The new Finch West LRT line opened this past weekend in Toronto. This is a 10.3-kilometer transit line that runs from Humber College to Finch West subway station, and replaces a bus route that was previously one of the busiest in the city.
It's also a line that dates back to 2007. I vividly remember reading about this proposal while I was in grad school in the US. Some of you might remember that it was part of Mayor David Miller's Transit City proposal. Since then, the project got cancelled and revived at least once, which is partially why it took some 18 years to complete.
Transit openings are typically exciting. A bunch of people lined up on Sunday morning in the cold to be first to ride it. I slept in instead of doing that, but I do fancy myself a transit nerd. Whenever I'm in a new city, I always try to take (or at least test out) their transit system.
And when the Eglinton LRT finally opens, I do have aspirations to ride from end to end while spinning house and techno music from the rear car. (I have yet to reach out to the TTC to see if they might be interested in accommodating such an activity.)
But it's not all excitement. Now that the Finch line is open, the customer reviews are in and the general consensus seems to be that it sucks:
A CBC Toronto reporter rode the entire 10.3-kilometre line from east to west Monday morning, finding it took roughly 55 minutes to complete. As a reference point, over 400 runners ran this year's Toronto Marathon 10-kilometre event in under 55 minutes.
CBC Toronto's eastbound return trip to Finch West Station was about eight minutes shorter, clocking in at roughly 47 minutes. Still, several riders Monday told CBC Radio's Metro Morning that the previous bus route on Finch Avenue W. was faster and had more stops along the way, making it easier to access.
So now Torontonians are rightly questioning why our various levels of government spent ~$3.75 billion and took 18 years to build a line that performs worse than what was already there. Hmm. Good question.
The problems — and I defer to experts like Reece Martin — seem to be a lack of transit signal priority, stop spacing that's too tight (~500 meters on average), and too many slow zones, among other things. This is highly problematic from a value-for-money standpoint and from an overall transit investment standpoint.
If we don't fix this, we haven't just wasted billions; we’ve probably killed the argument for light rail in this city for a generation. The good news is we know this can work, and that's because it's being done successfully all over the world. Let's go, Toronto. Make it happen.
Cover photo via Wikipedia
I'll be the first to admit that I have an urban bias. I like walkable narrow streets. I like being able to cycle around. And I like not having to drive when I want to do things. But this can create a city-building blindspot and Paul Kulig, Principal at Perkins&Will Toronto, reminded me of that this week. Here's a tweet where he compares two streets, both of which have a right-of-way width somewhere around 40m:
The image on the left is Prenzlauer Allee in Berlin. And the image on the right is Finch Avenue West in Toronto. Despite both having light rail running down the middle, one of these streets is walkable, vibrant, and generally urban, and the other is very suburban. What this reminds us is that a wide street isn't necessarily an insurmountable challenge. It's ultimately how we design that street that is the make or break.
Here's another look at Prenzlaurer Allee:
In addition to transit running down the middle of it, it also has a ton of on-street parking. In many cases, the cars are parked perpendicular to the curb. So it's not like this street isn't also accommodating to motorists. The key differentiator is how the buildings are placed. They come right up to the street and are accompanied by a great pedestrian realm (note all the patios below).
This is one of the things that Toronto needs to be focused on following the investments made in public transit on streets like Finch and Eglinton. We don't want generous setbacks on these streets. Make them 0m. Towers in a park kill any chance of street life. We can talk all we want about "active frontages" on our arterial roads, but who wants to sit on a patio on a street like Finch? Nobody.
But as Berlin shows, there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't change that. Thanks for the reminder, Paul.
Cover photo via Google Street View
https://videopress.com/v/3Eq80SZc?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true
I was very impressed by Bordeaux's tramway network. It felt like no matter where you were in the city, there was a tram gracefully passing you by. Here's a high-level summary of the system:
The network has 4 lines and a total route length of 77.5 km.
The first line opened in 2003.
The network has 130 stops, which crudely results in an average stop spacing of around 600 m.
The system pioneered ground-level power supply for the trains, which means no overhead wires. Supposedly this caused some issues upfront, but now it seems to be working just fine.
Most of the network runs on a dedicated right-of-way (en site propre). Meaning, the trains don't compete with car traffic. Many of the lines are quite beautiful too - see above video.
In 2018, the network carried close to 100 million people. This is in a city of ~260k people and a metro area of ~1.4 million people (2020).
The key differentiators for me are (1) the stop spacing and (2) the fact that most of the system runs on its own dedicated right-of-way. These are two reasons why Toronto's streetcars perform so poorly. They stop too frequently. And most of the lines have to compete with traffic.
So why bother? Walking can be faster.
Bordeaux shows that -- if you implement light rail correctly -- you can actually move a ton people efficiently. With surface rail, you can also build out a robust network in a relatively short period of time.
Twenty years isn't that long in city-building years. It has already been 10 years since Toronto was first promised SmartTrack.
