Lower Don plan design winner
Posted by gigantichound on 08 May 2007 at 11:37 pm | Tagged as: Toronto
… announced tonight. Details here. Who knows what it will look like if and when it’s actually built.
Lots to discuss. The designer (see p6 of the .pdf) seems to want to run an LRT down Queen’s Quay, then Commissioners, as far as I can tell. There is going to have to be a Queen’s Quay East streetcar eventually, but I would have thought it would make more sense to run it along Lakeshore east of Cherry – there are three lanes with a median, and it could be squeezed in – and up to Woodbine. This would give the southern east end (Leslieville, the Beaches) a more reliable route downtown than the Queen car.
Firefox and Adobe are not playing well together on my machine for some reason so I’m having trouble with the PDF.
I really like the idea of providing Queen East etc. with an alternative to the Queen car. I wonder whether the TTC would think that there’s enough stuff actually close the Lakeshore east to justify an LRT–though of course the situation is not fundamentally different from the Queensway so perhaps. (The other issue is I wonder what the city’s position would be on reducing car lanes on Lakeshore East.)
As discussed I’m partial to the idea of a real actual subway roughly at the latitude of Adelaide and Eastern Ave then veering north at Pape toward Flemingdon Park. Of course this all assumes a larger budget.
That looked like the best of the four designs to me. A few of the others seemed to plan high-rises spaced out in parkland, which brought to my mind some of the apartment buildings up near York — not neighbourhood-building.
I think Commissioners might make more sense because it’s within closer walking distance of where people might want to go, isn’t it? Lakeshore is bigger, but not as walkable. Also, there are the lanes, but without the Gardiner east, no other major, fast, thoroughfare out east — so to lawgeek’s point, losing car lanes would become a huge, huge issue. As well, people are unlikely to be keen on trekking to an exposed stop next to lanes of speeding traffic. Sure, there’s a dedicated core of people who do it in Ottawa, standing in wind-battered shelters to wait for the bus that goes down the busway, but that’s not really the transportation style people are accustomed to here.
Is anybody other than us having trouble with the PDF? It froze my computer and CG’s as well.
I’ve been having problems with the TWRC’s .pdfs for a long time - they have a terrible time with Firefox, for whatever reason.
Where would an LRT on Commissoners end up? The bus that takes that route now goes up Carlaw and Pape, but there’s no extra room on those streets. A conventional streetcar on Carlaw would take forever.
A conventional streetcar on Carlaw would take forever.
Really? I wouldn’t have thought it would be that bad.
There are no left-turn lanes, and mostly one lane of traffic, so cars get bottled up behind left-turning vehicles. A streetcar would be even more trapped. I’d believe anything up to ten minutes for a northbound Carlaw streetcar to get from Lakeshore to north of Eastern in rush hour.
Pape wouldn’t be that bad.
There’s an EA underway for Harbourfront East RT but there doesn’t seem to be any information available about it (potential routes, for example).
It’s possible this would just be a limited out and back route turning somewhere at Leslie. (?) There are some open spaces right around the entry to the Spit so that could be physically possible. In the mayor’s stump speech on Harbourfront East the focus was just on extending transportation across the waterfront.
But to your point about Carlaw — it’s only one lane in some places because of parked cars, isn’t it? That’s easily solved.
Some of it is easily solved, yes, but there are industrial uses on the southernmost block of Carlaw which can’t do without a certain amount of street parking - there’s a roofing supplies distributor there, forex.
How about this? An LRT in a railway ROW could make some serious speed.
Steve Munro now has a thread on this. He links to a .pdf which doesn’t really illuminate what we’ve been discussing, since the QQE car apparently gets to Cherry and is eaten by sea monsters at the end of the world.
I noticed that… it makes sense as an extension to the existing QQ streetcar, but that’s about as far as it goes.
I like the sea monsters idea. Can we go with that?
Re. the railway ROW, I suspect the difficulty would be making room alongside existing uses (VIA, GO, CN).
I think there are bylaw issues with the sea monsters.
Re. the railway ROW: I was thinking of new track parallel to the existing rails. Possibly this could share space with the access road?
Damn.
My sense from riding VIA is that there isn’t much extra space there. It’s a neat idea though.
Here’s the track behind the Gerrard Scare mall. There seems to be *some* free space, but what do I know.
Issues would be:
- Bridges: Extra space on the sides of the track would vanish as the track area narrows to cross the bridge.
- Ideally, the eastbound cars would travel on the south side and the westbound cars on the north side. There doesn’t seem to be room on the north side of the tracks for this. Which leads into
- Safety. Ideally, the streetcars would run in a closed system which excluded pedestrians from the track. Not sure how to accomplish this. Dalton48: remind us how the Tokyo subway works, pls? Don’t they have closed-off tracks with doors that open into the subway doorways? Maybe it would need something like that.
I don’t remember that in Tokyo specifically, but definitely the case in Moscow. Quite effective in keeping people off the tracks!
Spacing has a bit on a similar transit thing in San Fran. Maybe our San Fran folk(s) can comment?
The Muni is quite good; it runs underground downtown and then along normal streets (not necessarily with a dedicated lane) otherwise. The line they’re describing wasn’t operating yet when we were there of course. It’s a four-car train, btw, like two streetcars joined together. There are retractable steps (so to speak) so the system can either load level to a platform (downtown) or up from the street.
I’m not sure exactly how efficient the above-ground system is during rush hours; it seemed to work fine when we took it (even without dedicated lanes) but I think that was mainly on the weekends.
The Muni is kind of my model for a hybrid buried/above ground system–buried where there is too much else going on above ground.
I like the comment about the BART in the comments. It runs relatively infrequently (compared to the TTC) and is basically a glorified suburban commuter rail system for a good part of its run. Of course it is not as bad as Dallas’s DART, but that is another story…
Steve Munro (www.stevemunro.ca) has an update on possible routing for the Port Lands, including a 523 Leslieville:
ervice to Eastern/Front
The Port Lands are a big problem for transit generally, not just for residents of The Beach. Like much of the waterfront, this is an area where we risk creating a downtown suburb without transit if we dawdle while car-oriented developments fill up the space and transit-hostile travel patterns become entrenched.
Studies for transit to the Port Lands include several new routes (see the demand forecast report at page 13) including:
523 Leslieville from Union Station to Bingham Loop via the Queen’s Quay east LRT, south on Cherry, east on Commissioners, north on Leslie, east on Queen and Kingston Road.
524 Broadview from Broadview Station to the foot of Cherry Street via Broadview (extended over a new road), Commissioners, an extended Don Roadway and Unwin.
These may be a bit far-fetched and certainly won’t be in place to take you to the Loblaw’s superstore or the proposed Walmart, but most people would probably drive there anyhow. Right now, there is little in the Port Lands to generate transit demand and the most we are likely to see in the short term is an extension of the bus network into that area. Much depands on the timing of residential development along the Cherry Street corridor and the type of development (bix box retail, industrial, or office commercial) in the eastern Port Lands.