Changing transit on Finch East by adding well over a billion dollars worth of transit infrastructure is unnecessary. The bus works and can continue to work very well, particularly if simple Rocket service is added: spending all that money to replace it for the sake of replacing buses is incredibly silly when there's plenty of other places that do need something other than regular buses in mixed traffic. Forcing Finch East riders to transfer to a pointless LRT line for about 5km would be a fairly dramatic reduction in service quality, especially when you factor in the substantial reduction in frequency over this stretch. Even if they have dubiously thought-out plans about running LRT along Finch East at some point, how many years will the transfer stick around? Transfer City, indeed.
Browne's Cormers? You should really put down the MapArt book and go out and see the actual city you're pretending to be knowledgable about.
No pretending. It's a major industrial employment centre, with populated residential zones to the immediate west and east (@Middlefield and @Tapscott). I've been through the area several times and during PM peak it's not uncommon to witness near-empty 39 buses heading westbound overcrowd at Markham-Finch. The implications for BRT straight up Main St Markham (Hwy 48) are obviously there as well, which would make this a significant transfer point.
You're not really grasping what a Finch East LRT could signify were it interlined directly through the Sheppard tunnel. It would look basically like this:
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Service east of the DVP and west of Dufferin along Finch would be LRT. The 36/39 bus then becomes a single route in-between these two points. A parallel BRT service right along the Finch Hydro Corridor for most of Finch's length would satisfy those seeking a fast and reliable Finch crosstown service, and would directly link up to Old Cummer GO, Finch and Finch West subway stops en route. West of Senlac, I'd run the LRT line down the median of Sheppard West to Downsview, such that a viable link is formed in-between the two legs of the YUS line. East of Fairview, the line straddles the left side of the DVP on it's own guideway, serves Seneca underground then surfaces on Finch routing eastwards to Malvern TC. See, this is what could happen if people looked at the situation objectively.
39/139 sees well over 40,000 customers per day, that's nothing to sneeze at. If mere regular bus routes are netting nearly as many riders as the entire Sheppard Line than obviously Finch East is where the demand actually lies. And like Kettal said in the other thread, Agincourt already has it's own GO station which will soon see all-day bidirectional service. The 190 express bus along with frequent service along Kennedy and Midland south to nearby RT stations has this part of the city sitting pretty transit wise, compared to large swaths of Etobicoke, Scarborough and North York. Won't cost taxpayers' an arm and a leg either.
