Bike Walk Bus Toronto

Yesterday, I decided to take a quick day trip up to Barrie, where I hadn't been in quite a while. The trip was my first experience of Barrie being a lively, fun city, and I think things are only looking up. In this blog post, I will take a look at some of Barrie's positives, and what they can improve upon to make the City that much better. The Good Good Geography Barrie is situated on Lake Simcoe's Kempenfelt Bay, and the City wraps cleanly around it. This helps the City's focus point be towards the water. Any city that has a downtown closely integrated with a major body of water is a city I want to go to. The presence of water allows for additional activities: Barrie has a beach, boating, and fishing, as well as an inflatable water park in the bay. I saw a pirate ship doing boat tours, and people actually catching fish, right downtown. Additionally, downtown's centrality in the City makes it close to every part of the City. Nowhere is truly 'far' from downt...

Recently, I was reading through Sean Marshall's attempt to visit every city hall in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, which included a blog post about his experience with on-demand transit. Despite using transit extensively, I had never found the need to use on-demand service. This, coupled with me realizing that I had never adventured to two of the twenty-six municipalities in the GTHA, inspired me to venture to some of the region's more rural locales, on public transit. I think my conclusions are similar to Sean's, but I have some more particular thoughts about the services I used. What is on-demand transit? On-demand transit is a catch-all term for all transit that does not operate on a traditional, fixed schedule. Passengers are required to use an app or call a number to order a vehicle, which is usually a car or van, but can sometimes be a regular bus. On-demand transit, also known as dial-a-bus, can take a number of different forms: Door-to-door, which can inclu...

 In a previous blog post , I spoke about how the lack of GO bus stops on rail-replacement routes within the City of Toronto was one of the most significant examples of downtown-centrism in our region transit system. Recently, I was thinking about how other GO Transit policies punish passengers taking trips within Toronto that aren't downtown. In this blog post, I will provide a few examples of how GO Transit prioritizes downtown--suburban trips at the expense of numerous others. Transfer Barriers I won't rehash his article, but Sean Marshall recently wrote about how the new One Fare removes only one of a number of barriers between TTC and GO Transit. Because the TTC network was built around the subway system, connections to GO stations tend to be pretty poor. Considering that GO stations were built with a parking focus, transferring to connecting bus routes can be a pain. Sean gives examples of Old Cummer and Etobicoke North, which are two stations on major arterial roads, wit...

 In previous blog posts, or even if we've spoken, I have stated that the Montreal Metro is better than the TTC subway, but Toronto has better transit as a whole. I've talked at length about the second part of the sentence, but I've never properly interrogated the first part. In this blog post, I will compare the two heavy rail systems on a number of criteria in order to decide which is the better system. What Am I Comparing? I will compare the systems on a number of important points. I won't be providing a number grade to each, as I think that the qualitative comparison better reflects the nuance in this comparison. The systems will be graded on: Hours of service Frequency Reliability Scheduled closures Speed Connections (walkability and destinations) Connections (other transit) Accessibility Architecture Cleanliness Safety Also, for ease of writing, Toronto's system will be referred to a the 'subway' whereas Montreal's will be referred to as the 'Me...

 On this blog, I rarely speak about downtown transit issues. This is for a few reasons: there are lots of other people doing it, and in terms of the basics of providing transit service, downtown has a solid grid shape. This works well for transit, except for the areas to the southwest of Union Station. In this blog post, I will outline the basics of this area, outline its recent transit history, and what I think the next steps should be. The Area The area in question is roughly defined as anything bounded by Lake Shore, Strachan, King, and York. This area is high-density, and there are significant development pressures here. Neighbourhoods include CityPlace and Fort York. In addition, numerous attractions can be found here, including the CN Tower, Rogers Centre, and Fort York. In this block, there is east-west transit service along King, as well as along Queens Quay, just south of Lake Shore Boulevard. There is north-south transit on Bathurst, Spadina, and via Line 1 from Union (wh...

 I don't think I need to explain this, but most TTC routes require additional frequency. Many routes have not yet returned to frequencies from prior to the pandemic, and some streetcar routes operate much less frequently than they did in the 1980s. I think, however, that there are four TTC bus routes that TTC underinvests in. By this, I mean that they keep service at a minimum, despite high demand, and convenient routings that, if they were more frequent, would serve an important purpose for the entire network. In this piece, I will briefly identify the four routes that TTC is missing opportunities with by not providing a better service. 9 Bellamy The 9 Bellamy is the least frequent mainline route in Scarborough. Its morning peak frequency of 18 minutes is quite poor, and aside afternoon peak, service ranges from every 26 minutes to every 30 minutes. While Bellamy is mostly low-density, it serves large parts of Scarborough that are otherwise a distance from other transit services. ...