrian friendly streets), and don't have any transit routes on them besides peak-hour only express buses. At the same time, they're right beside two of the liveliest corridors in downtown and two of the busiest transit routes, too. Disruptions in these corridors would be far less detrimental than the same disruptions on King and Queen proper, no contest. This is similar to how parts of Bloor-Danforth were built... when not expropriating properties by the hundreds, Bloor-Danforth runs under side streets north of Bloor/Danforth propoer, avoiding the detrimental impacts to businesses along the corridor itself during construction.

It's critically important that the Queen and King cars be allowed to run during construction. Having them shutdown for construction of stations is not an option.
Besides which, disruptions have to be taken in stride. They're rough for a few years but the rise in property value and increased customer traffic more than make up for any disruption to business during the construction phase. I doubt any business on King would suddenly close shop just because they got a subway line.
You're assuming the businesses survive the construction... that's not always a given, and is the big worry that most along the corridor have. Pedestrians tend to avoid construction just like drivers do, when they have a choice.




Flawed premises. Flawed arguments. Flawed conclusion.
I think you might want to go back and take a look at your own premises, arguments, and conclusions.

Welcome to UT by the way. As you can see we debate passionately around here.

Thank you, and I'd certainly hope so! :)
 

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