Shift: London's Rapid Transit Initiative

[kaiserLDN]

Originally Posted by Djeffery

So, we are going to strip Richmond St and Oxford St bare of houses and build apartment buildings, I guess?
Why do you want opponents to come up with alternate ideas, but then limit what those ideas are? What incentive is there for people like me who live south of Oxford and west of Wellington in the BRT forgotten zone to stop using our cars?

I never said I was against road widening or expressways to help cars out. I said I don't want to hear those alternative ideas from the NIMBYS because this city lacks all of it. I have lived in the southwest and driven to the extreme north east and have never driven through the downtown on that drive. Always 402 - 401 - VMP. So everyone knows I rarely take transit however I am for whatever helps the city grow. We need Wonderland Road widened, rail bridges, Northern expressway to KW and onramps for VMP. That's all probably just over a billion dollars with rapid transit included. Which I don't think is a lot in todays dollars spread out over 15 years for a growing city our size.

Also yes at Oxford and Richmond I do believe there will be apartment buildings or some sort of business's set up along the corridor over the next 50 years regardless if rapid transit happens. No one looks 30-50 years ahead that is complaining. If you don't widen the Richmond for rapid transit you will widen it for cars. Either way its getting widened in the next 10-20 years. Either way the trees are coming down. So please share your alternative idea to help everyone out. We need to move people around better in this city if we want it to grow which the majority of people does especially if we want a healthy city. We need a mix of options.

[manny_santos]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

they live somehwere. Those apartment buildings pay property taxes, which students pay indirectly through their rent.

That was exactly my point. I'm not a student but I pay rent in an apartment building, and part of my rent goes to property taxes.

[Djeffery]

Originally Posted by kaiserLDN

I never said I was against road widening or expressways to help cars out. I said I don't want to hear those alternative ideas from the NIMBYS because this city lacks all of it. I have lived in the southwest and driven to the extreme north east and have never driven through the downtown on that drive. Always 402 - 401 - VMP. So everyone knows I rarely take transit however I am for whatever helps the city grow. We need Wonderland Road widened, rail bridges, Northern expressway to KW and onramps for VMP. That's all probably just over a billion dollars with rapid transit included. Which I don't think is a lot in todays dollars spread out over 15 years for a growing city our size.

Also yes at Oxford and Richmond I do believe there will be apartment buildings or some sort of business's set up along the corridor over the next 50 years regardless if rapid transit happens. No one looks 30-50 years ahead that is complaining. If you don't widen the Richmond for rapid transit you will widen it for cars. Either way its getting widened in the next 10-20 years. Either way the trees are coming down. So please share your alternative idea to help everyone out. We need to move people around better in this city if we want it to grow which the majority of people does especially if we want a healthy city. We need a mix of options.

Your post I replied to sounded a lot like, give me your ideas but don't tell me this this or this. Well, what if this this or this are the alternatives I like? I'm not a traffic engineer, but I know that taking lanes and making them bus only is a dumb idea. And I know this based on the stupid bus only left turn lane at Sarnia and Wonderland. A bus every several minutes comes along, and if that bus happens to get there 11 seconds after the light turns green, they get to sit until the next green because even though the rest of westbound traffic has a green, the transit lane has a short signal, and then a red. Nice waste of a lane, and foretelling what BRT will bring.

People don't want to take buses in this city. The people that do, many do grudgingly, and there certainly isn't anything to convince car drivers to make the switch. Buy more buses and make more frequent services if you think more people want to ride. The city is much larger than the BRT coverage is, and who is going to take several buses to start and complete a trip on the BRT bus? Like I said, I drive right through the city each morning. Yes, to mix it up, I take the highway, but I've found Springbank to York/Florence to Dundas faster for where I'm starting from (and if it's not college season, then Wonderland to Oxford is fastest). I'd love to see the VMP- Killaly-Windermere-Gainsborough connection made, and I've said elsewhere on here that if the city had some balls, they could make that as close to an expressway as can be done, if not a complete expressway. Finish Bradley missing links. Widen Wonderland and Highbury. Some missing rail bridges. Add a directionally controlled lane to Oxford from Highbury to Wonderland to suit rush hour volume. This could be looked at on other roads as well, especially if they are already planning construction.

[Oliverfox]

Originally Posted by Djeffery

Your post I replied to sounded a lot like, give me your ideas but don't tell me this this or this. Well, that if this this or this are the alternatives I like? I'm not a traffic engineer, but I know that taking lanes and making them bus only is a dumb idea. And I know this based on the stupid bus only left turn lane at Sarnia and Wonderland. A bus every several minutes comes along, and if that bus happens to get there 11 seconds after the light turns green, they get to sit until the next green because even though the rest of westbound traffic has a green, the transit lane has a short signal, and then a red. Nice waste of a lane, and foretelling what BRT will bring.

People don't want to take buses in this city. The people that do, many do grudgingly, and there certainly isn't anything to convince car drivers to make the switch. Buy more buses and make more frequent services if you think more people want to ride. The city is much larger than the BRT coverage is, and who is going to take several buses to start and complete a trip on the BRT bus? Like I said, I drive right through the city each morning. Yes, to mix it up, I take the highway, but I've found Springbank to York/Florence to Dundas faster for where I'm starting from (and if it's not college season, then Wonderland to Oxford is fastest). I'd love to see the VMP- Killaly-Windermere-Gainsborough connection made, and I've said elsewhere on here that if the city had some balls, they could make that as close to an expressway as can be done, if not a complete expressway. Finish Bradley missing links. Widen Wonderland and Highbury. Some missing rail bridges. Add a directionally controlled lane to Oxford from Highbury to Wonderland to suit rush hour volume. This could be looked at on other roads as well, especially if they are already planning construction.

^This is exactly what I would do to improve traffic in the city. Fixing the broken link roads would take a lot of stress off the main roads, plus running new south-north bound roads threw the core would make it easier to get through downtown.

[ssiguy]

Would London be better served by no huge BRT plan on 2 routes than series of Vancouver B-Line type buses?

Vancouver's B-Line has been very successful everywhere it has been deployed and the 99 B-Line is the busiest bus route in NA. Instead of the 2 routes the city could have 6 or 7 B-Line type route with modern looking articulated buses, fewer stops, stations with all weather shelters and time arrival displays, fare dispensors so fares would be bought before the bus arrives and allows for much faster all-door boarding, level sidewalks for the buses so no slow downs for people who have difficulty with stairs and those on wheelchairs or with baby carriages or luggage. Syncronized street lighting to give the buses ROW, no parking along the routes where the road would not be at least 4 lanes and no parking during rush hours, bus-only turning lanes, frequent all day service on clearly identifiable vehicles, all on far many more routes than is planned.

This would not require any land expropriation or big construction projects so it would be both cheaper and far less controversial. They could have these B-Lines down many more routes serving many more destination and tens of thousands of people as well as help get rid of many transfers which people uniformally hate. Such route could be running every 5 minutes all day so people wouldn't need the dreaded bus timetable and could be deployed on routes such as Hamilton Road, Wellington, Oxford East/Airport, Oxford West/Byron, Richmond/Western/Masonville, Dundas, and Springbank/Westmount/Wonderland South.

[kaiserLDN]

Djeffery I like your ideas. Put all these ideas together I think everyone can stop complaining. Maybe the city should have mass transit meeting and workshops where everyone puts in there ideas to help move people in and around the city. All the meetings now are for one project in general and if there are meetings for all projects I think they need to be advertised a lot more. We need some community meetings covering the whole city on how to move people around. Ranging from missing links, expressways to rapid transit. I think this would convince the people that only drive that the city is also spending money on them and wanting to help everyone.

[Dupcheck]

Our city can not clean our roads on time when it snows. I have no idea how they will handle taking care of the BRT routes as well. The train crossings are still the biggest problem for the BRT and also the biggest danger for the people.

[Spoofy]

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[jammer139]

When bad designs and policy for transit happens you see adverse impacts like the King St pilot in Toronto.

http://toronto.citynews.ca/2018/01/08/bu...action-king-street-pilot-project-losses/

[manny_santos]

Originally Posted by jammer139

When bad designs and policy for transit happens you see adverse impacts like the King St pilot in Toronto.

http://toronto.citynews.ca/2018/01/08/bu...action-king-street-pilot-project-losses/

They are claiming revenue is down since the pilot started in November, which I'm not going to question, but nobody is talking about how their sales compare with the same period in 2016 or 2015.

I work with small businesses for a living, and surprisingly some small business owners do not understand seasonality very well and have an expectation that their sales should be even at all times of year. Some of them believe that revenue drops at certain times of year can be blamed on anything that's convenient to blame. I'm not saying that's definitely the case here but I wouldn't be surprised if some of these businesses see revenue drops every November and December - after all, people don't go out as much when it's colder - and they're just blaming the King Street pilot because it's the most obvious variable that's changed. What I can say from knowing that part of Toronto well, foot traffic drops off every year after the Blue Jays season is over as they are in close proximity to Rogers Centre/Skydome, as well as once it gets cold.

Has the King Street pilot contributed? Perhaps it has, but I suspect this is a seasonality issue more than anything. I would not be surprised if they also saw similar drops in 2015 and 2016 once the Jays were eliminated from the baseball playoffs, but none of them were threatening to sue Rogers or John Gibbons.

A good case study on downtown small businesses being affected by a street being closed to cars but remaining open to pedestrians is Kingston. They've had sections of their main street closed for reconstruction for extended periods over the past eight years while maintaining pedestrian access. Many businesses along there complained that business was down during those closures because of the closures, but they forgot to factor in that the closures were taking place between May and August. That's important because foot traffic in that city's downtown is heavily dependent on Queen's University students, who are almost all from out of town and aren't in the city between May and August, and foot traffic in that city's downtown even in a normal year plummets at the end of April before picking up again at the beginning of September. Very few businesses actually closed during those construction projects; I can think of one restaurant that did close as a direct result (mainly because workers made it difficult for people on foot to actually access the business, which is a whole different issue), but pretty much everyone else has survived and are still there.

The point for London is that these arguments about cars not being able to access streets that are lined with small businesses are often weak and don't take other external factors into account.

[ssiguy]

I can understand why Toronto's King Street streetcar is a pilot but that is one of the main problems with it............it's all stick and no carrot as far as businesses are concerned.

The pilot has certainly increased ridershp and the speed of the streetcars but that's all it's done. Making the streetcar pilot permanent will help these businesses immensely. When it's a permanent route only then all the street enhancement can begin. Wider sidewalks, patios, a much nicer pedestrian realm, and a sense of permanence.

Right now businesses have none of that and in fact the street as it stands is less inviting because all the concrete barriers makes it more unattractive than it was before and the whole damn street looks like nothing more than one long construction route.

If I was a merchant along the route I too would be bitching because I get fewer parking spaces for potential customers and an unglier public realm to boot. Hopefully it become permanent but when it is it is paramount that the city spend the money to make the route an attractive one.

[Innsertnamehere]

THe king pilot is a miracle for streetcar users. Even if businesses are taking a bit of a hit, it's well worth it. The biggest complainer, Freds Not Here, is going to be shut down in a year anyway to build a condo.

[manny_santos]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

I can understand why Toronto's King Street streetcar is a pilot but that is one of the main problems with it............it's all stick and no carrot as far as businesses are concerned.

The pilot has certainly increased ridershp and the speed of the streetcars but that's all it's done. Making the streetcar pilot permanent will help these businesses immensely. When it's a permanent route only then all the street enhancement can begin. Wider sidewalks, patios, a much nicer pedestrian realm, and a sense of permanence.

Right now businesses have none of that and in fact the street as it stands is less inviting because all the concrete barriers makes it more unattractive than it was before and the whole damn street looks like nothing more than one long construction route.

If I was a merchant along the route I too would be bitching because I get fewer parking spaces for potential customers and an unglier public realm to boot. Hopefully it become permanent but when it is it is paramount that the city spend the money to make the route an attractive one.

It's also the time of year. The pilot started in November and it's now January; the patio portion of this won't be possible for at almost another 4 months.

[haljackey]

5 misconceptions about London's rapid transit project

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/lon...d-transit-shift-misconceptions-1.4501581

[ssiguy]

^^ If 2 of the 5 misconceptions are that it really won't be that "rapid" then exactly what is the point? This just seems to add fire to the opponents claim that it's not worth the money. Maybe they should go the Vancouver B-line type route and serve the whole city with better transit than a couple shorter routes that the city has now admitted won't be much faster than it is now.

[Oliverfox]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

^^ If 2 of the 5 misconceptions are that it really won't be that "rapid" then exactly what is the point? This just seems to add fire to the opponents claim that it's not worth the money. Maybe they should go the Vancouver B-line type route and serve the whole city with better transit than a couple shorter routes that the city has now admitted won't be much faster than it is now.

The point is to improve service, which is what this plan will do. It's not as grand and fast as LTR but the changes to the routes to line up for transferring is going to help a lot.

[Djeffery]

Originally Posted by Oliverfox

The point is to improve service, which is what this plan will do. It's not as grand and fast as LTR but the changes to the routes to line up for transferring is going to help a lot.

Unless people who travel on and connect to routes that aren't in the BRT corridors will find the timing off for their current trips when resources and schedules are changed to suit BRT connections.

[ssiguy]

Many will see their commute times increase if they are not on 1 of these BRT routes. Where they may have had only one bus trip to get downtown may now become 2 as their route is short-turned as people will now have to transfer onto a BRT line.

[ScreamingViking]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

Many will see their commute times increase if they are not on 1 of these BRT routes. Where they may have had only one bus trip to get downtown may now become 2 as their route is short-turned as people will now have to transfer onto a BRT line.

That's a possibility. Transfers are important.

On the other hand, connecting to a faster service with less stops for part of the trip may reduce total transit commute times for many. The key will be how the feeder routes are optimized to link up with the BRT routes, and the frequency of service offered on the BRT lines.

[kaiserLDN]

http://www.lfpress.com/2018/01/25/letters-to-the-editor-jan-26-3

This guy has a point about these trees

Also the trees wrapped are coming down if its road widening or of its BRT. They have trees wrapped on the S curve on Wellington Rd. Those trees 100% have to come down and the road straightened out at some point when whatever happens ( road widening or BRT )

And I'm sorry but from Horton St. to this Wellington road S curve is a bad entrance to the downtown. Prime spot for redevelopment. Widen it as a road or widen it for BRT than hopefully this area gets cleaned up. One of my favored spots in the city that needs redevelopment.