saveoursubways (SOS)

[wyliepoon]

If you want to design a poster in Mandarin or Cantonese, we'd be more than happy to use it.

Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken dialects, not writing scripts. I think you mean Traditional Chinese script (for residents from Hong Kong/Taiwan) and Simplified Chinese (for residents from mainland China).

I can help with Chinese translation if you need it.

 

[Dan416]

Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken dialects, not writing scripts. I think you mean Traditional Chinese script (for residents from Hong Kong/Taiwan) and Simplified Chinese (for residents from mainland China).

I can help with Chinese translation if you need it.

That would be very helpful Wylie. Would be interesting to see those translated posters!

 

[Fresh Start]

85%? Did you know that 75% of statistics are made up? Yeah including that one. Unless you have some concrete studies saying where people who are headed for Kipling/Islington are going, don't make claims you can't support. If regional express is good enough for Mississauga, how is it not good enough for Richmond Hill? IIRC there is a Richmond Hill GO line.

Which is why I said "likely". We can't put tracking devices on every individual commuter to find out where their point of origin and point of destinations are. What can be proven however are the massive passenger load dumps that occur at St George and Bloor-Yonge interchanges daily. These riders are coming from somewhere and are by quantifible numbers heading into the downtown.

As for converting Milton to regional express, that's not going to come cheap, with CP in the way. How much will it cost to buy the corridor from them? How about to reroute it through MCC? MCC will only grow in importance as more condos are built there. You'd be hard-pressed to call it "Downtown Mississauga" right now, but in the future?

It'd still be leaps and bound cheaper than a 12 km subway extension. The advantage of terminating the Bloor-Danforth at Sherway or at most Dixie-Dundas is that the right-of-way can be largely done at- or above grade. Beyond that we're talking underground bores and much disruption to the developed areas. MCC would not need to be incorporated onto the Milton Line as dependency on that location as a transit hub changes. It'd then be the task of Hurontario LRT to offer sufficient mass transit to that area.

Add to that, it's already denser, more populated and more transit-friendly than VCC.

Hey I hate that project too, but it is what it is. Why repeat the mistake?

This isn't a subway to nowhere near VCC. There are over 1 MILLION people in Peel Region, over 700,000 people in Mississauga alone. You can't tell me Mississaugans wouldn't benefit or use a subway connecting MCC and Kipling. You can't argue ridership won't grow dramatically. And you certainly can't argue that ridership to VCC will be higher now, or even when VCC is fully built out.

You heard me defending Sauga's status as a major urban centre/region earlier right? No one's downplaying its importance, but as someone whom personally from time to time commutes back and forth between MCC and downtown Toronto the part of the trip which frustrates me the most is not the bus trip in-between, surprisingly, but the 35 minutes spent on the Bloor-Danforth Line crawling its way in, followed by another 10 minutes transferring and riding down to Union. Why elongate the problem? You came up with a sound solution earlier which I think would suffice; those whom desire points along the Bloor-Danforth should get off the REX commuter service at Kipling or Dundas West/Bloor and backtrack from there. It is not fair to the majority that their commutes should be held up catering to the wants of the minority when the transfers are effortless. Who can't descend a flight of stairs and wait under a minute for a connecting train?

Like any subway, people would go out of their way to take a subway through Mississauga if its get them to their destination faster. It would take all the ridership of Dundas (assuming a Dundas alignment), which is one of the top corridors in Mississauga, probably only behind Hurontario, and it would funnel ridership from Bloor, Burnhamthorpe, Rathburn, basically anyone at Square One who wants to travel to Kipling and beyond.

We can make LRT just as equally atractive an option for Mississaugans if much of the ROW is grade-separated. I don't suggest a road-median LRT for Hurontario til north of Eglinton. Likewise "Dundas" LRT could really just parallel the corridor til Cooksville via the rail corridor, if we want it to be limited stopping express. The 1/201 bus could remain to provide mixed long-haul/local services along Dundas proper.

Riders can just as easily be funnelled into a Dixie-Dundas terminus station with all the relevant bus routes (1/201, 5, 51, 8, a new route via Feldgate possibly route 20) feeding into it.

 

[Second_in_pie]

Perhaps this should be argued somewhere else, but I really think there's a compelling argument for doing a major rerouting of the Milton Line instead of extending the B-D. I know it looks nice to have the subway going all the way to MCC, but regional rail that runs at metro-like frequencies along it's own right of way could be quite fast, and it could easily hook up with the B-D at Sherway and Islington.
The best part is no duplication of service. If you have the B-D running to MCC, that's direct competition with the Milton Line, which could do the job of running commuters long-distance quite well. I'd say upgrade the Milton Line first, then see if the local service is warranted. Perhaps if plans for redeveloping Dundas come along, a subway might make sense. But right now, it doesn't make the most sense, because there's not much between MCC and Sherway that would require such a good local service.

 

[LeonSKennedy]

I could help with the Spanish translation if needed. I can speak, read and write Spanish fluently.

 

[Second_in_pie]

I think the idea was to get Chinese posters out because Agincourt and that area is predominately Chinese. However, I could help out with anything that needs to be in Italian, Spanish, French, German or Japanese. I don't really know the keyboard commands for Chinese characters, or Arabic or Hindi script

But good idea on the Chinese posters. It'll probably make people more inclined to do something if they can connect more easily with natural languages. Just make sure to have English posters everywhere, including "chinese" areas.

 

[wyliepoon]

I don't really know the keyboard commands for Chinese characters, or Arabic or Hindi script

My way of English-Chinese translation is essentially typing English into an online translator, and then cutting/copying/moving around characters around to get rid of any grammatical errors (since anything translated online is some sort of reverse Engrish).

 

[Dan416]

Perhaps this should be argued somewhere else, but I really think there's a compelling argument for doing a major rerouting of the Milton Line instead of extending the B-D. I know it looks nice to have the subway going all the way to MCC, but regional rail that runs at metro-like frequencies along it's own right of way could be quite fast, and it could easily hook up with the B-D at Sherway and Islington.
The best part is no duplication of service. If you have the B-D running to MCC, that's direct competition with the Milton Line, which could do the job of running commuters long-distance quite well. I'd say upgrade the Milton Line first, then see if the local service is warranted. Perhaps if plans for redeveloping Dundas come along, a subway might make sense. But right now, it doesn't make the most sense, because there's not much between MCC and Sherway that would require such a good local service.

Yet somehow this fantastical regional rail idea only ever comes up when the Milton line is brought up, even though it's a corridor on which its impossible to add any trains, which are desperately needed.

Yet the same people don't become so tied to regional rail when it comes to Richmond Hill, and instead support subway there. Why not just reroute Richmond Hill GO? Well the usual response is, it doesn't go where riders want to go. Quelle surprise!

I honestly don't understand this double-standard when it comes to Mississauga. It baffles me. It has a deeper significance, especially when you read the "Why the hate for Mississauga" thread and people resent Mississauga as a suburb, yet have no problems with Brampton, Oakville, Vaughan, Markham, Durham Region, which are all the same sprawly cities as Mississauga, if not worse.

This is an argument which has been going on for years here on UT and isn't going to go away. The best we can do is agree to disagree on the need for the subway. I've already conceded regional rail is important, but it isn't a replacement for subway. They're completely different markets and no one here has demonstrated that the regional rail network would obviate the need for subway to MCC.

 

[Voltz]

Yet somehow this fantastical regional rail idea only ever comes up when the Milton line is brought up, even though it's a corridor on which its impossible to add any trains, which are desperately needed.

Yet the same people don't become so tied to regional rail when it comes to Richmond Hill, and instead support subway there. Why not just reroute Richmond Hill GO? Well the usual response is, it doesn't go where riders want to go. Quelle surprise!

I honestly don't understand this double-standard when it comes to Mississauga. It baffles me. It has a deeper significance, especially when you read the "Why the hate for Mississauga" thread and people resent Mississauga as a suburb, yet have no problems with Brampton, Oakville, Vaughan, Markham, Durham Region, which are all the same sprawly cities as Mississauga, if not worse.

This is an argument which has been going on for years here on UT and isn't going to go away. The best we can do is agree to disagree on the need for the subway. I've already conceded regional rail is important, but it isn't a replacement for subway. They're completely different markets and no one here has demonstrated that the regional rail network would obviate the need for subway to MCC.

Wow....

Regional Rail/REX has come up for several of the other GO lines as well as milton, and is in the Metrolinx RTP, and they are doing a study on adding tracks to the Milton corridor, it is possible to add more trains and it was even mentioned by GO that all day service could come on the Milton Line within three years with those new tracks.

The Richmond Hill GO line is much less of a suitable alternative to the Yonge extension than the Milton line is to Bloor, it does not cross Yonge street twice before reaching Union, and the line slowly meanders through the Don Valley like a drunken hippo.

Milton GO trains can get from Kipling to Union in less than 15 minutes even if a stop at Bloor is added, these three transfer points will make it very easy for people to go anywhere on the Subway network, and their trip will be faster unless the destination is on the west end of the BD line.

Why can't a REX Milton provide just as good or even better service than a BD extension to MCC? The lines would pretty much parallel each other...... and the GO Line could continue on all the way to Cambridge, while saving a good 20 minutes of travel time for the many riders who head from mississauga to downtown, compared to a subway extension

Don't forget that the Midtown GO line could also run through Mississauga and beyond.

I know you will probably label me as a mississauga hater, but come on, subways are not the holy grail of transit technology

 

[kettal]

It has more in common with the Vaughan subway. Vaughan has a GO line which parallels and intersects with the subway. The Vaughan subway is a porkbarrel.

Richmond Hill line does not intersect with the Yonge subway at any point, and so the subway serves a rider who cannot be serviced by GO. And in case you don't realize, re-routing GO through North York Centre would obviously be prohibitively expensive compared to the subway extension. Duh.

It's not because of a hate for Mississauga, it's because Mississauga is blessed with a fast rail line, which will be better than a subway extension in every conceivable way (except if you only measure it's worth by proximity to a big mall's parking lot).

You just want a subway in Mississauga for the "status", which is not what subways are for.

 

[andrewpmk]

Richmond Hill and Mississauga are very different.

The Richmond Hill GO line and the proposed subway extension serve totally different markets. The Richmond Hill subway extension would go along Yonge Street, the GO line snakes around east of there largely following the Don Valley. The Yonge Street subway serves the intermediate stops at North York Centre, Yonge/Eglinton and Bloor/Yonge, while the GO train bypasses them (connections to east/west lines would be possible at Eglinton, Sheppard and Finch, but impossible at Bloor, but reaching any of those three points above would be inconvenient by GO). Thus the GO train is mostly only useful for passengers going to destinations very close to Union Station (or transferring at Union), while the Yonge Street corridor would handle most of the demand to other destinations. Thus, if the Yonge subway extension is not built, then even if the Richmond Hill GO line were expanded, VIVA would be very heavily used.

In contrast, the Milton line and any Mississauga subway extension would serve the same corridor and would most likely mostly run on the same railway right-of-way. Transfer between the Bloor-Danforth and Milton lines is available at Kipling, which is also a site planned for intensification. Thus building a Mississauga subway extension would pretty much duplicate the existing GO line. It would be much cheaper to simply add a third track on the Milton line as far as Mississauga City Centre, and potentially build a spur from Cooksville to MCC, and run frequent all-day service, and this would have the added benefit of providing an express service between MCC and downtown rather than the milk run of the Bloor-Danforth line.

 

[Dan416]

OK I'm done discussing Mississauga issues with you Mississauga haters. It's sickening, pointless and nauseating.

This thread is for SOS. Keep your Mississauga-bashing in the Mississauga hate thread.

 

[kettal]

There's too much hate! It can not be contained in a single thread!

 

[Juan_Lennon416]

Again, no one is bashing Mississauga!

 

[Dan416]

Again, no one is bashing Mississauga!

Really? Let me go back and re-read the entire Mississauga hate thread. You know, just for kicks.