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Thanks for this thread, Cichlidae. I'm moving to Toronto at the end of next month to start an urban planning degree, so all of this is very interesting, though my interests lie more in the transit sphere than the highway sphere. Regarding your comments on the death of streetcar systems in North America, Toronto was lucky enough to have a citizen's coalition that stopped the abandonment policy in 1972. Since then several new lines have been constructed and upgraded, and there's a plan in the works to build several new streetcar lines and a large number of LRT lines all around the city. While I have my own objections to large portions of the plan (it's "LRT everywhere" instead of "LRT where it makes sense"), I'm glad to see that the city government's attitude towards streetcars has totally about-faced since 40 years ago without them ever having gotten rid of the legacy system to begin with.
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Jul 28, 2009 02:30
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 04:50 |
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Cichlidae posted:"LRT everywhere" might not seem like that sound of a strategy, but with efficiency like that, it's hard to argue with putting it wherever you can reasonably afford. A city half the size of Toronto, Brussels, has multiple metro and premetro lines, as well as several trams and a dense network of buses. My approach to mass transit is that more is better. It's very hard to saturate rail lines, and more light rail means more direct trips and shorter headways. For example, the Sheppard LRT is to be tacked on to the end of a half-built suburban subway line because they don't have the funding to extend it to it's logical terminus, the Scarborough Town Centre a few kilometres away. Instead, they're building an "LRT" from the end of the subway, PAST the Town Centre (which is far enough from that street that a bus ride is needed to connect) and all the way to the eastern border of the city, where ridership can easily be handled by bus service, perhaps with bus-only lanes. Now in order to get from Sheppard East to the subway downtown you have to take the LRT to the suburban subway, then that subway to the downtown subway. If you add in a possible bus ride on either end and the fact that TTC-style LRT barely goes faster than a bus, it comes to a long ride and a lot of transfers. I could fill a whole post about the retarded state of transit planning in Toronto, but I'd rather not bore you.
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Jul 28, 2009 04:21
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