BrisUrbane

Video: ‘Toronto Fire P343 riding the rails on the St Clair Right of Way’ (efd488, YouTube)

Is emergency vehicle access only limited to busways? The St. Clair right of way (ROW) is probably the closest Toronto gets to having actual LRT; Had Toronto city councillors not forced the TTC to add more stops to the route and had the high-floor, single ended streetcar vehicles and so forth, been replaced with a double ended LRT vehicle with multiple door boarding, the  St. Clair ROW could well have qualified as LRT. Due to space restrictions preventing the construction of large medians to separate mixed traffic and transit, the TTC raised up the lanes to be higher than the mixed general traffic lanes so that car drivers would be discouraged from driving in the transit ROW.

The video above shows a City of Toronto fire department making use of the ROW to get its fire trucks past traffic. So is emergency vehicle access only limited to busways? If the LRT tracks are set in continuous concrete then it seems that emergency services- police, fire, ambulance- can indeed make use of LRT ROWs.

In addition to the previous post, here are two links for those interested about Toronto (and Melbourne’s) streetcar networks:

• Success and Challenges in Modernizing Streetcar Systems: Experiences in Melbourne, Australia, and Toronto, Canada, Graham Currie (Monash University) and Amer S. Shalaby (University of Toronto)
• Active Transit Signal Priority for Streetcars: Experience in Melbourne, Australia, and Toronto, Canada, Graham Currie (Monash University) and Amer S. Shalaby (University of Toronto)

Note: The BrisUrbane blog is not associated with these authors.