General Road and Highway Discussion

[SF22]

Okay, but WHAT IF instead of widening Victoria to make space for the LRT where there's only two lanes, we tunnel the LRT for that section between Walnut and Lawrence??

I honestly can't tell if you're being serious lol...but just in case you aren't:

Then we will quickly be not building another LRT because the cost is unreasonable.

In any case, there are many surface routes that would be fine for LRT, or even rerouting + traffic calming and just make it a shared section.

Fortunately we don't even have to worry about this for a few decades given the situation in Cambridge.

Edit: I am just reading the rest of the replies and I am astonished at the denial of induced demand. Removing capacity could make traffic better....removing car capacity to add 10x the transit capacity will make traffic better with near certainty. I expect this from our transit planners (which is a shocking indictment of their field), I didn't expect it from folks here lol.

Only half-joking. You'd think that people in the residential areas would prefer a tunnelled LRT instead of an elevated one with all the noise and visual clutter, but it totally is more expensive. (Also I just really like the metro, and kind of wish we had one, even though I know that nobody would approve that expense).

I would personally never want any portion of the LRT to be shared with vehicle traffic, though. The beauty of our system is that it ALWAYS arrives on time, and putting 1km of shared road in the middle would wreak havoc on scheduling reliability. I think you'd be more likely to see the region buy up the properties on one side of Victoria St to create the necessary space to route the trains/cars separately, much like the Weber St houses between Wellington and Guelph were torn down to make space for 2 extra lanes back in 2014.