Toronto Union Station Revitalization | ?m | ?s | City of Toronto | NORR

rbt said:
Done. I've demanded that GO, Via, and the TTC shut-down union station for the next 24 months to passengers to accelerate construction.
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That would be pretty interesting to see, if nothing else for the absolute crapfest that it would create. Shutting down Union station for the next 24 months would make the best case for public transit this country has ever seen. It would very much play into the addage "you don't know what you got til it's gone". After just a couple days, I don't think you'd find very many people who still wouldn't see public transit infrastructure as not worth funding.
 
hawc said:
Faster!!!
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gweed123 said:
That would be pretty interesting to see, if nothing else for the absolute crapfest that it would create. Shutting down Union station for the next 24 months would make the best case for public transit this country has ever seen. It would very much play into the addage "you don't know what you got til it's gone". After just a couple days, I don't think you'd find very many people who still wouldn't see public transit infrastructure as not worth funding.
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After a couple of days there may be support for transit funding and transit, 24 months after people would have adapted and that wouldn't be good for transit or downtown in general.
 
EnviroTO said:
After a couple of days there may be support for transit funding and transit, 24 months after people would have adapted and that wouldn't be good for transit or downtown in general.
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But they would have adapted in the form of a 3hr commute. That's not something I would ever want to get comfortable with.
 
No they wouldn't adapt to a 3 hour commute. After two years jobs will have started leaving downtown because people won't spend that much time commuting. You can't plan a work day and picking up or dropping off the kids with that length of commute. Office spaces have been moving back downtown because that is where people want to work and a big part of that is the transportation system that gets them there and walk-ability of the area for going to lunch or coffee. With no way to get downtown in a reasonable commute time the office values would plummet pretty quickly and suburban office parks would boom.
 
EnviroTO said:
No they wouldn't adapt to a 3 hour commute. After two years jobs will have started leaving downtown because people won't spend that much time commuting. You can't plan a work day and picking up or dropping off the kids with that length of commute. Office spaces have been moving back downtown because that is where people want to work and a big part of that is the transportation system that gets them there and walk-ability of the area for going to lunch or coffee. With no way to get downtown in a reasonable commute time the office values would plummet pretty quickly and suburban office parks would boom.
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This makes a lot of sense, but in North America there does seem to be a correlation between free-flowing downtown traffic and sprawl, decentralization and crappy downtowns. Because if the theory held up, downtowns like Detroit, Cleveland and Hamilton should be thriving, while Toronto, Montreal and New York, which all have notorious commute times, should have vacant downtowns.
 
EnviroTO said:
We are talking about what would happen if GO was shut down.
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Keep in mind that the GO Trains only move 180,000 people a day - and that includes passengers that don't start/stop at Union (personally, most of my GO Train trips don't involve Union). Assuming that each person takes 2 trips a day, that's only 90,000 people commuting on GO Trains.

Employment in the City of Toronto is about 1,300,000, and employment downtown is over 430,000. Ridership on the YUS subway is over 700,000 a day.

The combined King/Queen streetcars are 100,000 a day ... add in Dundas and Carlton and your over 170,000 ... which means that 4 of the streetcar lines (well 5 as that includes the 508) alone move about the same number of people a day as the GO Trains. (the remaining streetcar lines move over 110,000 a day ... the entire network moving 280,000 a day ... far more than the entire GO network).

Of course there's GO Buses as well, but the entire network (much of which provides service for people travelling within 905/519, and not entering 416 ... at least south of the 401) only carries 37,000 passengers a day ... less than TTC's Finch West bus.

Let's not overplay GO Transit too much. While it's not insignificant, the city doesn't become a ghost town without GO Trains. Even closing Union Subway station would only be an inconvenience, as you'd just separate the Yonge and University lines.

And of course, no one is suggesting that anything like this would ever be done ....
 
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The percentage of jobs in the downtown core in Montreal and New York is quite similar to that in Toronto. Both have plenty of business/industrial parks in distant suburbs. In the case of New York City, which is especially notorious for outrageous housing prices and long commute times, most people living in the more distant suburbs like Westchester County north of NYC, Nassau/Suffolk Counties on Long Island, in Connecticut and most parts of northern New Jersey work locally, where housing prices are much cheaper. <http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/commuting/index.html> Manhattan seems like it has most of the jobs in greater New York but it doesn't. My opinion is that in general, areas with low cost of living and short commutes tend to gain jobs while areas with high cost of living and long commutes tend to lose them. Middle class people are moving out of New York <http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20090205/FREE/902059930> while some businesses are starting to move back into Downtown Detroit because it is so affordable and there is little traffic congestion <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/29/eveningnews/main7196044.shtml>.

If Toronto wants to encourage more job growth downtown, it needs to run GO trains more often to reduce effective commute times (e.g. for a person working downtown who lives in Pickering, if their job regularly ends at 8pm, it takes 20 minutes to get from their work to Union Station, the next train isn't until 9:13pm, it arrives at 9:51pm, then say it takes 9 minutes to drive home so they arrive home at 10pm, this is effectively a 2 hour one way commute which is unacceptable. If this person starts at normal hours e.g. 9am but often ends work late, driving downtown is not a feasible option either due to congestion. Increasing off peak GO train frequencies to 15 minutes would reduce this commute time to a bit more than an hour.) Given that the only decent affordable areas of the GTA are Durham Region, northern York Region e.g. Newmarket, Simcoe County, Brampton, Milton, Georgetown, Burlington and Hamilton, excessive commute times to downtown push jobs out to the suburbs.
 
Curious, why do you think the percentage of jobs in the greater new york area in the downtown core is similar to Toronto ?

Not saying you're wrong but I'm curious. I think Toronto has a large % of jobs out of the core in the 905.
 
taal said:
Curious, why do you think the percentage of jobs in the greater new york area in the downtown core is similar to Toronto ?

Not saying you're wrong but I'm curious. I think Toronto has a large % of jobs out of the core in the 905.
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The New York metropolitan area has a LOT of suburban areas outside city limits such as Westchester County north of New York, Nassau/Suffolk Counties on Long Island, parts of Connecticut (especially Stanford), and large sections of northern NJ and there are many jobs in these areas. Plus there are many jobs within the outer boroughs of NYC (Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island). An example of a "business park" in the suburbs of New York is IBM world headquarters in Armonk, NY (a distant suburb north of NYC in Westchester County).

I would have to look carefully at the US census data that I linked to in order to figure out how many jobs are where (they are listed by county), but I think that the proportion of jobs in Manhattan/outer boroughs/elsewhere in metropolitan area is pretty similar to the proportion of jobs in downtown Toronto/416 suburbs/905. Also it is pretty clear from the census data that most of the residents of these outer suburbs work locally, and only a small minority commute to NYC, which is similar to the pattern in the GTA. Not surprisingly, transit mode share in greater New York is pretty low, even though it is very heavily used within NYC proper, because the transit systems in many of the suburbs of NYC are much, much worse than those in the 905.
 
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