Stick to the surface

Posted on September 12, 2008 at 9:56 pm by Andrae Griffith

As I speed downtown on the subway, I often wonder what wonders I’m passing above me. Am I passing a vintage clothing store where hipsters are searching for that one-of-a-kind pair of jeans? Am I passing a little Thai restaurant that could fill my palate with unforgettable flavours? Am I passing a local florist selling a dozen roses for that special someone?

In this world of deadlines and timetables, opting to take a parallel bus route instead of the subway could be taken as a sign of too much time on one’s hand. But, there is, at least to me, something deeply satisfying about seeing the city unfold before you. Heading uptown from Ryerson, I might enter the subway in the canyon of towering buildings and emerge among strip malls and power centres. On the bus, I can see the subtle changes from block to block. The evolution of neighbourhoods unfolds before my eyes.

Though the conventional wisdom is that stations spaced far apart leads to a wasteland midway between, this doesn’t hold true for north Yonge. Despite being a full kilometre from a subway station, a vibrant gathering place exists where one can spot people drinking coffee on a Second Cup patio while a small dog tied outside the store tries desperately not to be overwhelmed by the activity all around him. One can spot joggers enjoying the crisp, invigorating morning air. One can spot young couples, some deeply in love and some just exploring their feelings, walking hand-in-hand towards a classy restaurant. In my mind, it’s scenes like this which are unique to the vibrant urban spaces that we strive to create. Either way, these are scenes which cannot be seen from a tunnel below.

Surface routes like the 97 YONGE, 74 MOUNT PLEASANT, 11 BAYVIEW and 61 AVENUE ROAD NORTH offer trips though the hidden gems of uptown Toronto. Areas where the city-wide draws that bless Queen West and the Eaton Centre are replaced with local shops and cafes, and where every pass reveals something new and exciting. On Yonge, you’ll find a vibrant commercial district survives despite being far removed from the subway line thundering below. On Avenue Road, the lonely shelter at Otter Loop hints at the trolley coach service which used to rule these streets. Bayview adjacent to Leaside turns into quite a destination on a warm summer’s night, while a certain store on Mount Pleasant bring back unforgettable memories of my own childhood.

To some, these bus routes are the neighbourhood bus to take them to destination beyond walking distance. To others, these routes are alternatives to the subway – a guaranteed seat for a reasonable detour. To me, these routes are a passport to the city. They are a chance to explore the neighbourhoods that make this city great, and a chance to discover places to eat, places to shop, places to play, and places to just sit back and watch the world pass by.

The world for the price of a token – sticking to surface routes might not be so bad after all…

Tags: avenue road, buses, leaside, mount pleasant, north yonge, uptown, urban exploration

20 Comments

Sometimes I too like riding a surface route. Queen St Streetcar is fun. But most of the time if I have a choice between bus or subway. Subway it is! I love the speed of the subway, buses are usually too darn slow.

Comment by Mike P — September 14, 2008 @ 12:02 am
Sometimes, speding a extra 5-10 minutes on a surface route is worth it.

Comment by Justin Bernard — September 14, 2008 @ 9:34 am
I can’t enjoy a surface route because I have to pick up my son from daycare at the end of my day- speed is what I need.

Comment by George S — September 15, 2008 @ 12:53 pm
If it was only five minutes. It’s more like thirty.

Comment by Mimmo Briganti — September 15, 2008 @ 5:41 pm
If only it was just 5 minutes more to take a surface route.

Why is the assumption that all of us are like Sunday riders, and we don’t worry about how long it takes to go somewhere, we just want to see the neighbourhood, and such. At times all of us have time, and we take surface routes,and enjoy the scenery. But many times speed is what we need, we live in an incredibly fast paced city and we lead busy lives. Transit riders already take twice a long to commute as a motorist, do you think we want to take even longer than that. We don’t always have time to smell the roses so to speak, and subways play a very important role in getting somewhere fast. Although the trains only usually go 50KM/hour. But that’s another topic for another day.

Comment by Mike Polsky — September 16, 2008 @ 11:01 am
I’d agree, on a daily basis commuters don’t have time to spare. People with kids practically never have time to spare – be it day, evening, night, weekend.

A couple of years back, I had a project in the West end – Kipling/Islington area. From the Beach, it was 52 minutes to 1 hour – by subway with a short bus trip at either end. I probably drove 60% of the time – which was anywhere from 25 minutes to 50 minutes. If I had to take surface transit, I would never have taken transit.

The point is that the subway enables trips that have accceptable duration for medium length trips.

When I was a boy, I explored Montreal by bus. Bus tickets were 8 1/2 cents each for students. I could lollygag about on weekends. I must have had transfers from 50 or so routes. It was a great way to explore.

As an adult, I just don’t have the time.

Comment by J Albert — September 16, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
Things like what J Albert is talking about is the proof that everyone needs in order to understand that there is in fact demand for urban intra-416 use of GO Transit. GO Transit needs to run very frequent, multi-interlined service for it to be attractive, but it is viable.

If J Albert had originated in the Beaches, he could have parked the car at Main Square, hopped a train from Danforth GO, and gotten off at Kipling 30 minutes later.

And to top it off, GO Trains would count as “surface” transit

Comment by Karl Junkin — September 16, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
The neighbourhoods on Mt. Pleasant and Yonge in North Toronto date from the era when these streets had frequent local service.

Until the subway was extended to York Mills in the early 70s, there was a very frequent trolleybus service between Eglinton and Glen Echo (at Hogg’s Hollow), and of course a frequent streetcar service before the subway opened in 1954. That’s what built the neighbourhood.

Mr. Pleasant had frequent streetcar service from the mid 1920s onward that built those neighbourhoods and the commercial strip. You can see photos on the City Archives site showing the streetcar line under construction running up the street with a mixture of vacant lots and brand new buildings.

Once you get past the “old” part of the city, you land in North York and what neighbourhoods once existed have largely vanished under a collection of extremely boring high rises. Again, the old areas like Willowdale focused on Yonge which was a main street and had streetcar service until 1948 that ran up to Richmond Hill.

When talking about stop spacing, you have to keep the cause and effect relationships sorted out. In the context of Transit City, the intent is to support the City’s Avenues plan with surface transit that will encourage pedestrain activity along the street and, in turn, support linear rather than point forms of development.

Comment by Steve Munro — September 17, 2008 @ 12:24 pm
Mr. Munro, even if it made any sense to invest $8 billion in LRT in the hope that it will perk up grim suburban arterials (a position with which I profoundly disagree, and I note that each of your examples are at least 60 years out of date), only the Sheppard and Eglinton TransitCity lines have significant intersections with the city’s “Avenues” plan. According to the city, no “Avenus” development at all is expected on Don Mills or Jane, and very little is expected on Finch. That’s 3 out of 5 lines.

Comment by Andrew E — September 17, 2008 @ 4:19 pm
Whoops, I forgot about the Waterfront West and Malvern lines. Still, around half the project is irrelevant to Avenues.

Comment by Andrew E — September 17, 2008 @ 4:29 pm
We should be building transit primarily to get people from point A to point B — not to “develop” avenues; that’s secondary.

Transit City’s weakness is it does absolutely nothing to address long distance travel, and that’s where we need improvement the most. Short trips already work well.

Transit City also calls itself a network, but unless its routes can act as trunk lines and attract riders from adjacent parallel and intersecting routes, it’s not really a network at all.

Example:

Origin: Keele + Sheppard
Destination: Weston + Steeles

Would this person go out of his/her way to take the Jane or Finch LRTs for their trip?

Comment by Mimmo Briganti — September 17, 2008 @ 4:54 pm
Developing livable neighbourhood environments is not secondary, it is critical to creating a city people want to live and be successful in, and transit is critical to growing that sense of livability. To call that secondary is disgraceful.

That mentality is what gave us the GO Train stations of asphalt deserts in the middle of nowhere, it held the attitude that neighbourhoods are unimportant and that it is “enough” to get people from A to B and not worry about the rest. But it isn’t, and GO Transit is learning the hard way now in its endless parking supply-and-demand predicament.

Transit is about sustainable city building. Sustainable city building goes beyond just getting from A to B. The vitality of the areas being services needs to be safeguarded and/or enhanced, or nobody is going to ride the service since it will go to places nobody wants to go. That’s why everybody immediately hops into cars at GO Train stations, they’re located in places people don’t want to be.

Comment by Karl Junkin — September 17, 2008 @ 6:46 pm
Karl, there are a lot of things that bug me about TransitCity, but the biggest is that TC advocates can’t seem to get their story straight. Is it about rapid transit, as the mayor says? If so, why is the average speed no higher than the buses it replaces? Is it about urban development, as you and Mr. Munro say? If so, why do three of the seven lines have no alignment with the city’s own development plan?

The sad part is that it could be both, if TC’s designers took lessons from good tram systems outside of Toronto. Wtih $8 billion on the line, I’m not interested in a system for which excuses must constantly be made.

Comment by Andrew E — September 17, 2008 @ 8:26 pm
I can’t speak for other advocates, but my story has been straight. I was actually an skeptic when TC was first announced, but after hearing the facts and arguments have become a supporter.

The facts include that Transit City is faster than the buses it replaces, the study figures show that LRT has an average speed somewhere around 7km/h (give-or-take, varies by route) faster than bus routes, more in Eglinton’s case for obvious reasons.

However, speed is not the main issue – that’s false advertising by the Mayor, and you’re right to call him on that.

The main issue is reliability and transit-oriented development as corridors rather than nodes, as it is development as corridors that has led us to the Queen St. and King St. and Roncesvalles Ave. (among others) that we know today. That’s a fact, and it’s nothing to sneeze at, these corridors are gems of Toronto.

It’s also about capacity in the cases of Eglinton and Finch, which are really in need of an upgrade, you can’t practically provide higher capacity by bus without hurting service reliability and user-friendliness. Why Finch E. isn’t included in Transit City is something that I sure would like to know as it is the busiest bus route in the city (Sheppard appears to be to blame, but that’s not an excuse either).

Jane has shown to be a big, BIG problem in recent turns of events, and at this rate, I agree that Jane should be scrapped and that perhaps Keele be considered as an alternate for reasons you’ve mentioned (it’d also be so much cheaper, but you have to pull a few tricks around Eglinton and St.Clair).

Sheppard I also believe has not wholly altruistic purposes, and is more political than anything. A subway would be a worse failure though, so it’s a pick-your-poison dilemma. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this end, despite my disagreements.

As for Morningside, I would have supported it if the SRT were converted to LRT, but with that not happening, I question the validity of not simply stretching the Eglinton LRT to the end of Eglinton and up Kingston Road to Guildwood and terminate it there instead, together with the Kingston Rd. streetcar extension.

Comment by Karl Junkin — September 17, 2008 @ 8:57 pm
But Karl, is $10 billion dollars for a 7 km/hr improvement money well spent?

Comment by Mimmo Briganti — September 17, 2008 @ 9:16 pm
Like I said, it’s also about reliability, and that is actually more important than the speed, which I only brought up because Andrew claimed there was no difference at all. The reliability of the transit service brings an increase in the stability and convenience of the neighbourhood, as the transit becomes much more attractive if it is reliable. That means not only frequency, but predictable trip times. The trip times need not be highway speed, as long as they’re predictable and reliable. If that kind of service can reach all corners of the city, it’s worth a pretty penny, that’s for sure… but I think a lot of money could be saved on Jane at this rate.

Comment by Karl Junkin — September 17, 2008 @ 10:04 pm
Karl, thanks for an interesting discussion.

First off, it is very hard to get a straight answer about the speed of TC. The numbers bandied about on Steve Munro’s website indicate that the expected speed is around 20-25 kph, compared with 17-20 kph for the existing bus services. So if these numbers are correct, we’re both right, with me taking the most pessimistic view and you taking the most optimistic view. (Both speeds are considerably slower than grade-separated vehicles.) If you have a good citation for the speed calculation I would be very happy to read it.

But I’d like to return to your other comment, that TC is about development and capacity. Here are the initial alignments for the TC lines, and here is the city’s Avenues plan.

Now look at Eglinton. Initially this looks great — the length of Eglinton from Yonge to Keele is considered prime “Avenues” territory, one of the best alignments between TC and Avenues in the entire system. But … over this entire length, the TC plan calls for the line to go underground, with subway-like stop spacing. Which promotes, as Mr. Munro puts it, “point forms of develoment”, not linear development as in the Avenues plan. Which directly contradicts the developmental justification TC.

I’ve gone the opposite way from you … I started out enthusiastic about TC, but am now opposed to it as I see how poorly thought out it is.

Comment by Andrew E — September 18, 2008 @ 9:30 am
“… directly contradicts the developmental justification for TC”.

Comment by Andrew E — September 18, 2008 @ 9:32 am
I think a bit of history re the Official Plan is useful here.

The reason that Transit City and the OP are not completely in line with each other was that the TTC fought very hard to prevent a transit plan from being part of the OP. Moreover, their own transit thinking consisted of extending the Sheppard and Spadina subways, and that was about all. Local services might get more frequent buses, but little more.

I along with many others was asked my opinions of the Transit City plan before it was announced, and I raised several issue that are showing up now in the EA process. Some of these will be fixed, I hope, so that we don’t get locked into the same problem with TC as with decades-old subway plans that don’t address current needs.

The intent with Transit City was to show what could be done if only we stopped planning on a project basis, and started looking both at networks and at the interaction between surface transit and city redevelopment. Unfortunately te whole machinery of large public works, EAs, etc., is geared to having the “right” answer before we even start the studies, and this has been further complicated by the new 6-month study process where real alternatives analysis isn’t possible.

We are looking at each line as a project, even though the alternatives should be considered at the network level. We also risk getting locked into specific lines because that’s what we have studied.

Jane, at least south of Eglinton, is a dubious choice. As readers may know from the leaked Metrolinx plan in the Star, the revised route connects with whatever would be built on Eglinton and ends there. The whole Sheppard/Finch situation is a mess, but few seem to have noticed that the plan included converting the Sheppard subway to LRT so that through service could be provided. Whether this survives into the final draft is another matter. That idea, by the way, came not from me but from Richard Soberman who is also an advocate of the Eglinton ART.

There will always be a debate about whether we should be concentrating on long-haul trips with fast lines and infrequent stops, versus shorter trips on local routes. Transit City is not intended to carry people from Pickering to the Airport and, frankly, that’s not the local transit system’s job. There are far, far more people who need to make shorter trips, but they are relegated to inferior service because they don’t (and never will) live on a subway corridor running to an influential politician’s riding.

Even if subways are built, you still need to access them. This means a walk or a local bus ride and only the lucky few live right on top of a station. This is a major issue for accessibility of service.

Coming back to the TC network, we already know that Jane is not in the “first tier” of lines to be built, and the best outcome of the EA would be to recognize that the line as proposed isn’t a very good idea.

Comment by Steve Munro — September 18, 2008 @ 9:40 am
Mr. Munro, thanks for the response. However, an overview of the history of the project does not dispel the general impression that TC advocacy is confused.

What are we hearing?

- Is it rapid transit? (The Mayor’s point.) Clearly not, as projected speeds are well below subway speeds.

- Is it an urban planning project? (Streetcar advocates’ point.) Not in any meaningful way, because of poor — and contradictory (e.g., Eglinton) — alignment with the city’s Avenues plan.

- Is it an exercise in network planning? (Your point.) Maybe it was at first, but as you say, it’s not turning out that way in practice.

Even at the level of individual lines, design “features” such as far-side stops, as well as the dubious status of traffic priority, suggest that the system will not be well designed or operated, typically of Toronto tram lines.

Given the absence of a coherent plan or justification, as well as the scarcity of transit money and clear needs elsewhere, I don’t see how any fiscally responsible person can continue to advocate for TC.

Comment by Andrew E — September 18, 2008 @ 10:53 am