11-20-2023, 02:19 PM
(11-19-2023, 06:17 PM)tomh009 Wrote:(11-19-2023, 04:09 PM)Acitta Wrote: Service changes may put brakes on Ion’s gold standard of transit by Brian Doucet
An excellent opinion piece!
A weird combination of insightful and idiotic.
He is absolutely right about 30 minute headways being ridiculous, and his suggestion of going to 7.5 rather than 8 minute headways is excellent for the reasons he gives.
But on the other hand, he says “Its combination of frequency, reliability and punctuality is unmatched in this province”. In fact the worst scheduled frequency for the Toronto subway of every 5-6 minutes, on the underused Sheppard line, is better than the best scheduled frequency for ION of every 10 minutes (ignoring overnight closures). At rush hour the main Toronto subway lines operate on a 2-3 minute frequency. If this were proposed here we would probably be told it’s impossible for reasons that might make sense until you consider that many vehicles per minute travel along most of our Regional roads at busy times. The subway similarly operates with actual headway management controlled by signals (unlike the TTC bus and streetcar routes, which suffer from grossly incompetent line management). There certainly are delays and unplanned outages on the subway, but the same happens on ION, including absurd ones stemming from perfectly normal weather.