A painting of me

The Yonge Line

   16 October 2012, early evening

Every time I take the Yonge line I am reminded of just how bad public transit is in the city. The Bloor line certainly gets busy during rush hour, but its a whole other scale of busy. The Yonge line is a disaster. I’m curious to see when it actually implodes in on itself. I wonder if the TTC have numbers on when that will happen? They are extending the line North. Presumably they expect to get people who are taking buses to Finch station out of buses, but I can’t imagine there isn’t going to be a net gain of people on the line. At this point, is living along the Yonge line actually useful?

 

Comments

  1. It’s a hell of a lot better than taking a bus down Finch Avenue or a bus down Victoria Park avenue, that’s for sure. Of course, if out idiot of a mayor hadn’t cancelled Transit City, we’d be well into getting a ton of LRT lines built that would relieve congestion on the subway lines.

    Meanwhile, we will get the new trains and the signalling being put in that will make the trip down the Yonge Line faster (one day). I find that better than bitching about the Yonge Line imploding; I personally don’t think that it will do so.

    by Simon Tarses on October 17 2012, 2:24 am   #

  2. The Yonge line was 10 percent over design capacity in 2009. I think all the recent construction and new trains have brought it back down to 100 percent.

    Steve Munro has written about it in considerably more detail.

    by grant on October 17 2012, 9:50 am   #

  3. That the subway is better than taking the bus is a pretty low bar. Bigger trains and better signalling strike me as solving symptoms of a problem, and not the actual problem. I’m not sure how well that will actually scale. As noted, extending the line North can’t help that situation.

    This is on my mind after taking the Yonge line again yesterday.

    by ramanan on October 17 2012, 10:34 am   #

  4. I wonder if they could just increase the number of trains running during rush hour? I don’t know if it’s possible, but increasing their frequency would help.

    by Ananthan on October 17 2012, 12:52 pm   #

  5. They should just build a giant conveyor belt from Finch to Union and people can hop on and off as they please. Problem solved.

    by rishi on October 18 2012, 3:34 am   #

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