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Finch West Line 6 LRT

Bojaxs said:
It's not just Toronto. It's Ontario wide. I rode the ION for the first time last weekend, and I was less than impressed with it. Long stretches of the line we didn't go more than 15km/h. The worst offending part of the track being at the intersection of Courtland Ave E & Hayward Ave. The train travelled so slow I thought there was something wrong and assumed we were coming to a stop.

View attachment 597588View attachment 597589View attachment 597590

And now they want to scrap the 403 bridge for the Hamilton LRT and implement two 90 degree turns at Dundurn. And people are claiming this won't negatively impact travel time. Of course it will.

What's the point of "capacity" if the transit is slow and people will be opt to drive instead because it's quicker? The Finch LRT won't be able to compete with driving during non-rush hours.
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One wonders where the problem is. Is it procurement? Is it implementation? Is it planning? Some combination of the three?

I don't need to rehash the disaster of diversions and slow zones that is the streetcar network. Ottawa's metro-LRT has 15% added to travel times. This iON problem specifically seems to be the jog west of Courtland - I read somewhere that it was supposed to cross the Conestoga on Courtland, but NIMBYs blocked that plan. (no sources, so don't take that at face value)

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Truthfully, the LRT debate never made much sense to me. LRT is a nebulous term, which in this case, refers to a street running tram.

I strongly believe that better operations can increase the speed of Finch West LRT to 20-25 km/h on average. We should assume best practices when debating what mode to build, then we should implement those best practices (which we've been doing poorly at lately, but I digress).

Bojaxs said:
See, this is what happens when these LRT's approach their "eventual" completion. The goal posts start shifting.

"It was never meant to be rapid."
"It won't take many cars off the road"

Fairly certain I can pull up older documentation, assessments and promotional pieces from the early 2010's specifically stating these were the goals of this project.

I mentioned BRT, but then people respond back with the "capacity" issue.
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In my opinion, full-scale BRT is a scam. Keep building RapidTO, but double-digits-per-km to add two lanes isn't worth it, especially if we got construction costs under control (Spadina was $70 million/km inflation-adjusted including the Spadina Station loop, but no depot).

(edited for clearer formatting of ideas)
 
DirectionNorth said:
One wonders where the problem is. Is it procurement? Is it implementation? Is it planning? Some combination of the three?

I don't need to rehash the disaster of diversions and slow zones that is the streetcar network. Ottawa's metro-LRT has 15% added to travel times. This iON problem specifically seems to be the jog west of Courtland - I read somewhere that it was supposed to cross the Conestoga on Courtland, but NIMBYs blocked that plan. (no sources, so don't take that at face value)

Truthfully, the LRT debate never made much sense to me. LRT is a nebulous term, which in this case, refers to a street running tram.

I strongly believe that better operations can increase the speed of Finch West LRT to 20-25 km/h on average. We should assume best practices when debating what mode to build, then we should implement those best practices (which we've been doing poorly at lately, but I digress).


In my opinion, full-scale BRT is a scam. Keep building RapidTO, but double-digits-per-km to add two lanes isn't worth it, especially if we got construction costs under control (Spadina was $70 million/km inflation-adjusted including the Spadina Station loop, but no depot).
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The problems for the line is everything as you noted.

With the line jogging all over the place, it makes it a longer travel time as well slow speed. Given this line is in its own ROW, speed should be way higher than you noted.

Have no hope for phase 2
 
innsertnamehere said:
The problem with the CIty of Toronto's planning processes of the last decade has been that 0 decision making has been made based on travel times. It's all "capacity" and "safety" based decision making priorities which are well and good but resulting in push back as seen in the Province's potential bike lane ban because these things haven't been duly considered.

a minute here, a minute there, a seemingly small sacrifice in each case worthy of the safety or capacity increase. The problem is that a minute here a minute there multiplied across hundreds of similar decisions results in a city with infrastructure where you can never travel faster much quicker than walking speed.
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A while back, I made bet with my wife that I could walk faster than the Spadina streetcar running in its dedicated lane. I got off the street car at Front St. and rejoined it at College St.
 
Paul Aitken said:
A while back, I made bet with my wife that I could walk faster than the Spadina streetcar running in its dedicated lane. I got off the street car at Front St. and rejoined it at College St.
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I saw a graphic that ranked streetcar speeds across several cities. Toronto was dead last. We are lucky to have our vast streetcar network, but those in charge have no idea how to properly run things anymore. Other cities prove fast operation is possible.
 
The Finch line will be a lot faster than any of TTC existing streetcar line.

It will be faster than Charlotte Gold line, as well the Detroit QLine and most of all Washington DC Streetcar line. There are a number of other lines in the US where the Finch line will be faster along with the Eglinton Line.

Washington DC Streetcar line is the worse streetcar/Tram/LRT line I every had ridden to the point you are lucky to see 15km speed in a 50km zone. It also happens to be the roughly ride line that you think you were ridding on a freight car with noisy wheel sets. The line open in 2016 and free to ride. There is a plan in the works to extend the line a few miles with nothing around it to support it where the speed should be a 50km when it reaches the Metro station. Until it is battery power, it cannot be extended into the downtown area as original plan as there are to be no overhead system in the area, considering there used to be in the early 1900's.
 
Both Finch and Eglinton should be faster than the existing TTC streetcars because they have their own ROW. But it doesn't mean all consideration shouldn't be taken to improve speeds. I also happen to believe that speed matters for public transit, whether it be a GO train, a subway, an LRT or a bus.
 
Bojaxs said:
At this point we'd have been better of having built bus lanes along Finch ala Kingston st, style.

"It's faster than buses stuck in rush hour traffic."
Yeah, so? Was it worth the billions of dollars just to shave a couple minutes off a trip during rush hour?

"LRTs have higher capacity than a bus."
So we got a lot of people not going anywhere fast.
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Signal priority can be changed. Once a bus is there that’s it.
 
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