03-14-2022, 09:41 AM
(03-14-2022, 09:11 AM)jamincan Wrote: What do people think of some sort of LRT or BRT along Highland vs. along Victoria vs. on the CN/GO rail corridor? On the one hand, the CN/GO rail corridor is mostly grade separated (exceptions are Strange/Park/Duke/Lancaster/Lackner) and from King St. east, it is also double-tracked until just before Lackner. On the other hand, it's further away from the commercial strips which seem to be centred on Highland.
I don't think the GO/CN rail corridor would help much. In order to LRT it would almost certainly need to be triple tracked (sharing with one night freight train a week works OK, but this is a heavy rail line that carries a couple trains a day and--hopefully--increasing). I doubt triple tracks would fit under most of the existing grade separations, meaning, they'd need to be rebuilt anyway. Location wise, I suspect it's worse than the other locations, but probably not by enough to really kill the idea more than just the problematic logistics.
If we are just talking about the segment WEST of King, there is a third option, which would be the Greenway/Drainage ditch which runs between Victoria and Highland. And for that...I have a dream...a Wuppertal dream. Or at least, I'm thinking of some elevated, but cheap, extremely high frequency but relatively low capacity system strung above that section visiting locations all the way out west.
There is a significant amount of lower income, high density housing, along with a lot of commercial/retail (and lots of empty parking for redevelopment). I think an experiment with a high frequency/low capacity high order transit would be interesting there.
But it's probably silly, we can do the same thing with buses or LRT....and just accept lower frequencies.