Recently, I received a few feedbacks that seemed more appropriate to a new thread, and so here they are.

Matthew Grupp wrote:

Could you comment on the desirability/viability of building opposed unidirectional dedicated ROW along Queen/King?

Could one direction be ROW with the opposite-direction service in mixed traffic?

Steve:  I am assuming that your proposed configuration would have a 1+3 lane setup with the countra-flow streetcar lane in the north or south curb lane, and the opposite direction in mixed traffic.  This creates a number of problems.

First and most obvious, it eliminates parking and deliveries on one side of the street.  This will not go over well with the merchants, not to mention the taxi industry in locations such as King and Bay.

Second, the streetcar operation in mixed traffic has three choices of lanes.  If in the curb, again we lose all parking and delivery capability on that side of the street.  If in the leftmost lane, the one immediately adjacent to the contraflow streetcar lane, passengers would have to cross two lanes of stopped traffic to reach a streetcar.  This would present safety concerns, and would stop all traffic on the street when streetcars were at a stop.  Therefore the streetcar lane would have to be where it is now, one out from the curb.  At least the streetcar would no longer queue behind left turning traffic.

The biggest problem I have with this scheme is that it requires a full-time loss of parking, standing and delivery capacity for routes that don’t exactly have wall-to-wall service on an all-day basis.  Imagine trying to tell the King Edward Hotel that cabs cannot stop at their front door, ever, so that the King car running every 8 minutes or so can have a reserved lane.  Ditto for many, many other similar situations on King and Queen.

I received a separate query about one-way pairs.  For example, having westbound streetcar service on Queen, and eastbound service on King.

Where such operations have been implemented, typically they are over short distances such as the downtown loop of a line that otherwise runs bothways in the same alignment, and the streets in question are close together.  If we were to implement such a scheme in Toronto on King/Queen, the walking distances to transit service would be much larger than they are today for one direction of everyone’s trip. 

For example, people living in Parkdale south of King would still have easy access to eastbound service into downtown, but their return trip home would require walking south from Queen.  In some locations, there is not even a straight north-south link between Queen and King, notably where the railway cuts diagonally southeast from Queen and Gladstone to King and Atlantic.

In short, we would have walking distances to transit stops that were much longer than what we have today and this would not attract riders, even if the service on the one-way streets had unfettered right-of-way and ran frequently.

Leo Gonzalez wrote:

Steve, what do you think of building a road along the Finch Hydro corridor for cars instead of streetcars?  I agree that the hydro corridor isn’t really the best option for LRT service and that Finch Ave proper would be far better suited, so how about funneling some of the private auto traffic off Finch and onto the Hydro corridor?

For someone in a car, driving 200 or 300 m up to the corridor from Finch is really no big deal.  This would allow us to build an LRT private right-of-way along Finch with greater ease because we wouldn’t have to worry so much about displacing car traffic (not that I care, but unfortunately, many people who have the power to make decisions in this city do).

Steve:  This is superficially attractive, but it is very site-specific in that we don’t have a convenient hydro corridor just up the street from most of the proposed transit corridors.  At some point we need to stop building more road capacity.

A related issue here is the question of whether Finch or Steeles would be the appropriate location for a second east-west trunk route.  Steeles would be better positioned to address demand in the 905, although of course there would be the jurisdictional issue about Steeles Avenue itself.  Somehow I think that problem could be solved if people really wanted to do it.

Finch has the advantage of including a subway connection, but Steeles is further north and could actually relieve some of the congestion at Finch.  Indeed, you might even twist my arm to agree to extending the Yonge Subway north to Steeles provided that it would connect there with an east-west LRT line.  Another caveat is that we need to figure out how to build subways for less than $250M/km.

Finally, Hamish Wilson, on a perennial campaign against the Front Street Extension, writes:

I do hope that we somehow can really think about the opportunity of a Front St. transitway (instead of the Front St. road folly, and the WWLRT at this time).  If we borrow the alignment of the FSE and the WWLRT past Dufferin and assume c. $30M/km for about 6kms, we could I think be having a route that helps the Etobicoke to core quick trip with an intermediate spacing of stops c. core subway spacing Spadina to Bathurst.

[This would be] … not a loopy noisy milk run but a direct to dense destination delight.  And if we change our technology, can we upgrade the size of the LRT vehicles to something that’s not only some larger, but also has an option of being driven from either end so it cuts out the loop of Union Station.

There’s a great deal of transport demand through this waterfront corridor, but the WWLRT isn’t going to cut it, yet it rumbles along.  I think there’s a good chance of saving multiple hundreds of million$, or at least deferring for more buses etc, by exploring a Front St. transitway, but it’s not occurring.

Are we happy to pour money into the Waterfront while the rest of the system declines?

Steve:  I have no objection to using the money from the FSE to build transit, but don’t understand why we need to try to build a mini-subway instead of a good, reliable LRT line.  The alignment from Dufferin west to Roncesvalles is more or less settled.  East of the CNE grounds, the WWLRT will turn north and east along Fort York and Bremner Blvds, and will connect to the Union Loop through the basement of the ACC.

The question I have about following Front Street all the way is how this would be any different, in terms of traffic interference, than the planned Fort York/Bremner route.

The reference to a “loopy, noisy milk run” is annoying on two counts.  First, as we have debated here endlessly, “noise” is mainly a function of track design.

We do not need a special generation of cars captive to this line.  If the TTC opts for double-ended cars as a new standard, then the WWLRT will benefit from them along with every other corridor now under consideration.

Whether we call it the WWLRT or the FSELRT, we will still be building something from Etobicoke to Union.  Its target market will be medium range commuters (those living within Toronto, not beyond in GO train territory) and the planned growth in population along the Lake Shore West “Avenue”.