Yonge and Bay one way?

[jwill]

Tracks on Church and Victoria are used for short turning eastbound streetcars after they have dropped everyone off at subway stations, as well as diversions when necessary. Its a useful piece of track that the TTC is unlikely to give up without a fight.

 

[waltthizzney]

I thought they were shutting down the street from Queen to Gerrard?

http://www.thestar.com/news/transpo...urning-famous-street-over-to-pedestrians?bn=1

It works well in Vancouver on Granville and can give the city a more interesting and defined core.... Happens in Montreal in the Summer as well, Seriously who even drives on Younge other than taxi's and when your driving a tourist around?

 

[adma]

One thing that's dawned on me: since DMW's scheme involves Yonge/Bay + Bloor, I'm wondering if this is a foot in the door t/w eliminating scramble intersections...

 

[Woodbridge_Heights]

I agree with ShonTron.

We shouldn't dismiss it out of hand like Adam Vaughan has, but evaluate it in a more pragmatic way. Right now, I mildly oppose it because of the exact reasons Shon has listed: difficult to divert southbound traffic north of Bloor; renders the offramp of the Gardiner useless, and makes northbound streetcar diversion impossible.

Anyway, I find that outright dismissals of one way streets, like Vaughan's, are based on a misinterpretation of Jane Jacobs' observation that after Manhattan streets were one-way-ized, bus ridership dropped. In our era, where we practically worship Jane Jacobs, it's easy to forget that a lot of her conclusions were anecdotally-derived and should be taken with a grain of salt. Could it have been that things like a drop in Manhattan employment, white flight, increasing suburbanization, and rising transit fares had more of an effect on bus ridership than converting main streets to one way?

I feel the same, that the Bay/Church pair makes more sense than Yonge/Bay. The split at Davenport/Bay/Church just seems to make things so much easier. W.r.t to the Gardiner ramp issue, I have suggested previously that we could likely get rid of the York/Bay/Yonge ramp if we allowed drivers at the Spadina ramp to continue Eastbound along Lakeshore blvd.

 

[flonicky]

This idea is only being floated to change the channel from the mayor's various current controversies.

 

[TrickyRicky]

The fact that Rue Sainte Catherine works does not prove that one-ways don't kill street activity as surrounding streets like Sherbrooke are very dead, and even Sainte Catherine itself dies off quickly.

From a purely engineering traffic flow perspective I think there is no doubt that one-way street grids create superior traffic flow; however, the benefits of individual one-way streets are more questionable versus one-way grids.

Either way I don't think we could possibly come to a concensus in this discussion around the positive or negative benefits of one-way traffic on Yonge or Bay or theoretically in general. My concern however, which I hope can generate a greater level of concensus is that this is like a solution looking for a problem. Solutions looking for problems don't tend to get funded but with the current dearth of rational thinkers at city hall you never know what they are going to ram down people's throats. P.S. the Miller Mayorship notoriously also tried to ram solutions looking for problems down the throat's of communities.

 

[waltthizzney]

The fact that Rue Sainte Catherine works does not prove that one-ways don't kill street activity as surrounding streets like Sherbrooke are very dead, and even Sainte Catherine itself dies off quickly.

From a purely engineering traffic flow perspective I think there is no doubt that one-way street grids create superior traffic flow; however, the benefits of individual one-way streets are more questionable versus one-way grids.

Either way I don't think we could possibly come to a concensus in this discussion around the positive or negative benefits of one-way traffic on Yonge or Bay or theoretically in general. My concern however, which I hope can generate a greater level of concensus is that this is like a solution looking for a problem. Solutions looking for problems don't tend to get funded but with the current dearth of rational thinkers at city hall you never know what they are going to ram down people's throats. P.S. the Miller Mayorship notoriously also tried to ram solutions looking for problems down the throat's of communities.

one way streets work fine DT vancouver as well...

 

[Paleo]

Agree with solution looking for a problem. Our street grid isn't really ideal for this type of arrangement.

Also it bothers me that there's always some light bulb recommending this arrangement for Queen or King... yeah a good idea if you want to kill those businesses that depend on convenient access from public transit.

 

[confusion]

I feel the same, that the Bay/Church pair makes more sense than Yonge/Bay. The split at Davenport/Bay/Church just seems to make things so much easier.

I agree completely! And Yonge is pedestrian / slow moving vehicles south from the split.

 

[adma]

We should keep in mind, too, that one-way "systems" are in large part a creation of the Robert Moses-ish urban-renewal/regality-of-the-traffic-engineer era, and required a lot of weird widenings and intersection-monkeying and urban-clearcutting to make sense.

To start/end a one-way Yonge-Bay combo at Bloor sounds to me as problematic as the S end of the Allen Rd, or where Richmond/Adelaide hits Bathurst...

 

[CDL.TO]

Also it bothers me that there's always some light bulb recommending this arrangement for Queen or King... yeah a good idea if you want to kill those businesses that depend on convenient access from public transit.

To be fair, what some have proposed is for one-way car traffic, but two-way dedicated lane streetcar service. Here's a similar example from Amsterdam.

 

[Paleo]

To be fair, what some have proposed is for one-way car traffic, but two-way dedicated lane streetcar service. Here's a similar example from Amsterdam.

Yes that came up last time someone trotted this idea out and it's still just as ridiculous. There is simply no space along most of King and Queen for that arrangement; you'll need platform space as you can't exactly have one direction unload passengers into a live traffic lane, streetcar or car.

 

[Hipster Duck]

Yes that came up last time someone trotted this idea out and it's still just as ridiculous. There is simply no space along most of King and Queen for that arrangement; you'll need platform space as you can't exactly have one direction unload passengers into a live traffic lane, streetcar or car.

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.

 

[jwill]

All of these one-way schemes require a dense network of streets so that whatever direction or mode you eliminate from one street can be included in a nearby parallel route. This works great in places like Vancouver, New York, Portland, etc. where there is a consistent fine-grain street grid, or in places like Amsterdam and other old European centres where there are multiple alternatives possible in the street networks. But Toronto's street network doesn't have that kind of redundancy. The only continuous streets are relatively far apart outside the core, so each one needs to carry bidirectional streetcar, car, and bike traffic to be effective.

It shouldn't be surprising that a street network designed to facilitate short commutes by streetcar in a small city isn't ideally suited to contemporary travel patterns. We simply don't have enough streets, and the ones we do have are simply not big enough for all the traffic they carry.

 

[Paleo]

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.

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.