[Newsbot]

Title: Council votes 24-19 to put LRTs on Sheppard | CTV Toronto
Category: Political
Posted By: OnTheIce
Date: 2012-03-22 13:10:04
Canadian

[OnTheIce]

Toronto council shits the bed!

[Lemmy]

Hardly. $1B now gets rail service to a gridlocked Scarborough in the immediate future. The alternative was 2km of subway now and a 40 year wait to complete the same length of rail below ground.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

OnTheIce OnTheIce:

Toronto council shits the bed!

Agreed. Some going against the wishes of their own constituents that voted them in. A sad day for the future of transit in Toronto.

-J.

[OnTheIce]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Hardly. $1B now gets rail service to a gridlocked Scarborough in the immediate future. The alternative was 2km of subway now and a 40 year wait to complete the same length of rail below ground.

Newsflash.

This will do nothing to help gridlock. It will not reduce the amount of cars on either route and those cars will deal with 1 less lane in either direction.

Keeping busses running would have made more sense than LRT.

[Lemmy]

If that's true, then keep the buses running and shitcan the LRT. But running a subway out Shepard is 1,000 times more insane than running an LRT.

[BeaverFever]

Interesting how all the reformacons say times are so tough theres no money for basic services, no money for decent public sector salaries but want to spend billions extra on a decades-long white elephant project that could only make things more convenient for a select few. Most of the people who want the subway live on the fringe of the city and will never use it anyway. No wonder every single tranist expert consulted was againt it.

[llama66]

I'm happy council is staying with the transit city idea. LRT is cheaper to build, look at Calgary, the C-Train is total success story. Toronto would benefit from multiple LRT lines, and I hope they get them

[QBall]

llama66 llama66:

I'm happy council is staying with the transit city idea. LRT is cheaper to build, look at Calgary, the C-Train is total success story. Toronto would benefit from multiple LRT lines, and I hope they get them

Do you even live in Ontario? Did you not see what happened to St. Clair? Take the partisan glasses off, take off the 'I Love David Miller' t-shirt and wake up.

[Dragon-Dancer]

Sounds like they made the right decision. A full line now or a partial and far more expensive one completed in 40 years.

[bootlegga]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Hardly. $1B now gets rail service to a gridlocked Scarborough in the immediate future. The alternative was 2km of subway now and a 40 year wait to complete the same length of rail below ground.

LRTs can carry close to 25,000 people per hour, when coupled with two lanes of road pushes it to almost 30,000 people per hour. To move that many by car, you need an eight lane road - and given that there's no space to build such a massive road, it makes sense to split the traffic between LRT and road vehicles. Many cities have done it (or are doing it and it is the future of public transit - subway lines are the past.

Not only that, but the LRT will be done in a fraction of the time and cost that a subway would take and cost.

[andyt]

So each lane of traffic can only move 2500 an hour? Wouldn't you need 10 lanes then to equal the LRT?

I'm just looking at an article that says the max capacity of LRT is 20,000 per hour - in each direction. So an LRT line would move 40,000 per hour (max capacity). If your figure of 2500 per lane of road is accurate, that would give 16 lanes of road to equal 1 LRT line.

[BeaverFever]

QBall QBall:

llama66 llama66:

I'm happy council is staying with the transit city idea. LRT is cheaper to build, look at Calgary, the C-Train is total success story. Toronto would benefit from multiple LRT lines, and I hope they get them

Do you even live in Ontario? Did you not see what happened to St. Clair? Take the partisan glasses off, take off the 'I Love David Miller' t-shirt and wake up.

Just this week, The Star tested commute times by sending one writer by streetcar and one by car along the full length of St. Clair line at 8am on a Tuesday. The car commute took 20 minutes, the Streetcar took 29 minutes.

http://www.thestar.com/news/transportation/article/1149423--st-clair-right-of-way-a-rite-of-passage-for-a-gentrifying-avenue?bn=1

St. Clair is not a disaster - the dedicated line brough new condo development and alot of boarded-up storefronts were reopened as a result of that new development. Property values along the line have increased 35-40%, which is above the city average and realtors attribute the streetcar line for part of that increase. In fact, those who criticise the St. Clair project accuse the city of "forced gentrification" saying the line was a covert plan purposely designed to drive out low-end businesses and low income housing.

Now, to be fair, many people at the far west end of the line who live in "car country" couldn't care less if there was subway, bus, streetcar, or zero transit at all because in that neck of the woods, its just a big empty suburban wasteland and you need a car just to get anwhere anywhow. Those people complain that the dedicated way prevents them from making left-hand turns and so they have to take alternate routes or pass their desitantion and make a U-turn. Boo Hoo. Also of note is that the LRT is not a steetcar and the dedicated Right of Way will not be in the middle of the road but along the side.

[andyt]

Well if the car took less time, then rip out the LRT and put in more lanes for cars. Problem solved.

[BeaverFever]

No, because lots of Torontonians don't have cars or dont want to use one everyday. They're fine with the extra 9 minutes so what's the problem?