The City and TTC will be holding two EA meetings for the Sheppard LRT line on Tuesday and Thursday, April 15 and 17, 2008.
These will also include discussions of the proposed extension of the Scarborough RT.
The FAQ linked from the EA notice page includes a variety of intriguing items giving an idea of how the project team views what they will implement. Apropos of discussions in other threads here about stop spacing and vehicle speed, we learn that
there is normally a much greater distance between stops, relative to a typical bus route.
It should be interesting to see how the TTC and City reconcile this statement with the actual layout of streets and stops on the existing bus route, not to mention the Official Plan goals for Avenues with medium density development along transit lines rather than concentrated at major intersections.
Update: The presentation materials from the meeting are now available online.
Steve Munro 
The TTC really needs to get its act together about transit priority on LRT lines. Signal priority won’t work properly on Spadina because service is too frequent – longer streetcars are needed. However, St. Clair has much less frequent service and there is still no signal priority. If the TTC is just going to build duplicates of St. Clair across Toronto, complete with centre poles, far-side stops, and no signal priority, then Transit City will turn out to be a colossal waste of money. On the other hand, if it actually installs proper signal priority, which is very effective in other parts of the world, then Transit City will be a great success.
LikeLike
Leo:
It was Joe Mihevc who referred to St. Clair streetcar as being subway-like (Toronto Star, 27 Oct 06):
“We’re going to get a high-quality, almost subway-like service along St. Clair from one end to the other,” he said.
However, on 24 Oct 06, Mayor Miller was reported by ctv.ca to have described the ROW in the following terms:
“the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way, for example, has half the capacity of a subway for less than one-tenth of the price.”
Note he said the right-of-way (questionable) and not the provided service (definitely not).
Steve: I agree that even the Mayor’s statement overshot the mark. Given the design of St. Clair, about the best we could hope for is a Spadina-like headway with longer cars. This could get us up to about 4,500 per hour (two-car trains of the new vehicles won’t fit on the islands or in the loading areas of existing loops). However, even in its heyday, this line ran at best a one-minute headway of PCCs giving roughly the same capacity.
I really wish people, including folks at City Hall who should know better, would stop making direct comparisons with subway lines that would never be built, and if they were, would have nowhere near the stop spacing for which the neighbourhoods fought so hard.
One thing we can see already on the Yonge to St. Clair West stretch is that the cars have far too much running time, and there are always a few laying over at the end of that very short shuttle. I can just imagine the TTC scheduling the line as if it were stil in mixed traffic when they re-open it with right-of-way from one end to the other. Then the operators will come to expect extended layovers, service will be ragged because of unreliable departures at terminals, and fixing the whole mess will take years, just like Queen Street.
LikeLike
“Wouldn’t it make the most sense, to extend the subway to meadovale, as then it would only require one bus to go to the zoo, which is one of Toronto’s most visited tourist destinations.”
Have you seen Meadowvale and Sheppard? It’s pretty quiet. Its hard to imagine the Sheppard East LRT would go that far, let alone a subway … unless someone (else) decided to run it to Pickering.
The Zoo already has excellent bus service. The 86A Scarborough goes directly from Kennedy to the zoo on weekdays. It’s once every 8 minutes during the day and drops to once every 13 in the late afternoon. I took it last week, and it’s only 35 minutes from Kennedy direct to the zoo. Less walking that their car park. It is unfortunate however that weekend service is only on Sheppard East, and much less frequent.
LikeLike
Re: Calvin’s overheard comment, “Just like on Spadina,” one can argue that Spadina has priority by virtue of the segregated ROW. However, from the context, it is pretty clear that the comment was not in regard to geometric priority (valid), but to signal priority. If that is the case, it sounds as though someone on the project team is confusing transit exclusivity with transit priority. The worst example of this is the transit signal allowing buses to access Sheppard from Don Mills station (i.e., maybe allowing a pair of buses out every two minutes), a photo of which I have seen in a report somewhere as an illustration of a “transit priority signal” whereas it is in fact a transit-exclusive signal (an entirely different animal!).
Are TTC or the project team looking at how transit priority or traffic signals would work at this stage of the project, or is this purely a geometric design exercise? And if it is the latter, at what point do operations come into play? (This may be more relevant for the SRT study, where in my mind the mode choice comes down to things like how much time would the SRT save in travel time, vs. how much more inconvenient would it be to access the stations than with a surface LRT, etc. Did anyone at the SRT meeting ask about travel time estimates?)
Michael B. and others clearly show a disappointment in those pesky mid-block stops — but that misses the point. The midblock stops aren’t just for local travel, although that will be a side benefit. They are there so that riders can get to the service! Not everyone is immediately at a major intersection; on Sheppard, there is a lot of demand midblock that at best would have a longer walk, and at worst would be discouraged from riding. As it is, with no stop between Consumers/Brian and Don Mills, there is a lot of potential demand bypassed, including the three Crossroads Centre towers on the north side, new condos under construction on the south side, and the west edge of the Consumers Road office park.
Ideally, I would argue the stops should be 500 metres apart, but on Sheppard, the major streets are 800 metres apart, meaning that midblock stops would reduce this slightly to 400 metres.
LikeLike