Here’s the Lyon Street main Confed line station entrance in  the Podium Building, which is sandwiched between Tower C Transport Canada and the Marriott Hotel. The building may still have the old movie theatres locked in its core. It also has approvals for adding some additional stories … about 22 of them.

This  2000 sq ft street-level lobby sits above the pedestrian concourse that runs below the three office towers and two hotels that make up the Place de Ville complex. As such, there is probably another lobby below it, and much of the pedestrian traffic to and from the LRT will access it from the subterranean passageways.

Notice that there is but one escalator, and beyond it, two staircases with a centre railing. Two elevators are shown off to the top left. The drawing also shows the structural pillars of the building (the little squares on a grid) which are typically about 20′ apart. There are no ground level doors to the left, onto the sunken plaza Campeau put in front of Tower C, probably because there would have to be steps, and an accessible ramp, etc.

Here is another entrance, at the appropriately-red-trimmed office building above the old Zellers / now Winners store. The entrance stairs — no escalator — is shown built onto the lobby in what is now exterior space carved into the ground floors of the building, which cantilevers out above the station on higher floors, supported by round pillars which are also shown on the drawing as little circles..

The glass lobby at the head of the staircase is very minimal, and crowds the sidewalk.

And over at the Clarica site, the station is between the parking garage ramps (shown to the left) and the former Hy’s Restaurant site to the right:

This station has both the manual staircase and a single escalator. Users will approach over a generous forecourt to the street side, and through the building lobby from the south (which also accesses Albert Street sidewalks).

The other Lyon street station entrance further west also has a staircase plus one escalator.

The presence of a single escalator suggests it will run in the direction of peak traffic, ie down at the mid-afternoon rushour, and up in the morning and probably up in the off peak times too.

I am glad there are manual staircases. Using them may be the only exercise some cubicle sitters get all day. But even the athletic tend to use the escalators if they are present.

Back in the day, when the City was drawing up its wish list for the LRT stations, it spec’d that there should be three escalators at each main entrance: one up, one down, and one spare / rush hour direction.

Going with only one escalator, and at only some entrances, definitely saves costs on buying and installing and maintaining escalators, but also saves huge amounts of space since multiple escalators would require bigger lobbies and shafts.