Quote:
Originally Posted by biguc
Anyway, a lot of you are really wringing your hands about tramways, and it shows you don't have a lot of good experiences with them. I'm willing to bet that most of you have a bad taste in your mouth from the TTC's offering, or some of the borderline white elephants in American cities. I always thought Minneapolis's was kind of bad, even though it shares more in common with the C-train than a tramway.
|
I'm definitely not one of them that complains about the TTC's streetcar system because I fully understand that the streetcars in Toronto address
capacity needs rather than rapidity needs Can you just imagine how many buses would have to operate to handle the demand on these current streetcar routes today?
Quote:
Originally Posted by biguc
But a well designed tramline is pretty quick.
A few keys to a good tram line:
1. Long blocks. milomilo mentioned this with respect to the C-Train. It's an intuitive point, but worth illustrating in contrast to what happens with TTC streetcars. They mostly run east-west, across the grain of the city's blocks. This increases potential points of conflict.
|
True. But is also worth nothing that the TTC streetcar system is over 100 years old and Toronto is honestly fortunate enough to have kept their streetcar system from when it was first implemented. Transit planning is way different now than it was 100 years ago. Plus when motorized vehicles came around, the streetcar system quickly lost its priority to private vehicles since those started trending for the next 100 years.
City planners were honestly designing cities for vehicles during the golden age of the private car. And it didn't help that North American media romanticized and catalyzed the idea of far-flung suburb living and owning a car either.
You kind of have to cut Toronto a little bit of slack on their original streetcar routes since it is older than the invention of the motorized vehicle and they weren't designing it thinking about it sharing the road with vehicles or other updated concepts like developing transit nodes and engineering for future connectivity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by biguc
Another virtue of at-grade systems that people miss when they get worked up about point-to-point speed, is the speed of using the system. An at-grade tram is very accessible. Compared to grade-separated systems, it's much faster to get to the transit. The difference in Berlin, where the subways run just under the roads and don't have fare gates, isn't that pronounced. But somewhere like Kiev, where getting to the subway is a commute unto itself, you're often better off taking trams than joining the miners going to the subway.
Sprinting across town on a fast train is a lot less impressive when you tack on five minutes of escalator rides and waiting for people fumbling with their metro card at the ends.
|
That entirely depends on the system though. If your at-grade LRT system has stations in the median of the road then you still have to use those 5 minutes to wait for the crosswalk to signal you and you still have to wait for "people fumbling with their metro cards".
More and more Canadian transit systems are moving towards a card tapping technology that is easy to use like Vancouver and Winnipeg to name a few; these boarding and disembarking strategies are also commonly found worldwide as well. My point here is that you are ALWAYS going to get the dingbat who can't think 5 minutes ahead of themselves, who needs to take an extra second to hold everyone else up while they search for their metro card or whatever. Transit disgraces are found in all systems, not just on grade-separated rapid transit systems.
As for accessibility, Canada has been really good at developing stations in the last two decades (I will daringly say) that are able to accommodate people of all mobility capabilities by installing escalators and elevators.
In fact IIRC there is a REM station being developed in Montreal that is said to be very deep and it is anticipated to be equipped with a faster set of elevators. The reality of grade-separated systems is that you, yourself, need to reach the platform's level most of the time. Would you rather take the 5 minutes to get to the train's platform or would you rather wait for a clean-up crew to swing by to remove a vehicle collision blocking the tracks?
Prev
Linear Mode
