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Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

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Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#21

Post by sandoz9 »

bretthopper wrote: post #11
jcroll wrote: post #10

I live in Toronto and the pilot project remains a very controversial decision basically pitting the interests of commuters against car drivers in what is for all intents and purposes a zero-sum game. The next question is whether there's a solution where everyone wins and the most immediate idea is a subway running down that corridor. Of course, the amount of disruption that would bring to businesses already crying fo…

Why do you think this is a zero-sum game? That's only if the number of car drivers is equal to transit riders + cyclists (and maybe some pedestrians). Of course that equation is nowhere near equal. The entire reason behind the pilot is because transit vastly outnumbers car drivers. If you can improve the situation for 10-100x as many people, then why wouldn't you? (all else being equal of course). I'm simplifying thi…

It's not just car drivers, eleven restaurants in the area have closed since the pilot began. What do you do as a business owner when city is driving away your customers?

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#22

Post by barkingcat »

hourislate wrote: post #13
blakesterz wrote: post #3

Buffalo tried this a few decades ago and it did NOT work. The entire area died, all the restaurants & retail closed. It took millions of dollars and many years to undo it and now the area is back and full of people. I don't know for sure the blame lies entirely on the clearing of cars idea, but that sure didn't help. The city (like many) fell pretty hard for a bunch of reasons at the time they tried this. https://www…

I have read some of the restaurants along that stretch of road in Toronto have closed or will be closing. They have said business has fallen off the cliff. https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2018/07/pearl-king-street-t... https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/king-st-pilot-forces-... https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/01/22/king-st-business...

Pearl King Street in particular was an overpriced restaurant with poor positioning. Chinatown is a few minutes away and offer much much better food at 1/3 of the price for each dim sum dish. Right beside are some better dining choices and no one ever went in there even when cars were allowed on King St.

I think either way Pearl was destined to close.

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#23

Post by saq7 »

lambersley wrote: post #16
bretthopper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this is a zero-sum game? That's only if the number of car drivers is equal to transit riders + cyclists (and maybe some pedestrians). Of course that equation is nowhere near equal. The entire reason behind the pilot is because transit vastly outnumbers car drivers. If you can improve the situation for 10-100x as many people, then why wouldn't you? (all else being equal of course). I'm simplifying thi…

It simply moved the traffic to the parallel streets thus worsening congesting in the city overall. The overall utilization of an expensive infrastructure is very low. The "440%" increase in cyclist is unlikely to equal the number of people moved through that corridor via motor vehicles.

It is simply untrue that the overall utilization of the infrastructure is low. Streetcars on King and Queen are usually jam-packed, unless you are in the far east and west ends. The bike lanes running east west on King, Adellaide, and other streets are very heavily used.

And it's true that most people who were driving won't trade in their cars for bikes, for various reasons. I am not sure how that factors in at all here.

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#24

Post by bretthopper »

sandoz9 wrote: post #21
bretthopper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this is a zero-sum game? That's only if the number of car drivers is equal to transit riders + cyclists (and maybe some pedestrians). Of course that equation is nowhere near equal. The entire reason behind the pilot is because transit vastly outnumbers car drivers. If you can improve the situation for 10-100x as many people, then why wouldn't you? (all else being equal of course). I'm simplifying thi…

It's not just car drivers, eleven restaurants in the area have closed since the pilot began. What do you do as a business owner when city is driving away your customers?

Restaurants close all the time. Are those closures due to the pilot? The city has provided numbers on receipts which don't show a huge effect. I'm not saying there's no causation here, but you can't just say 11 restaurants are closed and attribute them all to the pilot.

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#25

Post by saq7 »

sandoz9 wrote: post #21
bretthopper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this is a zero-sum game? That's only if the number of car drivers is equal to transit riders + cyclists (and maybe some pedestrians). Of course that equation is nowhere near equal. The entire reason behind the pilot is because transit vastly outnumbers car drivers. If you can improve the situation for 10-100x as many people, then why wouldn't you? (all else being equal of course). I'm simplifying thi…

It's not just car drivers, eleven restaurants in the area have closed since the pilot began. What do you do as a business owner when city is driving away your customers?

Correlation does not mean causation. Restaurants close all the time for myriad of different reasons. Do you have any data that can actually support a causal link here?

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#26

Post by bretthopper »

jgh wrote: post #15
bretthopper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this is a zero-sum game? That's only if the number of car drivers is equal to transit riders + cyclists (and maybe some pedestrians). Of course that equation is nowhere near equal. The entire reason behind the pilot is because transit vastly outnumbers car drivers. If you can improve the situation for 10-100x as many people, then why wouldn't you? (all else being equal of course). I'm simplifying thi…

According to this article prior to the change: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/why-all-the-fus... it was 65,000 transit commuters per day vs 20,000 vehicles per day. edit, here is the latest data from the city: https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/8fe2-King-... (sept/oct is not yet available which is unfortunate because the baseline is october 2017)

Yeah, thanks. 10-100x was a huge exaggeration but 2-3x is still a large benefit and worthwhile on its own.

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#27

Post by crispyambulance »

Dave_TRS wrote: post #8

From Toronto here, and just wanted to clarify that the headline is somewhat misleading in claiming that "it worked". Article begins: > One year after Toronto turned King Street in a transit- and walking-priority street, streetcar ridership, biking and walking are way up. What "worked" is that removing cars did indeed make space for faster streetcars and biking - but this is not surprising, practically a truism! The p…

It is not just a matter of traffic throughput. Part of the purpose "complete streets" movement is to enable pedestrian and other slow-moving traffic for the purpose of increasing or preserving the vitality of urban cores. You have a different "kind" of downtown when it has enough foot traffic as opposed to people zooming by at 50 kmh pissed-off about looking for parking or trying to get home asap.

If the metrics only measure throughput of bodies past intersections, they're missing a large part of the point.

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#28

Post by angerbot »

hourislate wrote: post #13
blakesterz wrote: post #3

Buffalo tried this a few decades ago and it did NOT work. The entire area died, all the restaurants & retail closed. It took millions of dollars and many years to undo it and now the area is back and full of people. I don't know for sure the blame lies entirely on the clearing of cars idea, but that sure didn't help. The city (like many) fell pretty hard for a bunch of reasons at the time they tried this. https://www…

I have read some of the restaurants along that stretch of road in Toronto have closed or will be closing. They have said business has fallen off the cliff. https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2018/07/pearl-king-street-t... https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/king-st-pilot-forces-... https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/01/22/king-st-business...

King street restaurants have high turnover anyways - most of them have not been open that long to begin with. The area has a lot of competition so you really can't get away with being mediocre for very long.

Lots of business were crying foul at the start of the pilot, but credit card transaction data the city has hasn't borne that out.

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#29

Post by dmix »

jgh wrote: post #4

I lived along there (king & bathurst) for a couple of months last winter and thought it was great. Combined with the new street cars along king st it's really pleasant. At the time r/toronto would have people complaining about a lack of pedestrians or whatever (it was -20 every day for like a month) but that didn't really jive with my experience. Even in the really cold nights I found that there were a good number of…

Really? King St looks perpetually dead to me these days between Spadina and Bathurst, when it used to seem way more active. I've been walking to work and back home nearly every day for most of the year through there, so I saw the difference.

I'm cool with experimenting with reducing cars but this seemed a bit extreme. And King St seemed like a bad choice... it doesn't have a hundred small retail stores like Queen St or Kensington Market.

Re: Toronto Cleared Cars Off a Major Transit Corridor

#30

Post by jnty »

jcroll wrote: post #10

I live in Toronto and the pilot project remains a very controversial decision basically pitting the interests of commuters against car drivers in what is for all intents and purposes a zero-sum game. The next question is whether there's a solution where everyone wins and the most immediate idea is a subway running down that corridor. Of course, the amount of disruption that would bring to businesses already crying fo…

Can it be a zero-sum game if you can usually switch 'sides' from driver to pedestrian/cyclist/transit user reasonably easily?
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