Yonge and Bay one way?

[gweed123]

Well, ideally, you would shift the track pair to hug one curb, either the north side or the south side, and then eliminate the direction of traffic on the side where you shift the tracks toward. So, for example, if Queen was turned into a one way westbound, you would shift the tracks to the south curb, so that the current eastbound parking lane effectively becomes an eastbound streetcar ROW with boarding directly from the sidewalk and the westbound streetcar line is the non-ROW, left-most lane of regular traffic heading west. You would have to create an island platform for the westbound streetcar but that would probably be easy because you would just shift the car traffic slightly to the north past an intersection (so the rightmost traffic lane would take up the parking lane for the section where the streetcar platform/island exists).

Man, I wish I had better illustrator skills so I could actually draw this arrangement.

Anyway, this is still incredibly cumbersome because you would have to rebuild the tracks and all of the Grand Union interchanges on both King and Queen. It would cost several hundred million dollars and it would probably be more effective to just build the DRL and pedestrianize portions of King or Queen.

Personally, I'd just rather see both of those streetcar services switched to Richmond and Adelaide. Right now they just crawl along, but if you put in streetcar tracks on the right side of both streets, people could board right from the sidewalk, and because it's a one-way the streetcars may actually move.

That way you can do some changes to Queen and King to make them more pedestrian friendly.

 

[CDL.TO]

Whether the scheme ends up being island or side platforms for boarding, the space for it has to come out of something else and that something else would probably end up being the already narrow sidewalks along most of the street. It's not an idea I would support.

I hear you concerns and they are fair (though I think you overstate the severity), keep in mind that streetcar-only lanes are narrower than the the current mixed traffic lanes. That alone would free up half a metre to a metre of space.

 

[Palma]

Good idea, but during my Hausmann-esque moods I've long thought University/Avenue Road and Jarvis should be the uni-directional feeders into the downtown. Both streets have connections at various points that can make this happen: Avenue Road either at Queen's Park or further north at Oxton/Chaplin, and Jarvis at the Mount Pleasant/Charles/Bloor split off. Of course, with University, the median would have to be put to the side, but that would have the added bonus of creating a true, linear park from Osgoode all the way up to Queen's Park. Yonge and Bay strike me as small potatoes in that sense, as Jarvis and University already *feel* like Manhattan-esque one-way Avenues, whereas Bay and Yonge play a role more akin to 34th street, say, useful two-way streets, but not the traffic tributaries of the Avenues. Added bonus: true implementation of "rolling green" lights.

Edit: And Adam Vaughan is *really* offbase in his deluded, parochial comments.

Vaughan says the reason some streets in New York work is because they were built that way with wide boulevards and the wide sidewalks to walk on. The streets were not converted to 1 way like Richmond and Adelaide which are also narrow. I think its a terrible idea to convert Yonge St into 1 way. What about the Yonge bus and the Bay bus? Only the people who are heading from north of the city down south will like the idea. Their purpose is to go down Yonge St to point A and return.

 

[Jonny5]

Personally, I'd just rather see both of those streetcar services switched to Richmond and Adelaide. Right now they just crawl along, but if you put in streetcar tracks on the right side of both streets, people could board right from the sidewalk, and because it's a one-way the streetcars may actually move.

That way you can do some changes to Queen and King to make them more pedestrian friendly.

The traffic congestion on King and Queen is grossly exaggerated. Richmond and Adelaide are not secret express roads no one knows about. People are not sitting for an hour on King and Queen while there is an expressway one block north. They are equally congested and it lasts for a small part of the afternoon rush hour and almost none of the morning rush hour. That realignment would be one of the worst changes possible. The small fraction of the day that King and Queen get backed up is the same time Richmond and Adelaide get backed up. I took the Express bus that looped on these streets for a year and it would often take 15 minutes to go from York to Yonge. It has never taken that long on the King streetcar and it frequently takes less than 5 minutes. The delay turning to access these streets at Parliament and Bathurst, or wherever would ad even more time to the trip. I can't see how it makes trips faster, only slower. And what can be improved for pedestrians on King and Queen that can't be done with the streetcar tracks there?

 

[gweed123]

The traffic congestion on King and Queen is grossly exaggerated. Richmond and Adelaide are not secret express roads no one knows about. People are not sitting for an hour on King and Queen while there is an expressway one block north. They are equally congested and it lasts for a small part of the afternoon rush hour and almost none of the morning rush hour. That realignment would be one of the worst changes possible. The small fraction of the day that King and Queen get backed up is the same time Richmond and Adelaide get backed up. I took the Express bus that looped on these streets for a year and it would often take 15 minutes to go from York to Yonge. It has never taken that long on the King streetcar and it frequently takes less than 5 minutes. The delay turning to access these streets at Parliament and Bathurst, or wherever would ad even more time to the trip. I can't see how it makes trips faster, only slower. And what can be improved for pedestrians on King and Queen that can't be done with the streetcar tracks there?

Even if you make the right lane a TTC-only lane (even only during rush hour)? I think that'll speed it up quite significantly. I use this setup every day in Ottawa.

 

[Jonny5]

Even if you make the right lane a TTC-only lane (even only during rush hour)? I think that'll speed it up quite significantly. I use this setup every day in Ottawa.

That would solve a lot of problems, but I still don't know if it's enough. It would need to be the whole distance of Parliament to Spadina to make it worthwhile since you are loosing a lot of time with all the turning and you lose the direct subway connections. The Spadina streetcar doesn't exactly whisk up it's dedicated lane. Also turning north from King to Parliament would be very difficult given the layout of the street and so you might have to push it out to Church, but then you are almost going through the core anyway. It's a very big change and I can see it helping a bit, if there are dedicated lanes, but I don't think there is a way to know if it would really be a net benefit to riders without trying it. Maybe when the Adelaide and Richmond tracks are replaced it could be done as a test. That's still a few years away I think. It would also be easier to accept if there was regular service of some kind on Wellington/Front. It's a long way to get an eastbound streetcar from say Front and John or anywhere on The Esplanade.

 

[car4041]

Personally, I'd just rather see both of those streetcar services switched to Richmond and Adelaide. Right now they just crawl along, but if you put in streetcar tracks on the right side of both streets, people could board right from the sidewalk, and because it's a one-way the streetcars may actually move.

I agree with Jonny5 that this is unlikely to make much of a dent in travel times once you factor in the turns on Bathurst and Parliament or wherever. But operations aside, I also think it would be awful in terms of network design. King and Queen are where the people are, and the streetcar has a symbiotic relationship with the commercial strips it runs on. You'd be taking transit off two vibrant streets with lots of destinations and huge short-haul ridership and moving it to a corridor that's about as dead as downtown gets. The positive would be saving a couple of minutes in rush hour (maybe). The negative would be taking transit off the streets that were designed for it and have grown up around it. I think that's a pretty big negative.

 

[dunkalunk]

I agree with Jonny5 that this is unlikely to make much of a dent in travel times once you factor in the turns on Bathurst and Parliament or wherever. But operations aside, I also think it would be awful in terms of network design. King and Queen are where the people are, and the streetcar has a symbiotic relationship with the commercial strips it runs on. You'd be taking transit off two vibrant streets with lots of destinations and huge short-haul ridership and moving it to a corridor that's about as dead as downtown gets. The positive would be saving a couple of minutes in rush hour (maybe). The negative would be taking transit off the streets that were designed for it and have grown up around it. I think that's a pretty big negative.

This is why IMO we need both a DRL and the existing streetcar service. Long-haul trips on the streetcars would be for the most part removed.

On another note, if any streets in downtown should be converted to opposing one-way it would be Wellington and Front.

 

[jwill]

So, if I'm coming from the East End and I want to get to work at King and Bay (as many people do) I get on a King or Queen car, and I get off at Richmond and Bay and walk down to King St. This is not going to save me any time.

 

[Palma]

Personally, I'd just rather see both of those streetcar services switched to Richmond and Adelaide. Right now they just crawl along, but if you put in streetcar tracks on the right side of both streets, people could board right from the sidewalk, and because it's a one-way the streetcars may actually move.

That way you can do some changes to Queen and King to make them more pedestrian friendly.

Queen and King are a lot more pedestrian friendly that Richmond and Adelaide

 

[Palma]

This is why IMO we need both a DRL and the existing streetcar service. Long-haul trips on the streetcars would be for the most part removed.

On another note, if any streets in downtown should be converted to opposing one-way it would be Wellington and Front.

Are they not already sort of?

 

[W. K. Lis]

Queen and King are a lot more pedestrian friendly that Richmond and Adelaide

The Bathurst streetcar ran along a two-way Adelaide until the mid-1950's, looping downtown. The Fort streetcar ran from Queen (Wolseley Street Loop) to Exhibition.