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yurt2022 said:
We need Doug Ford to step in and remove operations responsibility from TTC and hire Alstom/Mosaic to operate this line.

We're not waiting to "Q1 2026" for staff to make a report that still doesn't get the line to advertised speeds (which might not even be implemented).
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Most likely they will come back with some half ass recommendation and the TTC will spend over a year to implement...
 
I'm concerned that the political initiative here is focused on signal priority, which while it will help, is ignoring the real problem with the line that politicians don't seem to be acknowledging - and that is that the TTC is simply operating the line far to cautiously. You could delete every stop light on the line and this thing would still have terrible travel times because the TTC refuses to run it faster than 30km//h.
 
innsertnamehere said:
I'm concerned that the political initiative here is focused on signal priority, which while it will help, is ignoring the real problem with the line that politicians don't seem to be acknowledging - and that is that the TTC is simply operating the line far to cautiously. You could delete every stop light on the line and this thing would still have terrible travel times because the TTC refuses to run it faster than 30km//h.
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Why don't you wait and see what their plan is before criticizing it?
 
innsertnamehere said:
I'm concerned that the political initiative here is focused on signal priority, which while it will help, is ignoring the real problem with the line that politicians don't seem to be acknowledging - and that is that the TTC is simply operating the line far to cautiously. You could delete every stop light on the line and this thing would still have terrible travel times because the TTC refuses to run it faster than 30km//h.
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Chow explicitly mentions increasing the speed on the line itself AND tsp adj. As the steps she'll be pushing.

Proof is in the pudding of course but I think we gotta wait and see here
 
Jac. said:
I also don't know why before the station (heading in westbound) it goes down, then curves, and then goes right back up only to go down again into the station, how did that pass planning? Is there something I am missing. That whole area fascinates me.
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The reasoning for having the line ramp up and down is that it meant that less soil needed to be excavated during construction and sped up that process. And once open it greatly simplifies emergency access. Now they simply have a pair of gates at ground level. If they kept it deep, they would need at the very least staircases, and possibly as elaborate as a building to cover them.

Of course, the fact that the line is built adjacent to what is ostensibly a highway helps, as there will almost certainly never be any need to redevelop that land or above the tracks.

Dan
 
Toronto is making the same mistake as Ottawa. They open the line without it being optimized. This turns everybody off. How can it take an hour to go less than 11 km? You would expect much better performance in a seperate transit lane.

After seeing what has happened here in Ottawa, operations are extremely cautious to protect the trains. The bogie problem with this model has never been resolved and dwell times are extended to protect the fragile doors from public abuse. Very little has been done to speed up trains in Ottawa, so the Finch speed problem may be a feature that makes transit worse in the long-term after spending a pile of money

All the complex safety features in modern LRT are not designed for speed.
 
There is a silver lining here. If you stand in the right place, and squint your eyes, or crop your photos, you can almost pretend that we have Platform Screen Doors! :D

Screenshot 2025-12-10 101015.png


(Cropped from original pic by Reese Martin.)
 
Voltz said:
Humber College station should be covered over completely, having to clear snow from a below ground platform is just dumb.

That should have been the biggest issue with this line.
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Platforms should be heated and snow shouldn't accumulate, but cover while its snowing or raining would be nice. Has snow been accumulating on the platform?
 
To me, the biggest elephant in the room is that giving the train absolute signal priority so it experiences no delays at intersections is not even on the table. That's a silent admission of the fact that speed, frequency, and reliability of a rail line will always be constrained by its points of interaction with people and vehicles at intersections and level crossings. An urban transit line that doesn't have a dedicated and secured right of way from end to end cannot be considered rapid transit. Full stop.

I hope this growing public debacle, and the quickly rising anxiety of politicians on the eve of an election year, both soon to be amplified by the opening of Line 5, puts paid to the fantasy that rapid transit performance can be provided without a dedicated and secured right of way. The tens of billions of dollars going into LRT projects and years of construction will not yield rapid transit. The lines have every potential to provide significantly better transit service than the mixed traffic buses they replace, but they will fail to live up to the promises that have been made all these years and people are right to be asking some very acute questions.

Lastly, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of Vancouver's SkyTrain, and the early success of Montreal's REM, in the long-running debate about the merits of LRT vs automated grade separated light metro, I think the latter has been demonstrated to objectively be the better choice to deliver actual rapid transit for less-than-subway money.
 
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