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Spadina station used to have a moving walkway from 1978 until 2004 when it was removed for cost savings. It's main purpose was reducing transfer times between NW Line 1 and W Line 2, as the remaining transfer combinations (NW1-E2, SW1-E2, SW1-W2) are better served at St George station. Given that the TTC has been reviewing capacity enhancement at St George, the second busiest station, should we consider reinstating it? St George has 209,994 combined weekday boardings, compared to 278,174 at Bloor-Yonge and 39,080 at Spadina, so there is clearly room to redirect transfers.
I haven't found any data breaking down which combination of transfers occur at St George vs Spadina now vs when the walkway existed, however there are some indirect data available. If we look at the operating statistics reports from 1997-2012, we can compare the ridership at the busiest stations before and after 2004 to estimate much traffic redirected to St George relative to Bloor-Yonge indexed to their 1997 ridership. According to this approach St George station became 5% busier than it would have been had the moving walkway remained in place (graph data and 2-period moving average below). Furthermore, Blog TO reported around 11,000 people were using it per day in its final years. That's almost more than the current daily total of 11,479 riders on Line 1 at that station 20 years later, a large portion of which can be assumed to be local users now. This compares to 10,500 people, or 5% of today's current ridership of St George station - the estimated riders no longer transferring at Spadina station between lines NW1-W2.
Currently all of Google Maps, Apple Maps and the Transit app advise transferring at St George between northwest Line 1 and west line 2, but let's dive into the actual time saved. A beautiful Spacing article by Dr Shoshanna Saxe from 2015 found that switching at St George was 20s or 14% slower compared to Spadina, attributing other psychological factors to people's choice to transfer there. Now Toronto reported the length of the moving walkway to be 137m compared to 150m by blog TO. The typical speed of a moving walkway is about 0.75 m/s, and typical walking speed is about 2.1-3 mph. Under these assumptions, the most optimistic time savings is 71 seconds for the slowest walkers over 150 meters, and least optimistic is 36 seconds for the fastest walkers over 137 meters. That corresponds to the St George transfer being 56-91 seconds or 52-126% slower than Spadina compared to Shoshanna's numbers.
Anyway that doesn't change the cost of re-implementing the moving walkway or the problems it encountered, but perhaps we can learn from Montreal's similarly beleagured moving walkway at Baeudry station, which unlike ours still exists. Considering the expansion in rapid transit coming with Finch and Eglinton, the elevators being installed, and the future entrance planned on Madison Ave, maybe it is time for the city to study this once more.
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