Reading through the very informative BrisUrbane blog I came across this lovely video of the Toronto Subway System:
Toronto Transit from Preston Kanak on Vimeo.
Toronto’s subway system certainly has its pluses and minuses – for a city of its size the system is relatively small (although it is supplemented by streetcars and a commuter rail system). Compared to some other cities around the world (like Washington DC or even Montreal) the system’s design seems fairly utilitarian. But on the positive side of the ledger it seems to be an incredibly efficient and effective system. With nearly a million riders on an average weekday, the system sits behind only New York and Montreal in terms of daily ridership in the USA and Canada – while perhaps most impressively a significant majority of subway riders arrive at their station on the bus, effectively extending the reach of the system.
One thing I like about the video above is how it captures the way in which subway systems really become the heart of a city’s identity. I know that I’m a bit of a train nerd, but I think it’s probably fairly common for subways/metros to contribute significantly to the feel and identity of cities around the world. London’s Tube, Paris’s Metro, the New York Subway or perhaps most of all, the Washington DC Metro are classic examples, and I’m sure I would say the same thing about Moscow and St Petersburg if I ever visited those places.
Many of the reasons why I propose better public transport, and important projects like Auckland’s CBD Rail Tunnel come down to hard numbers, economic debates and so forth – but I think we shouldn’t forget the broader benefits that a high-quality rail system can bring. Cities often seem proud of their subway/metro systems, and use them as great civic spaces to show art (either artistic features within the stations or using the stations themselves as art) and generally reinforce a distinctiveness to that place.
Maybe it’s because subway systems vary a lot more than motorways, or maybe it’s because being a passenger in a subway system involves a lot more personal contact and interaction with it than you get from driving down a motorway, but there certainly seems something memorable and distinctive about these rail systems. Maybe this is why Aucklanders so often vote overwhelmingly for politicians proposing better public transport systems (particularly enhanced rail systems) even if they don’t actually catch the train themselves. They want Auckland to be a world class city and they think having a world class public transport system is critical to achieving that, or they think Auckland is a city that deserves a top class rail system. The arguments may be less backed up by numbers, but that doesn’t mean they’re not powerful and persuasive.
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Absolutely agree that support of PT is about so much more than moving numbers around. A good PT system enables community interaction – something the car has had a huge impact on. I always feel those who advocate for electric cars as a solution to all our problems miss this point. I’ve never met anyone who visits Paris and rents a car but met heaps who rave about using metro and being part of the city.
I think Toronto’s system is great because they didn’t build much rail infrastructure- there are only 69 Subway stations* but they use that Yonge-University-Spadina (YUS) and Bloor-Danforth line like workhorses with trains every 5-6 minutes during the OFF-Peak period. Buses and trams come right into the station and dump phenomenal amounts of people into the subway system.
*(compare this to Brisbane which has 85 within the Brisbane City Council area and 149 over the entire SEQ region plus 22 busway stations on top of that, Melbourne has 200+ train stations, Sydney around 300?)
So I think what matters is quality, efficiency and intensiveness of use. Keep it simple. Australian cities seem a bit -and excuse me- clueless on how to get passengers to the train station, so they seem to have just attempted to put train stations everywhere on every street corner at huge cost to build and maintain such a large asset, with branched lines all over the shop which of course makes the network wildy complicated, track conflicts everywhere, split frequencies and so forth which has resulted in “low frequency everywhere” style service.
Toronto forces interchange on the branches. People riding the Sheppard subway (Purple line) have to get off and transfer to the YUS line but this permits high frequency on the branches and the main trunk line and avoids splitting frequencies.
Yes agreed, good aesthetics means so much more than just planting around a nasty and invasive mega-structure like NZTA think. Even their language gives it away, they talk off ‘mitigation’ in other words they know what they do is evil, and their attempt to deal with this is the suburban one of herbaceous borders. In contrast a subway does not need any mitigation because its impacts are all positive. It does however require good design, both in terms of system performance and user functionality and appearance. And this adds up to the image of the system which in really successful cases goes on to become a defining characteristic of the whole city, as admin notes above.
Ideally Auckland will go down the Washington DC direction of really good station design. But also I think Brisurbane is right, by planning a network of smartly integrated bus interchange stations on the existing rail network and make the new lines really rapid and less dependent on walk-up [so less like the Western and more like the Eastern but with better station placement] Auckland could end up with a fantastic system. And one that supports the current habitation patterns while encouraging movement towards TODs and intensification.