Toronto Crosstown LRT | ?m | ?s | Metrolinx | Arcadis

[diminutive]

Except that it's not that minor. The distances from where the consecutive circles meet to any given station is 800 to 850 metres - 33% or more than your "baseline" 600m difference. Push the circles out to 800m, and all of a sudden we're talking about a distance of over a kilometer from the outer edges of it.

Huh? What consecutive circles? Where are they meeting?

Who said that we're talking about just houses? There are loads of businesses along that stretch.

You did... "Only a small percentage of the catchment area of any given station is on Eglinton."

You were the one arguing about how important it is to have these coverage stations because of demand originating from the houses off of Eglinton. Yet a station at Oakwood really wouldn't benefit more than a small number of houses. The businesses along Eglinton, which you earlier said were only a "small percentage of the catchment area," would be well covered regardless of an Oakwood station existing.

And why would you not take into account walk-in traffic? That's the whole reason why there are stops so frequently. There is tons of walk-in traffic along the central stretch of the Bloor-Danforth, or the Yonge Line between Eglinton and Bloor.

Because it's minor. Even Yonge and Eglinton, which is several times denser than Oakwood, would only see 1,900 walk-in/walk-offs during peak hour. Extrapolating through the day you'd still end up with middling ridership. Eglinton West is only expected to see 1,100 peak hour walk-ins. Oakwood would surely be only a few hundred.

Oakwood and Eglinton isn't exactly comparable to Yonge or Bloor through downtown. It's a fairly modest retail strip surrounded by not-very-dense single family homes.

 

[diminutive]

That spacing is similar to (actually, a bit wider than) the spacing on the central section of BD subway. There is no need to remove stop from Eglinton

Why is B-D being reified as the template for subways? Yonge north of Eglinton has much wider spacing, why not emulate it?

Just like every part of route design, the main concern should be ridership and cost. Not matching arbitrary stop spacing goals.

B-D's stations were much cheaper to build (closer to surface, far less complex) than the ECLRT's. Stations which may have been rational to build then aren't necessarily rational now. There's nothing wrong with how designers back then built the line, necessarily, but it shouldn't justify anything nowadays.

 

[ehlow]

Oakwood and Eglinton isn't exactly comparable to Yonge or Bloor through downtown. It's a fairly modest retail strip surrounded by not-very-dense single family homes.

Much of Bloor-Danforth is also a modest retail strip surrounded by single family homes.. all of the Danforth and most of Bloor west of Spadina fits that description. Just saying..

Why is B-D being reified as the template for subways? Yonge north of Eglinton has much wider spacing, why not emulate it?

Just like every part of route design, the main concern should be ridership and cost. Not matching arbitrary stop spacing goals.

B-D's stations were much cheaper to build (closer to surface, far less complex) than the ECLRT's. Stations which may have been rational to build then aren't necessarily rational now. There's nothing wrong with how designers back then built the line, necessarily, but it shouldn't justify anything nowadays.

In my opinion, stop spacing should both reflect the character of the neighbourhood and the connecting routes.

With regards to Yonge north of Eglinton, a stop between Eglinton and Lawrence is probably justified in my opinion, but obviously it's not on anyone's radar.

North of Lawrence, there's the huge ravine. Sheppard to Finch used to be a 2km spacing, but they added North York Centre station because of the amount of condos in the area... so clearly the original stop spacing was considered too wide for that stretch. 1km stop spacing does match Keele to Caledonia and to Dufferin on the Eglinton line.

If you're saying the central Eglinton section should be 1km apart instead of 700m.. OK. Although, I personally think central Eglinton is closer to Bloor in character than to Yonge in North York. I don't have data to back this up, but my feeling is that Yonge in North York is mainly a commuter line to downtown, and they don't do many shorter or local trips, whereas Eglinton as a street and the current bus service acts more as a local route and feeder route, so it's possible they serve slightly different but overlapping purposes.

 

[diminutive]

Much of Bloor-Danforth is also a modest retail strip surrounded by single family homes.. all of the Danforth and most of Bloor west of Spadina fits that description. Just saying..

I was responding to Bloor "through downtown," which I interpreted as stations like Bay, Yonge and St.George. Given destinations like Yorkville, the ROM, UofT, and various highrise officebuildings around these stations, I don't think they're really comparable to Eglinton and Oakwood.

Yonge and Bloor will be surrounded by 80 storey buildings for the love of god!

Now, stations like Chester or Christie are probably a pretty close comparable, but they just reinforce the point that ridership doesn't justify construction costs.

If you're saying the central Eglinton section should be 1km apart instead of 700m.. OK. Although, I personally think central Eglinton is closer to Bloor in character than to Yonge in North York. I don't have data to back this up, but my feeling is that Yonge in North York is mainly a commuter line to downtown, and they don't do many shorter or local trips, whereas Eglinton as a street and the current bus service acts more as a local route and feeder route, so it's possible they serve slightly different but overlapping purposes.

I don't think there should be a standard spacing. Stations should be built based on their potential to justify their (very substantial) construction costs.

The design approach to the whole Eglinton LRT thing is bizarre. There are hundreds of internet pages describing the Sheppard subway as boondoggle-ish for low ridership, yet the ECLRT subway's peak ridership is even lower!

 

[ehlow]

I was responding to Bloor "through downtown," which I interpreted as stations like Bay, Yonge and St.George. Given destinations like Yorkville, the ROM, UofT, and various highrise officebuildings around these stations, I don't think they're really comparable to Eglinton and Oakwood.

Yonge and Bloor will be surrounded by 80 storey buildings for the love of god!

Now, stations like Chester or Christie are probably a pretty close comparable, but they just reinforce the point that ridership doesn't justify construction costs.

Yeah.. but St George to Yonge on Bloor would correspond to the Yonge & Eglinton area right? Which has tons of apartment towers many very tall condo proposals.

I don't think there should be a standard spacing. Stations should be built based on their potential to justify their (very substantial) construction costs.

The design approach to the whole Eglinton LRT thing is bizarre. There are hundreds of internet pages describing the Sheppard subway as boondoggle-ish for low ridership, yet the ECLRT subway's peak ridership is even lower!

Well Eglinton will be 4x longer than the Sheppard subway, so it should be more useful. It will also run smaller trains since it's not a subway.

Eglinton should get a much higher daily ridership than Sheppard because Sheppard is 50,000 a day. If you add up the bus routes on Eglinton you 78,000 from Eg East & West alone, not counting Lawrence East which runs for a while Eglinton and the various routes which run on Eglinton. So.. I'm guessing Eglinton will be much more successful than Sheppard has been.


On another note, check out this forest of apartment buildings at Eglinton and Scarlett, just west of where the LRT will end:
http://goo.gl/maps/yZEqG

Those are likely low-income people so they likely have a high transit ridership share. There are further apartment complexes along the road towards the airport. Eglinton west will serve all those people as well as the airport.

 

[rbt]

Well Eglinton will be 4x longer than the Sheppard subway, so it should be more useful. It will also run smaller trains since it's not a subway.

Not to be picky, but Eglinton's capacity will actually be higher than Sheppard without additional work being done on Sheppard (knock down temporary walls to run 6-car trains).

Eglinton's trains are shorter, but moving-block signalling should allow for 90 second* frequencies in the tunnel where Sheppard's older signalling is limited to about 140 second frequencies.

* 90 seconds or better since shorter trains require less time in switches than a 6-car subway train. Vancouver has had luck running skytrain at 65 second frequencies reliably.

 

[ehlow]

Not to be picky, but Eglinton's capacity will actually be higher than Sheppard without additional work being done on Sheppard (knock down temporary walls to run 6-car trains).

Eglinton's trains are shorter, but moving-block signalling should allow for 90 second* frequencies in the tunnel where Sheppard's older signalling is limited to about 140 second frequencies.

* 90 seconds or better since shorter trains require less time in switches than a 6-car subway train. Vancouver has had luck running skytrain at 65 second frequencies reliably.

Good to know, thanks. I should also add that as far as I know, they're starting with 2 car trains which are 60m length, but Eglinton is expandable to 3 car trains at 90m, which I believe is about the same length as the subway trains on Sheppard. Although Sheppard trains will be wider.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

* 90 seconds or better since shorter trains require less time in switches than a 6-car subway train. Vancouver has had luck running skytrain at 65 second frequencies reliably.

Wow. I'd love to see how that performs at terminal stations

 

[datamouse]

It's also the automation that allows for shorter headways. Now if only ATO would magically be finished quicker on Yonge.

 

[ehlow]

It's also the automation that allows for shorter headways. Now if only ATO would magically be finished quicker on Yonge.

There were signal problems at Yonge this week, I heard. All I could tell people was that it hopefully will get better in 2018.

Also the Yonge line was shut down while I was trying to get downtown last night due to "injury at track level". Hopefully platform glass doors are eventually installed after 2018 to prevent people from throwing stuff and themselves into the tracks, improving reliability.

Or, maybe Ford was getting rid of a political enemy like on House of Cards last night.

 

[Hipster Duck]

Why is B-D being reified as the template for subways? Yonge north of Eglinton has much wider spacing, why not emulate it?

Just like every part of route design, the main concern should be ridership and cost. Not matching arbitrary stop spacing goals.

B-D's stations were much cheaper to build (closer to surface, far less complex) than the ECLRT's. Stations which may have been rational to build then aren't necessarily rational now. There's nothing wrong with how designers back then built the line, necessarily, but it shouldn't justify anything nowadays.

+1

B-D is a very bad example to follow, because it was built at a time so far removed from our present era, that comparisons are ludicrous.

50 years ago, planners simply expropriated historic homes by the thousands, bulldozed them, carved a trench into the landscape and built a cut and cover subway box for endless miles. They did this through neighbourhoods where this would be unthinkable today: Rosedale, the Annex, Playter Estates.

Just expropriating 1,000 of those homes today would set us back a billion dollars...and that's assuming that the rest of the residents of these neighbourhoods would be okay with that - which, I would wager, they wouldn't. And that's before a nickel has been spent on actual subway construction!

It would have been much easier to build stations every 400 meters or so back then. The stations themselves weren't carved out or dug out, simply built atop an endless trench.

This picture is from the Yonge line construction, but the methods for the Bloor line were the same:

 

[ehlow]

Yeah but I think the reason people compare is that a lot of people think that Bloor's stop spacing works well for various purposes, in terms of balancing speed & accessibility, and works well for the neighbourhoods it goes through, and that it's a very successful line.

 

[Palma]

I originally read that the trains on the Eglinton Crosstown would run 10 min apart which I was shocked to hear because I suspect most people are thinking subway timing of lets say 4 minutes during rush hour (its not the Yonge line after all)

 

[ehlow]

I originally read that the trains on the Eglinton Crosstown would run 10 min apart which I was shocked to hear because I suspect most people are thinking subway timing of lets say 4 minutes during rush hour (its not the Yonge line after all)

lol... there's no way they're spending billions of dollars building a tunnel & track, buying the vehicles, and only running a vehicle every 10 minutes. Especially given the ridership expected.

 

[Palma]

+1

B-D is a very bad example to follow, because it was built at a time so far removed from our present era, that comparisons are ludicrous.

50 years ago, planners simply expropriated historic homes by the thousands, bulldozed them, carved a trench into the landscape and built a cut and cover subway box for endless miles. They did this through neighbourhoods where this would be unthinkable today: Rosedale, the Annex, Playter Estates.

Just expropriating 1,000 of those homes today would set us back a billion dollars...and that's assuming that the rest of the residents of these neighbourhoods would be okay with that - which, I would wager, they wouldn't. And that's before a nickel has been spent on actual subway construction!

It would have been much easier to build stations every 400 meters or so back then. The stations themselves weren't carved out or dug out, simply built atop an endless trench.

This picture is from the Yonge line construction, but the methods for the Bloor line were the same:

But the line runs underneath Yonge Street, what houses were expropriated? I could understand when they wanted to do the Spadina expressway, that would have run through neighbourhoods, but if its a line underneath a major street that runs north / south or even east / west, they would not be bulldozing anything. They are not bulldozing anything along Eglinton, well they do need to put the stations someplace, I never thought of that