After years of frustration, Toronto’s major LRT projects — the Eglinton Crosstown and Finch West lines — are finally taking shape. The infrastructure is largely in place, testing is active, and the city is on the verge of a real step forward in how people move across it.The Crosstown will finally link east and west through midtown, while Finch West is basically a super streetcar in a poor area of the city. Is light rail still a legitimate form of transit, or were Doug and Rob correct with their subways subways subways mantra?
>>2058715Light rail is fine so long as it's smartly combined with heavy rail. You need both, fine distribution and longer distances. Subway alone will often fall between two stools: not very practical for short trips, too slow for long trips. Better to have a dense LRT/tram network, and a less dense but high speed and high capacity heavy rail grid.
>>2058716This is our mixed traffic streetcar system. In the above pic, the Grey and Orange lines are a similar technology but on separated lanes and direct tunnels to the subway network.
>>2058718Better to save the Nuke for Israel
>>2058715>Is light rail still a legitimate form of transit, or were Doug and Rob correct with their subways subways subways mantra?The Kingsway Ratepayers Association would commit terrorism if the province tried to build subway-level density along Eglinton West, so that was never a serious option. They're already having a melty about Metrolinx building stuff on top of the station premises.I used to bitch that the project should have been at-grade, but the last few years of arguments downtown have made it clear that the city will never accept transit priority signals and so at-grade would have been mediocrity. I guess we'll see how Finch West turns out on that front.
>>2058715Don't forget the Yonge line northI don't get why the city won't just finish the Sheppard line
>>2059891Yonge North is another suburban extension. The only decent component of it is that it will have another interchange with the GO system. Albeit, the Richmond Hill line is under utilized in its present state. Sheppard line west to Downsview and east to Scarborough would provide the high capacity 401 corridor rapid transit route the north end needs. That extension would connect residents in Scarborough to destinations like York University with only one transfer. The extension East of Don Mills could also mostly be on an elevated guide way rather than tunneled, until at least East of Victoria Park. It would also provide another interchange with GO at Agincourt. Presumably the line would link up with Line 2 at Sheppard McCowan, however ideally the line by passes that and goes directly to Scarborough TC. One can only dream.
Does the Finch West LRT really only go 8mph. How is it possible to make a dedicated ROW LRT that goes that slowly.
So back in the 90s they built the streetcar line on Queens Quay in its own right of way separated from car traffic, and they called it the Harbourfront LRT for a short while. Eventually it just became another one of the 500-series streetcar lines. Finch West is probably gonna face the same fate. Besides being higher capacity it's still functionally a tram line and all the TTC needs to do is paint the trains red and most people won't tell them apart from the regular streetcars. This false advertising of branding a tram line in the same rank as a subway line is a holdover from the time when the LRT cult got people to believe we didn't need to build any more subways cause these amazing LRTs would be cheaper with no downsides. Well, you see the result now. Apologize to Rob Ford.
>>2060735retarded city, ttc, metrolinx, ford govt, history, etc
>>2060735lotta traffic lights along finchstop at lightthen stop at stopthen stop at light againMore reds because they need to let people make left turns
>>2060818Even Americans have figured out that you can just ban left turns at intersections.
>>2060848The retards could have just not built this whole boondoggle since the buses were fine....
The new LRT line is so bad that the CBC has taken down their original story about how it takes like 57 minutes to go five blocks along Finch St.Toronto is just mini-america and should be excised from the country
>>2060893Which is a totally predictable amount of time for anyone who has driven across toronto, theres a lotta fucking traffic and a lotta fucking lights and a big ass train like that isn't getting up to 60+ between each stop...
>>2060900literally just program the lights to do a four-way red when the train is going through. most of the time loss was due to waiting for lights and the distance/time was compared to a marathon. it in fact did the same course as a marathon in the city, where high-but-not-top times were around 50 minutes. you could, if you were mildly fit, outrun the train.
>>2060888That east-west bus trips across Toronto are pretty miserable. It's been an actual decade since I was doing it regularly, but in some sections of the city it was legitimately faster to go south, then east/west, then back north if it meant you could take the subway for the east/west trip.That being said, it's looking the Finch LRT, in-and-of-itself, isn't going to fix that problem, so...?As I said >>2058805, I used to think these projects should have been at grade, to provide denser stops and a more "unified" feel of the city (i.e. entering a tunnel and only emerging at the destination means you stop giving a fuck about the "in between" parts, when in reality maybe those in-between parts have destinations that could have filled the purpose of your trip that you never knew about).But no political will to make transit "better" than driving, even along a few major transit arteries where you really shouldn't be driving. Even the businesses on the street will object to funnelling 2,000 transit passengers past their business per hour in favour of the 1,000 that happen to be in cars.
REM mogs
>>2060923Quebec is the best part of Canada and Anglotards have been seething at this fact for nearly a century.
>>2060960
>>2060960It's true, the White people there are less self-hating and more protective of their heritage.
>>2061002> more protective of their heritage.Most all the things that we associate with Canadian culture are from Quebec, including (but not limited to): Maple Syrup, Hockey, Poutine, Tuques, Bilingualism (duh), Skidoos, Fucking natives and/or fucking them over and learning them some Christianity, and William Shatner
>>2061044Yeah, because Anglos have been brainwashed into rejecting their heritage and merely consoooming for generations. The only people I see flying their actual flag in this country are Acadians. Everyone else just flies the Canadian flag as if it represents anything other than compliance.
