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salvius said:
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.
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When you go of your way just to prevent future generations of Torontonians building more subway, I think there is conflict. The Eglinton LRT should be built in such a way that makes conversion to full subway as easy as possible, not intentionally make it as difficult as possible. Imagine if the 905 were intentionally building their BRT lines in such a way that prevents future conversion to LRT. It would be just as ridiculous.

And the Eglinton LRT does not even have to subway to be very fast. There is plenty of space at the sides of the road but TTC does even seem to be looking into the possibility of utilising all that space; from what I read so far they just want the LRT down the middle of the road only. And I think that is the story of Transit City really: a one-size-fits-all solution to improving transit without ever "thinking outside the box" or thinking about how to fix the fundamental problems with transit in this city.

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.
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We are only stuck with a "stubway" because the TTC chooses not to extend it.
 
Oh, it's being extended...with a different technology. Transfer City here we come! If they didn't build the subway, the Sheppard East bus would probably be the busiest surface route in the city, with massive rush hour crowds filling bus after bus after bus, crawling along in horrible traffic. The mistake was not building the whole thing right away.

It's not just that Transfer City is one-size-fits-all, it's that the lines are grafted onto the subway spine in whichever areas politicians felt like gifting transit projects to. There are absolutely no good reasons why Morningside should get a line before Lawrence East, or Wilson, or Dufferin, or...
 
scarberiankhatru said:
It's not just that Transfer City is one-size-fits-all, it's that the lines are grafted onto the subway spine in whichever areas politicians felt like gifting transit projects to.
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Exactly. LRT lines "grafted" onto a subway system that is incomplete and already overburdened, and designed to leave that subway system permanently incomplete and even more overburdened, is not the route I would take for transit expansion. That's just my opinion.

I also disagree with people who think Sheppard is not a suitable corridor for a subway. IMO, aside from having extremely high development potential and replace an extremely busy bus route, it could have been a massive transit spine, a perfect place to split the north-south bus routes because of its central location, similar to the way Yonge splits the east-west bus routes. I live way on the other side of the GTA and I have never used the Sheppard Subway and it is not useful to me personally, but even I think it is a damn shame it is not going to be completed in our lifetimes.
 
Proposing that Eglinton be built so that it's NOT upgradeable to subway is possibly the biggest sin that Steve Moronoe could commit, beyond having a hand in creating Transfer City in the first place, and making Sheppard East LRT instead of subway. This guy is seriously pissing me off now. Why is he purposely sabotaging Toronto and the TTC? Hell I'd rip up every single km of streetcar track in this city with my bare hands just to piss him off, and get rapid transit built in the form of SUBWAY, not some pathetic LRT.
 
I think our government and transit officials all suffer from an extreme case of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive disorder). If I do something one way here, then I have to do it exactly the same everywhere - not basing decisions on what is best for long-term development.

Transit has to focus on speed of service. How fast can I get from point A to point B (across the system). If it does not move people FAST and EFFICIENTLY it will not get the ridership to solve any problems.
 
The ideology behind the New transit planning is local service, not speed. The latter is deemed quite irrelevant, as long as there are frequent stops close to your origin and destination, linked by (hopefully) reliable LRT service.
 
Then the only problem it will serve is those that need local service very close to home. Problem is, that people change jobs, people pick places where they want to live, and people pick companies that they like to work for (if they have a choice), and these two are not often close together.

Where the push is to get people out of cars, and into into transit - and get the city "moving" -- it will fail. Toronto will continue to be a car based city, and the traffic will get more congested - causing people to take more time in transit from and to work (which lowers quality of life). This is not good.
 
I think that's one of the big problems with planning today. They're still basing everything around the world 40 years ago where only one member of the household worked, and people kept their jobs for a lifetime and lived at a house as near as possible. Now, people can't help but change jobs every couple of years, but transit planners' only response is to denounce people for working far from home. People can't be expected to sell their house and move every time they switch jobs, especially since no location might be perfectly convenient for all household members' jobs.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
Proposing that Eglinton be built so that it's NOT upgradeable to subway is possibly the biggest sin that Steve Moronoe could commit, beyond having a hand in creating Transfer City in the first place, and making Sheppard East LRT instead of subway. This guy is seriously pissing me off now. Why is he purposely sabotaging Toronto and the TTC? Hell I'd rip up every single km of streetcar track in this city with my bare hands just to piss him off, and get rapid transit built in the form of SUBWAY, not some pathetic LRT.
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Well at least there is logic to his thought process - that you'll never need a full blown subway on Eglinton, so why waste 100's of millions to allow for a future upgrade that won't be necessary. Even if the upgrade is far enough out, it may be cheaper to not do it now.

His logic is at least well presented, well thought out, and sounds thoughtful - which is more that we can say of your writings, that sound like the ramblings of an Air Canada co-pilot.

And while I don't think I agree with him - I do wonder why lines Subway lines such as Shepherd and Eglinton would ever be constructed with the types of trains that TTC is using. The capacity is huge, compared to say a London Tube train or the Montreal or Paris metros. More smaller capacity subways would be a better deal than fewer high-capacity ones surely? Why not build a subway with a capacity closer to the new Vancouver subway - Canada Line? If you could get the tunnel diameter somewhat smaller, you'd only need one tunnel instead of two.
 
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