• ‘Nervous of its own boldness’: the (almost) radical rebirth of King’s Cross lands (The Guardian)
• This TfL AI experiment reveals how Tube station capacity could be increased – without building anything new (James O’Malley)
• Why the world is running out of sand for infrastructure (BBC)
• The World’s Most Recycled Material – Asphalt: Video (Practical Engineering)
• Haneda Airport Access Line to Open 3 New Express Routes Into Central Tokyo (Japan Station)
• Invest in Transit the Right Way (Vital City)
• How Toronto is winning the public transit pursuit (Economist Impact)
• Study Links Preference For Loud Cars to Anti-Social Personality Traits (ScienceAlert)
- Industry News – updated every business day
- Webinars and Online Conferences – Updated 1 May
The glowing article about Toronto is remarkable for the fact that you would be hard pressed to find anyone who lives in the city to say anything positive about its public transit system. The subway is wholly inadequate for the size of the city and is increasingly hobbled by a lack of maintenance. The city’s traffic is a nightmare, which makes buses and streetcars unreliable. A new crosstown line (Eglinton LRT) that has caused untold grief during the construction phase still has no opening date in sight. There are lots of big plans afoot but it will be several more years, at best, before the system is fit for purpose again.
The AI experiment is interesting but I wonder if the real reason it didn’t go anywhere is that (I suspect) the number of stations where the gate line is the real bottleneck is probably quite small, furthermore, I suspect those stations where the gateline is the bottleneck have comparatively small gatelines where the auto-reversing wouldn’t have many gates to play with…
The article also alludes to another, related, reason – with the increase that they did gain, the gateline often had to be closed entirely to avoid overcrowding on the platforms. Whereas if the flow rate is mediated by having fewer-than-optimal gates open, the overcrowding issue is less likely to occur – thus the AI actually made the safety situation worse (although it likely could be improved to detect the crowding issue earlier, before it’s a major problem, and reduce the flow-rate without closing the gateline entirely. It could probably also be integrated with the train control/monitoring systems so that it knows how long until the next train and then be better able to predict the future with regards to crowding)
@James Webber
Blogger and YouTube Channel RMTransit Vlogger Reece Martin has written a post Everyone Thinks Their Transit is the Worst which explains that the local view of public transport is generally not complementary. Jarrett Walker, US based transit planning consultant, has remarked on the same phenomena. Many Londoners believe their public transport network is quite lacking, but to visitors from North America, it’s absolutely marvelous. Is Toronto’s transit as good as Toronto’s? Not be a long shot.
The point of the Economist Impact article is that Toronto has greatly improved its transit network since the Second World War, starting the subway network from scratch and built a more comprehensive transit network than any comparable North American city. And even having more riders per capita than larger, older cities like Chicago.
The article didn’t even look at the impact of the recent 2024 free transfers between the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) subway, streetcar, & bus network and the regional GO Train network, with city limits. This effectively merges two transit networks together on a single fare. LR is developing a series looking at such intermodal and fare improvements, in North America, in the UK, and best practice of selected cities around the world.
Long Branch Mike — your comments are fair enough, but transit improvements in Toronto stalled years ago while the population of the city and the metropolitan area kept growing. Far too much political interference meant that the projects that did get done were either in the wrong place (the Sheppard subway) or very poorly thought out (the UP Express to the airport). The efforts to catch up that are now underway are obviously welcome but in the meantime the city is grinding to a halt.
@James Webber
I totally agree. The stop-start-stop rhythm of public transport expansion means loss of scales of economy, as well as not keeping up well to any growing city. London has seen this, and unfortunately is in one of the stop/lull periods. The French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and others have recognised the importance of constant expansion as critical policy, not political capital.