Friday’s Headlines

8 comments

1. Why shouldn’t we be sentimental about our streetcars? That infrastructure is an important part of culture. Taking them out of the picture is like demolishing the CN Tower or Old City Hall, or building a private subdivision on all the parklands of the islands. Rob Ford’s plan is heresy. Please value the culture of your city, don’t just see it from a detached, passionless perspective. It makes for a generic American city.

   We will probably have to eliminate some streetcar lines in the future to improve capacity and speed of transit (for those travelling medium to longer distances especially) with new subway lines. But to simply dismantle the network is out of the question.

2. Sure, be sentimental about the streetcars. But if you take away nostalgia, what’s left? A transit mode that frankly doesn’t work very well.

3. I haven’t read the latest Ford link, but I’m going to assume it’s more of the same from yesterday.

   1. It takes between 2 and 4 buses to replace 1 streetcar. 4 drivers are a lot more expensive than 1 driver. TTC doesn’t have the money.

   2. Queen, King, etc. are slow for driving because they are narrow, chock-full of parked cars, and there’s an awesome shop/restaurant/cafe every 5 metres so they are very busy. Getting rid of streetcars would not make those streets any faster for driving.

   3. Cancelling the streetcar order, new carhouse construction, etc. would be insanely expensive in terms of money already spent, penalty clauses, the fact that our streetcars have a non-standard gauge, and the fact that there are no buyers for such a hypothetical quantity of used streetcars.

   5. Oh, and it takes from 75 to 200 automobiles to replace one streetcar. That’s a lot of gridlock. Toronto would never, ever, ever have enough roadspace.

4. Streetcars may be the best of a bad situation when it comes to downtown surface transit. Downtown is congested and dense, so surface transit doesn’t work that well. This is why cities around the world with high density and congestion downtown have bigger subway networks. Buses would only make the situation worse and ultimately reduce ridership. They would also increase noise and pollution on the street.

   Value our streetcars. Otherwise, their disappearance will comeback and haunt us.

5. Besides carrying more people – streetcars are great because they provide a smooth ride.

   They should make Ford do a test – see how long he can remain standing in a streetcar, and then test him in one of his buses.

6. I get such a laugh over the anti-streetcar argument. First, we just spent the last 16 years replacing the entire trackage of the legacy streetcar system, so that’s hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money wasted right there if it’s all ripped out so prematurely. Second, we just so happen to be at a point where we are in the process of replacing the entire fleet, so the legacy system is in a way at a vulnerable point in the 149 years it has been around. Rob Ford has a good chance of winning, but McGuinty will still be premier until 2011 (and could have pushed it as far as 2012 if he had not set 4 year term limits) and his majority caucus will not let years of work be altered on such short notice.

   Already many cities have chosen light rail/streetcars (same thing) because it saves them money over conventional heavy rail rapid transit. And the versatile thing about them is that they can be run in trains as long as you want (like any train) and can run both in a tunnel with full right of way features like a subway line as well as on street level on a reserved right of way (with priority signalling) or mixed traffic. Heavy rail rapid transit like on the Yonge St subway, or it’s worthless offshoot, ICTS, are only designed to work on a 100% reserved right of way. Somone who is very concerned with his tax dollars being saved in any way possible may find appeal if the funds can be applied to a mode of rail transportation that gets very close to heavy rail rapid transit without costing to as such a steep degree as the other. There are also many times and places where Toronto`s downtown arterial roads are filled with crushloads of cars with one lone horribly overcrowded CLRV unable to move. One good place to see this is on the eastbound lanes of Dundas St. near Yonge outside the Best Buy. And many of these cars will consist of one driver in a vehicle designed to hold four people. If I could count the cars stretching the whole block to determine the number of people travelling, I am very sure they could very easily and very comfortably be accomodated on board a multiple unit LRV, taking up a mere fraction of the road space used compared to the other way around. And given how imperitive it is for the health of this city that we be able to transport people in this city as effectively and efficiently as possible, for the best bargain, it is most likely that streetcars/light rail transit fair about as the best option.

7. Jordan, track replacement is a sunk cost. No matter whether the streetcars are kept or not, we can’t get that money back, so it shouldn’t enter into the decision. It’s like saying, I spent a million dollars trying to design a car made out of lasagna noodles, and no luck yet, but I have to keep spending money on the project or the original million dollars will be wasted.

   More generally, the arguments in favor of keeping the streetcars are all either based on nostalgia, or they argue that streetcars are great if they are operated in a way totally different from what we find in Toronto.

   I’d like to see a streetcar system where service was reliable and competent; where streetcars always had the right of way; where they always stopped at center-of-the-road platforms (like at Bay and College); where proof-of-payment and all-door boarding were the norm; where traffic priority actually worked; and where the street design favored streetcars over private cars.

   Basically, what I want is the kind of European-style system that we now see in those cities that ripped out their streetcars decades ago and recently reinstalled them. If (like in those cities) it takes the destruction of the current streetcar system to achieve that, then so be it, because the status quo is not tenable.

8. I’ve been to (driven on the streets of SFO,LA, Portland, Seattle just to name a few and I have to admit that their street surface / underground(SFO ) transit system is more efficient than ours.) San Diego’s and Denver Colorado’s too where they even have railway crossings for trams to cross. I don’t know why our streetcars are so darn heavy. The ones I mentioned earlier are feather weights compared to ours in terms of sound, noise or lack thereof. (at least they don’t cause tremurs in the ground) Maybe one of the reasons why our roads constantly have to be repaired and even the tracks is because they are antiquated dinosaurs which don’t have enough air /gas in suspension to float along on. It’s either they built their roads more solidly or use more rubber or transverse leaf susp to absorb as much of vibrations as possible. Hybrid buses or diesel electric only. I only hope this gets better!