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Obviously spending more on something that serves people less well is ridiculous. But transit advocates saying "We can't afford it" to an inarguably superior service is equally ridiculous. Drum, there are a lot of people out there who have full time jobs determining what governments can and can't afford, and prioritizing. It's not your "job" as a transit advocate to decide that. You keep saying "Why should 100,000 riders suffer for 50,000 to benefit?" As an advocate, you should be proposing solutions so that all 150,000 riders get good service! Then, if budgets are too limited, governments can start to prioritize. It just doesn't happen in any other sector. Health care advocates don't say "Don't build this excellent new hospital, because somewhere someone else will still have a lousy one." They demand good hospitals in every community. Do they get everything they ask for? Of course not. But they get a hell of a lot more than they would if they fought amongst themselves over whose pet project deserves to be advocated and whose is "unaffordable" based on some imagined understanding of the government budgetary process.

"Building up ridership for the next step" shows how you've latched on to this idea that only when masses of people for some reason still ride an unappealing service, do we choose to "reward" them with a modest improvement. Nothing too good, though! We shouldn't build anything that would still be pleasant to ride after more than a few years.
 
If there is no need to upgrade Eglinton to full subway in the future then it won't be done. Why go out of the way just to make sure it is not upgradable and not leave the possibility open? It is just utterly ridiculous.

Does Steve Munro claim to be able to predict the future with certainty? Does have those psychic powers? He is a old man and he should not making decisions for the future generations of Torontonians 20, 50 or 100 years from now.

Steve Munro is no transit activist; he is simply just a promoter of light-rail.
 
Steve Munro is unquestionably a great and dedicated transit activist, but definitely with a light rail focus. I love and greatly respect all the work he's done on improving downtown streetcar routes. It's just when he tries to get into overall transit planning that I think his biases start to overwhelm his good judgement.
 
That sums up my opinion as well; we all owe him a big debt for the fight to keep streetcars in Toronto. But he's a lot like Jane Jacobs, in a way...lionized for some Reform-era battle and using that platform to promote agendas that might not make sense to anyone else.

As far as I'm concerned, the motto of Toronto transit planning should be 'streetcars if necessary, but not necessarily streetcars.'

There are lots of places in the GTA where light rail of some description or other would make a huge amount of sense. Meanwhile there are other places where they make very little sense. We shouldn't be blindly jamming it onto every transit need and, meanwhile, ignoring the very legitimate transit needs of the huge portion of Toronto that has been totally ignored by Transit City, which is in itself a form of streetcar-induced blind-spot.

The reason that everything south of Bloor (I'm not calling it 'Downtown,' since the use of that descriptor for areas marginally closer to the core than Yonge and Lawrence totally distorts the debate) gets ignored is that...there are already streetcars there. And in Steveworld, and increasingly Adamworld, any problems occurring in places that already have streetcars can only be the result of bad service (which there is a lot of), and not of the fundamental limitations of the technology. Of course the TTC is boneheaded about running the Queen line...but how well-run could the Queen line really be? At the end of the day, sitting on fixed rails in mixed traffic over long distances to get to work is never going to be such a great option; it's almost 10KM from Neville Park to King and Bay. Having more frequent cars will never change that, and that's something we will have to realize eventually.
 
allabootmatt said:
but how well-run could the Queen line really be? At the end of the day, sitting on fixed rails in mixed traffic over long distances to get to work is never going to be such a great option; it's almost 10KM from Neville Park to King and Bay. Having more frequent cars will never change that, and that's something we will have to realize eventually.
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That's just it. I'm sure they can moderately increase the reliability a variety of ways, but it will never be a decently reliable route in its current incarnation. Yet, they refuse to consider another incaranation (ie. subway, ROW, streetcar mall, tram tunnel, you name it).
 
Wanna know the most infuriating part? Take Parkdale; back in the day, when it was a far-flung suburb of a much-smaller city of Toronto, it was served by the Queen car as well as two passenger train stations. Both are gone, but the streetcar remains. Let's not forget that in the golden age of the streetcar to which Steve Munro loves to refer Toronto was a very, very different place, and one with much better heavy rail service!
 
Darkstar416 said:
That's just it. I'm sure they can moderately increase the reliability a variety of ways, but it will never be a decently reliable route in its current incarnation. Yet, they refuse to consider another incaranation (ie. subway, ROW, streetcar mall, tram tunnel, you name it).
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Not to mention travel time. People wouldn't take a streetcar into Downtown from Yonge and Lawrence...and yet in the Beaches, and a number of other areas, they're told to do just that to go a similar distance.
 
Then why do some his writings support subway expansion in certain areas?
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His writings support one subway expansion, by one stop, on Yonge from Finch to Steeles.

It's not even just streetcars that they believe in, though. It's this idea of "local service" on all routes that will hopefully result in the replication of Queen Street all over the city. It's an extremely laudable goal, but it has a number of problems. Like you said, it harks back to the "golden age" of streetcars where people walked out to their local stop and took the streetcar to their local shopping strip, or perhaps all the way downtown. Unfortunately, the city's a lot bigger now than it was back then, and a local service trip from Morningside and Finch to Downtown just isn't practical. Still, that's the model being followed for planning the Transit City routes. The lines have frequent stops comparable to existing TTC surface routes. If you follow his blog, one of the reasons Steve Munro is particularly hostile to Sheppard is that people now have to walk further to their local stop than they did with the Sheppard bus. I think that most riders would be more than happy to accept that sacrifice in exchange for a much faster, more comfortable, and more reliable ride on the subway. The statistics bear that out since ridership on the subway portion has soared. Transit City also dictates that lines run down the surface of the street everywhere unless it's absolutely impossible. While great for local service, it will mean that travel times will be just as long as they now are with the bus. I can't see people switching from the subway to, say, the Don Mills streetcar if the service isn't any faster than the Don Mills bus.

Success for Transit City will take many decades of redevelopment. It will take a very long time, if it ever happens, for Jane to develop into a long shopping strip lined with local destinations like Queen, so that it's perfectly natural for people to ride from Jane and Finch to Jane and Lawrence to do their shopping. That's the kind of travel pattern that's suited to Transit City-style service. Unfortunately, most of the routes they've picked for conversion are long feeder services with the large majority of riders travelling to or from the subway. In the meantime all these routes will be a tremendous drain on city funds. Look at the Spadina bus compared to the Spadina streetcar. The fare recovery went down by more than 50%, from the only profitable route on the system to below-average recovery. I'm not saying that Spadina wasn't a good idea (though mismanaged), but I'm just pointing out the inherent cost. This will be quite ironic considering the lambasting many Transit City supporters have given Sheppard even though it's only taken a couple years for the development payoff.

If Giambrone and Munro really want the model of people taking the streetcar to their local shopping strip, a laudable goal, their absolute number one priority right now should be the introduction of timed transfers.
 
In terms of Transfer City triggering 'Avenues' development, huge stretches of proposed TC routes are either not designated as such, or are not suited for it. Don Mills, for example, already has significant concentrations of people & jobs, but it'll never have patios and strolling shoppers, not without an unrealistically radical overhaul. Then there's routes like Lawrence East, where an LRT + Avenues combo could work very well because a) the bus is cripplingly awful and b) the corridor has the proper bones for Avenueization.

allabootmatt said:
Not to mention travel time. People wouldn't take a streetcar into Downtown from Yonge and Lawrence...and yet in the Beaches, and a number of other areas, they're told to do just that to go a similar distance.
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And people in more suburban areas are often told to go twice this far on buses.
 
Indeed they are. Which will make TC streetcars...an improvement? Maybe, but probably not so much....which makes it doubly strange that, in the suburbs as elsewhere, the TTC doesn't seem to care about faster travel.
 
Nope, which is particularly worrisome since so many billions of dollars are being thrown at suburban corridors. Transfer City seems to have thought of everything...except for how to move people around the city easily or quickly. The Finch streetcar should shave 10 minutes off the trip from Humber to Keele/Finch station, but the improvements on most other lines are dubious.
 
doady said:
Steve Munro is no transit activist; he is simply just a promoter of light-rail.
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Nope, he is both. There is no conflict here. You may not like his bias, but the man usually does a better analysis of the TTC issues than anyone else.

Sheppard was a mistake, and it should have been LRT from the beginning, with about 700m-1km spacings instead of the crud that we're stuck with. If ONLY the TTC listened to him, instead of getting stuck with the stubway. The majority of arterials can and should be LRT.

DRL would be nice, yes, but it was not in the cards for decades now. And while I still do advocate the DRL, I also applaud the Transit City announcement as a real, palpable, step forward..
 
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