03.17.07
Transit City
Well, everyone else is already talking about it, so maybe I should put in my two cents.
The TTC has learned one thing: the power of an attractive map! Perhaps this is one of the concrete results of the Spacing/TransitCamp discussions. It’s just unfortunate that the map sits buried deep in the TransitCity website, and didn’t make it into many of the newspaper articles. I think it’s an extremely compelling image. And the branding is good too; it echoes Robert Cervero’s Transit Metropolis, and it is a good shorthand for what makes Toronto distinctive. Of course, a transit geek like me may not be the most objective judge of such a brand.
I haven’t dug into the meat of the report yet, or really toured the proposed corridors in person (have I ever seen much of Finch?), but I’d like to talk a bit about the strategy. I think it’s a great idea to put this bold vision out there, and see if senior governments bite. It’s ambitious, feasible, cost-effective, it serves a much broader pool of voters than individual subway plans, and it talks explicitly about connections to neighbouring regions, leaving the window open for adjacent transit systems to connect up to this network. I see this plan as a necessary condition for the eventual intensification of the former inner suburbs.
The selected alignments are interesting. The recent Official Plan defined a much larger set of “surface transit priority” corridors. Notable in their absence are the existing downtown streetcar routes: Queen, King, Gerrard, College, Dundas, Bathurst and Dufferin (as well as several more peripheral corridors). In part, this is simple political expediency—all of those routes would be extremely controversial to convert to transit right-of-ways, since the narrow streets would require substantial restrictions on downtown car use. In contrast, the Transit City corridors are all wide streets that could still accommodate two lanes of moving car traffic. In the exceptional cases, like Eglinton at Yonge, the Transit City proposal involves moving the LRT underground briefly to avoid removing auto lanes.
However, Steve Munro pointed out that the TTC is hoping to have a trial redesign of King St. to give the streetcar there a dedicated right-of-way. Importantly, they have not included this as part of the Transit City plan - they’ve essentially decoupled the downtown redesigns from Transit City. So, even if the difficult and controversial downtown plans get axed, hopefully Transit City can still go forward. Again, I think this is a wise strategy.
Anyways, there’s some very interesting discussion of the Transit City plan over at Steve Munro’s site, spread over seven posts. Check it out: Intro, East, West, North, Centre/South, Money, Conclusion.
