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York Region Transit: Viva service thread

Rainforest

scarberiankhatru said:
The station would only be necessary if they built the station, and that's due to condo redevelopments that would only happen if the station is built.
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Does it always work that way though?

What's wrong with the location of Bessarion and Leslie stations on the Sheppard subway. A short ride to Yonge, and you get a seat for a trip downtown, or to Bloor, or to Eglinton. Yet, most of condos mushroom around Yonge / Sheppard, some at Bayview, but Bessarion remains very quiet and Leslie isn't a star performer either.
 
xtremesniper said:
Regarding the topic of the Bunker station, it sounds so far like its sole role will be to serve the driving community by providing a parking lot for riders to park and hop onto the line. In this case, I would vote against this stop being built. The whole purpose of the subway line and improving YRT/Viva is to give people a reason to leave their cars at home. There are thousands of people that can easily take the bus to Finch station instead of driving there every day. But do they take that option? No. Why? Because a 4000 car parking lot exists, which gives them that convenient option to bypass public transit. I do not support a parking lot station.

If however, reasonable development occurs there, then maybe it would be warranted. It just seems too close to RHC to be worth it.
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It'd be a full kilometre from RHC station, and on the other side of a highway...how on earth is that too close?

Bunker would also serve the redeveloped land along Langstaff, north of the cemetery, which could have 30K residents. Building a large parking lot at Bunker is a great idea, especially if it means smaller/fewer parking lots are built in Richmond Hill.

It's hard to say how far the Yonge line should go...in the foreseeable future, even Clark would be far enough, but one could make a case for going farther, to Major Mack, even. It's only going to Richmond Hill now because the planning arrows all point towards creating demand for transit along Hwy 7. Though if York Region is going to use the connect the dots method of transit planning, who knows, they might be better off locating their dots at malls and schools (York, Vaughan Mills, Hillcrest, Seneca, Markville) rather than suburban downtowns that don't exist yet...I hope the gamble pays off and the new "centres" work.

Rainforest said:
Does it always work that way though?

What's wrong with the location of Bessarion and Leslie stations on the Sheppard subway. A short ride to Yonge, and you get a seat for a trip downtown, or to Bloor, or to Eglinton. Yet, most of condos mushroom around Yonge / Sheppard, some at Bayview, but Bessarion remains very quiet and Leslie isn't a star performer either.
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Yes, that's how it works when a station may not otherwise be warranted...building a station means rezoning/redevelopment which means justifying the station. Have you noticed how many condos are under construction near Bessarion? Take away these condos and I doubt Bessarion, not having any bus connections, would have been saved. Drewry/Cummer buses, without a station, would continue on 600m or so to Finch, picking up many potential Drewry/Cummer walk-ins along the way.
 
scarberiankhatru said:
It'd be a full kilometre from RHC station, and on the other side of a highway...how on earth is that too close?
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Maybe I'm misunderstanding where the location of this station would be, but as far as I know it is located just south of the 407, and north of the cemetery. You can name me any distance you want between there and RHC, it doesn't make a difference to me because a good half of that distance is taken up by bridges for a road and a highway, as well as the on/off ramps for those roads.

Bunker would also serve the redeveloped land along Langstaff, north of the cemetery, which could have 30K residents. Building a large parking lot at Bunker is a great idea, especially if it means smaller/fewer parking lots are built in Richmond Hill.
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I'm not seeing how there's 30k residents living in that general area, but even if there was I don't see the issue of having a bus looping through the neighborhood to get them to RHC. It would be much cheaper and efficient than building an entire station for non-existent ridership.

Further, there already is a huge parking lot at RHC, and if the subway station gets built there, there wouldn't be Silver City anymore so even more of that parking lot would be dedicated to transit users. I don't see why another parking lot is needed.

It's hard to say how far the Yonge line should go...in the foreseeable future, even Clark would be far enough, but one could make a case for going farther, to Major Mack, even. It's only going to Richmond Hill now because the planning arrows all point towards creating demand for transit along Hwy 7. Though if York Region is going to use the connect the dots method of transit planning, who knows, they might be better off locating their dots at malls and schools (York, Vaughan Mills, Hillcrest, Seneca, Markville) rather than suburban downtowns that don't exist yet...I hope the gamble pays off and the new "centres" work.
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Agreed about the centres. It is a good idea to implement good transit service in a developing area so that new residents don't feel the need to take anything but transit once they settle in. Get them used to transit from the get-go, instead of having them take cars first and then begging them to switch over (they won't).

However, I would say I would be a huge advocate for the subway extension to go to 16th Ave, or even Major Mac. I think it's fine at Highway 7 for the time being, and I wouldn't be opposed to continuing the line as a LRT from highway 7 northbound. In fact, that would probably make the most sense in the long term. Subway to Highway 7, LRT further.
 
A few catch-up points.

-The Leslie/Bessarion development is still going on so it's not fair to assess how busy they are. They'll never be busy like downtown stops but it's also unfair to look at the line without remembering how it was truncated.

I find people who bash Bessarion etc for being underused are typical of the old way of Toronto thinking which is to wait until things are saturated before building. They also bash the Vaughan extension, saying nothing is up there. It shows a real lack of foresight; How dare we build BEFORE the transit is needed instead of developing in concert WITH transit!!

(I'm not talking about anyone here - this has been a perfectly civil discussion! :) )

-The region says their will be 30K people at Langstaff and though I suspect it will be lower than that, I think it's still enough to justify the station. I fully agree that the goal of improved transit is to get people out of their cars but you can't pretend that the need for commuter parking just disappears.

I don't agree these people are "by-passing" public transit. A trip that's not 100% public transit is not somehow invalid, IMHO. To bring the subway from Finch to Hwy 7 while adding no parking strikes me as folly.

-On the map I have, Bunker is RIGHT across from the cemetery, actually a block north of Bunker. It would be 700m from Royal Orchard and about the same from RH Centre but the 407 and its ramps create such a hard barrier, and they're such different TYPES of stops, I don't see the distance as a major issue.

-The subway is not going to 16th AVe any time soon but the region is preparing for that eventuality. The Silver City and Home Depot sites, even the plaza with The Brick and Staples, were described on the map as major redevelopment sites so, though they are relatively new I don't think either will be there by 2020. Same goes for those big parking lots. There's nothing there except the GO lot. That's how the transit-oriented-development model is supposed to work. We'll have to see what the reality is...
 
xtremesniper said:
Agreed about the centres. It is a good idea to implement good transit service in a developing area so that new residents don't feel the need to take anything but transit once they settle in. Get them used to transit from the get-go, instead of having them take cars first and then begging them to switch over (they won't).
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So you want to build good transit in developing areas but the option of building a station right at 30,000 new residents and 4000 parking spaces strikes you as a bad and inefficient idea because they should all be travelling almost 1km across the 407 to another stop? It's like Drewry/Cummer...if significant redevelopment is intended to occur, by all means build the station.

Of course they will switch to transit if good transit is available.
 
Rainforest

TJ O'Pootertoot said:
The Leslie/Bessarion development is still going on so it's not fair to assess how busy they are. They'll never be busy like downtown stops but it's also unfair to look at the line without remembering how it was truncated.

I find people who bash Bessarion etc for being underused are typical of the old way of Toronto thinking which is to wait until things are saturated before building. They also bash the Vaughan extension, saying nothing is up there. It shows a real lack of foresight; How dare we build BEFORE the transit is needed instead of developing in concert WITH transit!!
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The notion of building transit infrastructure in advance has its merits. However, not at the expense of existing customers who have to ride crowded buses and subways (south of Bloor), while the new lines built in disconnect with the existing passenger flows take decades to come to their full potential.

The VCC extension is a complete gamble, the investment will be made now while the returns will happen in 15 - 20 years if ever. Could extend the subway to Jane / Steeles, plus a busway or a bus bridge across the CN line and 407 to "VCC".

The Spadina to YorkU and Jane / Steeles extension, as well as Yonge to Richmond Hill, will see decent ridership from the beginning. But I would consider DRL before either of those two, as DRL would get an even higher ridership.

The fact that Sheppard subway is "truncated" represents almost a textbook example of poor planning. Obviously that line had to be sufficiently long to realize its potential and provide a decent return on investment. If so, secure the funding for the whole subway line and then start building it. Or, if that is not feasible, build a continuous light rail line on Sheppard. Or, if the long subway is not feasible while light rail is deemed insufficient in the long term, then perhaps defer a line along Sheppard altogether, and start pushing a subway from downtown up Don Mills instead. Yes, Sheppard would not develop as fast, but there would be more development in East York and along Don Mills, and once the line reaches Sheppard from the south eventually, Sheppard would take off as well. Either option would result in a more consistent network than the one we have at present.
 
I'm not seeing how there's 30k residents living in that general area, but even if there was I don't see the issue of having a bus looping through the neighborhood to get them to RHC. It would be much cheaper and efficient than building an entire station for non-existent ridership.
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I can't say that I agree with you on that one. Having lived both within walking distance and within a short bus ride of a subway station, I can say that there is no comparison between the two. Once you can no longer walk to the subway, it doesn't matter if you live 1, 5, or 10 km away because either way your trips are governed by surface transit, you lose the convenience of hopping on to the subway, and are affected by inclement weather.
 
Rainforest said:
The Spadina to YorkU and Jane / Steeles extension, as well as Yonge to Richmond Hill, will see decent ridership from the beginning. But I would consider DRL before either of those two, as DRL would get an even higher ridership.
Click to expand...

From Spadina extension EA:
"Completing the calculations using these assumptions results in approximately 5,500 AM peak period transit trips travelling northbound on the Spadina subway extension and alighting at York University station." Not clear if that's opening day or a future year.

Using the TTC's "ALTERNATIVE TRANSIT OPTIONS TRANSIT TECHNOLOGIES" graph, 5,500 trips puts you at the extreme top end of bus/BRT territory, the lower end of streetcar/LRT, and well below the bottom threshold of subway which is 10,000 to 30,000. Aw, it's almost halfway there you might say, but the graph makes one wonder what the hell the actual Spadina ridership is going to be, and how subway can be justified.

The TTC's 2001 RTES study appears to show a Spadina extension coming in at 3,800-4,400 peak point volume by 2021, and Yonge north just above 10,000. And yet Spadina got the head start...
 
Spadina still seems like a waste to me, but to be fair it would be more relevant to look at the southbound volume in the AM peak than the northbound volume.
 
Rainforest

Le Gique said:
From Spadina extension EA:
"Completing the calculations using these assumptions results in approximately 5,500 AM peak period transit trips travelling northbound on the Spadina subway extension and alighting at York University station." Not clear if that's opening day or a future year.

Using the TTC's "ALTERNATIVE TRANSIT OPTIONS TRANSIT TECHNOLOGIES" graph, 5,500 trips puts you at the extreme top end of bus/BRT territory, the lower end of streetcar/LRT, and well below the bottom threshold of subway which is 10,000 to 30,000. Aw, it's almost halfway there you might say, but the graph makes one wonder what the hell the actual Spadina ridership is going to be, and how subway can be justified.

The TTC's 2001 RTES study appears to show a Spadina extension coming in at 3,800-4,400 peak point volume by 2021, and Yonge north just above 10,000. And yet Spadina got the head start...
Click to expand...

There is no inherent need to implement the Spadina extension using HRT, light rail could do the job. If I was in charge, the only subway line I would really try hard to build would be DRL up Don Mills. All other major corridors would likely get light rail, unless it was easy to get extra funding to upgrade some of them to subways.

But at least I can see some benefits in extending Spadina as subway, looking at factors other than the ridership numbers: network connectivity, integrating York U, shifting riders from Yonge subway to the less used Spadina. The Downsview to Steeles section won't be underused as desperately as the one north of Steeles, or look as ridiculous as the short stubway along Sheppard.
 
There's a big difference between a subway extension and a new subway line...should we expect a subway extension to be filled to capacity? How would someone at Yorkdale get on?

I agree with rainforest in that the only new subway line I'd likely fight for is a DRL (Queen is pie-in-the-sky long-term and Eglinton would only need a subway if a subway is built), although all 6 current terminus stations should be relocated a few km via subway extensions.

Even if the Spadina extension was near the bottom of the list of transit projects, at least it was on the list...(I'm looking at you, Morningside).
 
fun little website they put up recently.

http://www.vivayork.com/gasrelief/


and if anyone missed out on that last public consultation, the next one is at...

your input is important to us. reserve your space at this workshop by calling 416.989.6186 or emailing us at contactus@vivayork.com, by thursday, august 21.

tuesday, august 26, 2008, from 7 to 9 pm
premiere ballroom and convention centre
9019 leslie street, richmond hill
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ps. could the mods maybe change the title of the thread to something like YRT/VIVA Discussion?
 
Viva blue

Viva blue weekday, Saturday and Sunday/Holiday service will be extended to meet the last northbound TTC train (currently bus shuttle service due to subway construction) arriving at Finch Subway Station at 2:15 a.m.
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with this major change happening to viva, i'm wondering if they'll still keep the 15min frequency between 12am and 2:15am. in my experience riding the bus after the last viva bus has left, the 98/99 to green lane bus has all it's seats full but no one standing. and this is with a ~30min frequency. maybe they'll be using the shorter viva buses instead of the articulated ones.
 
Great to see YRT/VIVA is recognizing that people are traveling at all hours of the night and there is a demand for services along major arteries long after the buses currently stop running. This system is definitely one of the more progressive 905 systems.
 
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