LRT Projects

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Is Cherry Street a Model for LRT in Toronto?

Ian Swain wrote the following note recently, and I thought this topic deserved a thread of its own.

Dear Steve:

Something in the Star’s article on Cherry Street last week made me curious. Here’s the relevant quotation (emphasis added):

But the Cherry St. configuration isn’t likely to replace the traditional centre-road streetcar pattern. For one thing, it requires building truck access in behind the buildings on the transit side of the street, something that couldn’t be retrofitted into most existing neighbourhoods.
There’s also the challenge of right turn signals. The transitway envisioned for this section of Cherry would be only 800 to 900 metres long, or about three stops. To build it any longer would slow down streetcars because they would have to constantly pause to make way for turning motorists, Dawson said. 

Do you think the superintendent of TTC route planning is correct that a streetcar right-of-way on one side of the street is inevitably slowed by right-turning cars? Or is it just reluctance on the part of the city to slow right-turning cars a bit with better transit priority?

Thanks,
Ian

First, let’s put Cherry Street in context.  The eastern waterfront is a blank slate for new development and street design allowing us to think about the way building access is provided.  On Cherry itself, the situation is special when compared to proposed new Transit City lines.  The existing street grid contains short blocks and the desire is for for a strong pedestrian presence.  Placing the streetcar right-of-way on the east side of Cherry makes the space an extension of the car-free eastern sidewalk. 

The short blocks would be a problem, as they are everywhere, regardless of where the right-of-way is located.  Views of the proposed layout are in the TTC report starting at page 15. Continue reading →

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West Don Lands LRT Update

The final report for the West Don Lands LRT (the Cherry Street Car) came to the TTC meeting yesterday.  Thanks to the TTC’s embrace of PDFs for their reports, this is available on the web in full, living colour!

Much of the detail has been discussed here in other posts, but this provides a good overview as well as a statement of the “final” version of the EA.  From here, the report goes to Council for approval in January after which there will be a 30-day period for public comments.

Detailed design (together with that of the surrounding new neighbourhood) will continue through 2008/09 with construction in 2009/10.  Operation is planned to start late in 2010.

This isn’t the biggest extension to the system ever, but it marks an important change in the way transit is integrated with the neighbourhood as you can see from sample views of the line in the report.  This is also the first step in a network of lines to serve the eastern waterfront including Queen’s Quay, itself the subject of a major redesign project now in the planning stage.

Members of the Commission were tripping over each other with enthusiasm for this project and hoping to see work of comparable quality when the Transit City design teams come to their neighbourhoods.

For those who are unfamiliar with plans for the waterfront, the Central Waterfront Transit Plan includes a network of new streetcar/LRT lines that will be built in conjunction with new residential developments eastward from the Don River.  Whether we will see the whole network depends on continued commitment to transit and on the continuing boom in downtown residential construction.

This project has set a new, high standard for community participation in transit project planning.  Public participation can seem tedious, especially to professional staff who just want to get on with the job.  However, the collegial manner in which the West Don project evolved has shown the benefit of involving the community in the design work rather than imposing a finished product.  This will continue through the detailed design over the coming year.

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Streetcars and Fort York

As the Waterfront West LRT project inches its way through various studies and construction projects, it’s worthwhile to look back at how the area around Fort York, the oldest and most historical part of the route, evolved to its present condition.

Originally, the fort stood at the lakefront, but as with so much of Toronto’s waterfront, landfill has moved the lake quite a way south leaving both the fort and the nearby lighthouse somewhat inland.

For many years, streetcar service to the fort and the nearby CNE grounds has operated via Bathurst and Fleet Streets, and reconstruction of this approach is now underway to provide a dedicated right-of-way over much of its length.  Less well known is a scheme to install part of the WWLRT on Fort York Boulevard, a new road skirting the southern edge of the fort’s grounds and connecting into Bremner Boulevard at Bathurst Street. 

Some bright spark, I am sure, knows why Fort York Boulevard wasn’t built with the streetcar right-of-way in it from day one, but such is the nature of project planning in this town.  The Friends of Fort York are, I know, concerned that widening this brand new road may encroach on the fort’s lands.

The Fife and Drum is the newsletter of the Friends of Fort York abd Garrison Common, and its October issue contains an article on the early history of streetcar service to the CNE.

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Cherry Street EA Update

If you were not able to get to the Public Information Centre meeting last week, the handout can be accessed on the Toronto Waterfront website (scroll down to the end of the list of reports). 

This package does not include drawings of proposed treatments of the underpass at the railway viaduct.  Although there have been some proposals, detailed design and evaluation is part of the study of the area south of the railway including the complex problems of connecting both parts of Cherry, Lake Shore and Queen’s Quay.

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A Visit to Fleet Street

Monday afternoon, I took advantage of the balmy Thanksgiving weather to look at the state of Fleet Street, an oxymoron if ever there were one in its current state.  The construction is working its way east from Exhibition Loop, and is currently at the Strachan intersection where the coming realignment of the tracks is already visible.  From here east, the street is a mess, pedestrians are walking along the roadway because the sidewalks are torn up, and the former brewery site is now a vast and empty lot awaiting more condos.

All of this doesn’t warrant a post, but two observations do.

First, despite the fact that the 509 Shuttle only has to run back and forth from Spadina to the Princes’ Gates, there are three buses on this service, and two of them were running almost as a pair.  I was one of a handful of people on the trip east from the CNE, and I didn’t see many on the other two buses either.  Isn’t it amazing how the TTC can run such frequent, if erratic, service for construction replacement, but when it comes to basic everyday service, well, you know the rest.

Second, I saw the best example of a transit priority signal in Toronto.  Eastbound at Strachan and Fleet, there is a signal to let the streetcars out of Exhibition Loop.  Despite the physical impossibility of any streetcar actually appearing here for several months, the light dutifully cycles through its “transit” phase.  Clearly, the presence or absence of a streetcar has nothing to do with this “pro transit signal”, and it is simply one phase in a multi-phase progression.  That’s what I see elsewhere and indeed it’s the sort of thing that is actually “anti-transit” because streetcars must wait for their own phase rather than using the regular green time that had been available to them for decades.

The TTC and the Works Department need to start being honest about which signals are true “transit priority” and which are rather expensive decorations whose main effect is to keep streetcars out of the way of other traffic.  There is supposed to be a report on this subject coming to the TTC, maybe even at its October meeting.  Stay tuned. 

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Cherry Street: Small Beginning to a Great Project

The Community Liaison Committee (CLC) for the West Don Lands transit Environmental Assessment wound up with its last formal meeting yesterday evening (Sept 27).  To our delight [I am a member of the CLC], we learned that the recommended scheme incorporates changes in street design that many of us had wanted to see in this small, but important link in the transit system.

A Public Information Centre will be held on Thursday, October 11 at the Enoch Turner School House (behind Little Trinity Church on King St. east of Parliament) from 4 to 8 pm.  This will be a drop in centre for people to review the design before it goes to the TTC and Council for final approval.

In the early days of this study, many of us despaired that we would see an “urban” street on Cherry which was to be 35 metres wide (almost twice the width of King Street, 20 metres) and with all of the charm of a suburban arterial.  Things have changed a lot through hard work both by the community and by the technical project staff. 

Three options made the short list for final evaluation:

  • the conventional centre transit right of way as we know it from St. Clair, Spadina and Queen’s Quay West
  • transit in the curb lanes with other traffic in the middle of the street
  • a transit/pedestrian precinct on the east side of the street with cars and cyclists on the west side, separated by a generous median.

The last of these won out.  Detailed drawings are not yet available online, but they will eventually appear on the project’s public meeting page. Continue reading →

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I Told You: Swan Boats Are The Answer!

TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, reported to be off at his cottage, may be getting too much fresh air for his own good.  The National Post reports that our fearless leader has asked newly-minted Chief General Manager Gary Webster to investigate setting up commuter ferries to downtown from Etobicoke and Scarborough.

In a related story Mayor Miller is less than ecstatic.  Maybe the air is different where he is today.

The idea is to run fast ferries from two locations — Bluffers Park in Scarborough and Humber Bay Park in Etobicoke — to downtown.  I am not going to waste time on a clever jokes about this idea, much as the idea of putting swan figureheads on the new craft and getting one of them named after me has its merits.

Here are the reasons this is a cockeyed scheme:

  • This is a commuter service requiring a parking lot at both terminals.  Aside from my feelings about park-and-ride services which have been discussed elsewhere, this would require lots of all-day parking in locations where we want to encourage pedestrians to congregate on sand and grass, not asphalt.
  • Bluffers Park is at the bottom of the Scarborough Bluffs at the end of a long road which may not be negotiable in winter.  This would definitely be a terminal only accessible by auto.  Unlike Humber Bay Park at Lake Shore West, Bluffers Park is nowhere near Kingston Road.
  • I believe that the beaches at both locations are shallow.  Unless we plan to build new quays out into the lake, the ferries won’t just pull up to the shore as they do at the foot of Bay Street.
  • Someone travelling to downtown must (a) get to the ferry terminal, (b) wait for the scheduled departure, (c) travel to the downtown terminal, (d) walk over to Queen’s Quay Station, (e) wait for the 509/510 service to appear, (f) ride one stop to Union and then (g) get to their office.  Commuter ferries make sense where there is a comparatively large body of water to cross, and if the time saved by the ferry trip is substantial compared to other routes.
  • The length of time for these trips will easily exceed the time that even a lumbering CLRV would take to get from Park Lawn and Lake Shore to downtown.  To the east, we won’t provide a direct service from Brimley and Kingston Road to downtown on the TTC, but there is a GO station nearby.  If the TTC really wants to provide an express service, all they need to do is run an express bus.
  • The service would not be able to operate frequently, and GO transit will almost certainly have better headways.
  • This would be a completely new mode for today’s TTC.  Experience from over 50 years ago of running the Island Ferries does not translate to this type of commuter ferry operation.

The TTC has two Environmental Assessments in progress, one for Kingston Road and one for Waterfront West, addressing travel from exactly the same locations as the proposed ferries.  Maybe we should have towed the Trillium up from Queen’s Quay to Dundas Square last week instead of the Bombardier mockup!  A network of canals in place of Transit City would make Toronto a tourist paradise.

Part of me really wants to see a marine division in the TTC if only to see how badly they would screw it up.  Common sense, however, has a shorter answer: 

The Transit Commission, when formally asked to approve a study of this plan next week, should tell Adam Giambrone to figure out how to run his streetcar network before he branches out to ferries.

If you want to get people from the lakeshore to downtown, run better service on the system you’ve got.

For more information about potential marine services:

Swans on the Don

More Swans on the Don

In another thread, Dennis Rankin wrote:

Hi Sarah and Steve:-

If today’s CFMX Radio news report was real and not part of my awaking dreams, then I will suspect a high level of collusion between you two and Adam Giambrone if any of those proposed Scarborough and/or Etobicoke to the Downtown Ferry Terminal high speed ferries have swan figure heads.

Could the first one launched be christianed ‘Hans C. Andersson’? Which of the two of you will be appointed Admiral? Will the Trillium be retrofitted with ultra high pressure boilers and after burners? Possibilities worth pondering? Maybe not!

[Note:  Sarah and I were co-authors of Swans on the Don.]