Grand River Transit

[Markster]

Well, I guess Toronto better close Bay subway station...

I use the Bloor subway as a comparison for a reason.  It's got stop spacing as tight as 450m in the core, expanding to 600m on the fringe, 800m in the outer areas, and +1km at the ends.  For the record, a Highland-Courtland-King stop spacing is 700m between stops.

cdklein wrote a blog post, bringing this up:
http://waterloons.blogspot.ca/2015/05/th...-stop.html

Density provides transit ridership through increased trip generation. Promixity to good transit service also drives ridership. Good transit service is partly driven by route speed, which is negatively affected by the number of stops along the route, so that is a major tradeoff. For most of its history, GRT has actually had too many stops on its routes, slowing down buses, raising costs and making its service less compelling.

But in attempting to deal with this problem, the region wants to treat all places the same. Stop spacing over 1km apart makes for rapid buses through our suburbia, and is an acceptable tradeoff between service quality and availability. But stop spacing at this scale within an urban core doesn't just affect downtowners, but also the potential suburban users who may head there.

[...] does it make sense to treat a dense urban cluster of apartment buildings, with multiple seniors' residences and other attractions as a place with the same transit need as a suburban hinterland of single family homes on widing avenues? Can we afford to ignore the ridership potential of parts of our downtown cores presented with poor access to transit that runs right by their front doors?