The missing link
Make people walk a long way and then throw in a transfer? They’ll just drive instead
The Toronto waterfront is going to grow, grow, grow in the next decade or two. Two hundred and eighty thousand new residents and 190,000 new jobs in the Port Lands, the western Don Valley, the South Core, the area around Harbourfront, the mouth of the Humber. This, on top of the tens of thousands of new residences and offices built south of Front St. in the past 20 years.
All that growth is the reason the city is planning to build a new, expanded waterfront LRT line across the bottom of the city, at a cost expected to be measured in the billions of dollars.
So why did the preliminary plans for that new transit line suggest, as a possibility, that it would connect with the subway line at Union by a pedestrian tunnel between Queens Quay and Front St.? Why is anyone thinking it’s a good idea to suggest people commuting should get off one vehicle and walk more than half a kilometre before getting on another vehicle to continue their trip? It’s silly.
Expanding the existing streetcar tunnel between Queens Quay and Union to serve more vehicles would be expensive? Well, you don’t say.
This is a city that has repeatedly, emphatically affirmed that it thinks it is worth spending $1.5 billion or more to ensure people in Scarborough do not have to get off an LRT and get onto a subway.
That rejected transfer between vehicles — in plans, a one-flightof-stairs affair like the ones at St. George and Bloor, a 30-second inconvenience — was thought to be so onerous it was worth spending virtually anything to avoid.
But presumably the people who live and work on the Waterfront are expected to have greater reservoirs of energy and patience such that not only would they change vehicles, but would walk 600 metres — a lap and a half of an Olympic track — in between.
Maybe someone at city hall thinks they’re all exercise buffs who welcome the workout. And the added 10 minutes to their trip time.
This is a city that recently decided it was worth spending more than $1 billion to rebuild the eastern Gardiner Expressway so that 5,200 peakhour, peak direction vehicles would not experience a two to three minute delay. But someone who lives in a new apartment overlooking that newly rebuilt road will be expected to take an LRT to Bay St., then walk for six minutes or more, before getting on a subway.
Or maybe just change vehicles twice instead!
A third option, besides the pedestrian tunnel and rebuilding the rail link to Union, is an “underground funicular” cable-car system. People would get off the subway, get on a little cable car for one stop, then get off that cable car and get onto an LRT at Queens Quay to continue their journey.
What’s the problem with that? “People generally don’t like transfers, so that’s a negative experience,” Nigel Tahair of the city’s transportation department told my colleague Ben Spurr. Uh huh.
In fact, transit planners have a name for the effect of this “negative experience.” It’s called a “transfer penalty.” Basically, the more often a person has to transfer vehicles, and the more difficult those transfers are, the less likely a person is to take transit.
The TTC actually has weights it applies to different kinds of transfers based on how they are perceived by customers to estimate the penalty. People like riding a vehicle, so that’s the baseline. People don’t like waiting for a vehicle. So the TTC estimates that time waiting for a vehicle to arrive has a weight of 1.5 — in a customer’s mind, a minute spent waiting at the stop is equivalent to one and a half minutes sitting on a train.
Now, walking has a weight, in this calculation, of 2.0. A six-minute walk to change vehicles, as the pedestrian tunnel plan calls for, is considered equivalent to adding 12 minutes to the trip.
And each transfer? That has a weight of 10. Changing vehicles once is thought to be as inconvenient as 10 minutes of riding time.
So, a six-minute walk plus a transfer is equivalent, in a riders mind, to a 22-minute delay on their trip. And an additional transfer onto and off of a cable car? That’s another 10 minutes.
Is that all a bit convoluted to follow? Well, the simple upshot is that if you make people walk a long way, they will not like it. And if you make people change vehicles more often, they will not like that either. And people who do not like their transit experience will tend to drive, instead, if they have the option.
It is said it might cost $270 million to connect the new LRT line properly to Union Station.
I don’t know why it would cost that much to expand the existing tunnel a bit to accommodate more traffic. But I don’t understand anything about why building transit costs so much (and so much more than it used to). A subway station now costs $200 million or more to build. A single stop extension of the subway in Scarborough is going to cost at least $3.5 billion.
I don’t understand it — I can barely fathom the numbers — but by now I know very well, as most Torontonians do. Transit is expensive. But if we’re going to spend billions on new lines, the least we can do is make sure we do it right. You build a transit line — especially if you’re building a tunnel — to last generations.
The waterfront LRT will serve generations of people, hundreds of thousands of them, who will live and work in growing parts of the city. Whether those people can easily get around on transit will depend in part on the one-time, permanent decisions we make now.
As Councillor Joe Mihevc said, this is not the time to “cheap out.” You build the thing right, connect it to the subway line, and avoid having a generation of people living and working on the water, sitting in their cars and wondering why we wasted all that money on an LRT line that goes right past them without conveniently connecting them to the city. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire
Build the transit right and you avoid a generation of waterfront dwellers sitting in their cars