ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[panamaniac]

It's hard to tell with the clouds flattening the light, but the level of the concrete between the rails appears to be lower than the level of the concrete outside it.

Yeah, I walked past it this morning. The concrete between a pair of rails is about an inch lower than the concrete outside of them.

It's an interesting design, which has the notable benefit of preventing debris from collecting within the flange gap.  When it's a thin groove, stones fall in and accumulate.  If enough fall in, you'll end up with the LRT's wheels crushing these rocks, which is not going to be the best for maintenance.  With this larger area of lowered concrete, any debris will fall into the larger depressed area, and not be stuck right up against the rail.  It'll be easier for a street sweeper to clean it out.

That said, I wonder where all of these locations would be? Imagine if a property abutted by this type of rail suddenly had need of a driveway entrance across the track. To level it out, you would need quite the effort, especially if the rubber inserts were needed to be added.

This technique is only going to be used in the centre-running sections, so new developments would end up having right-in-right-out access.  I don't expect that the Region will ever permit a net-new crossing of the LRT tracks. All side streets and driveways will be right-in-right-out in perpetuity.  Also, I fully expect the region to aggressively close down driveways across the side-running sections as properties get redeveloped.

I've thought about this a lot, and I've convinced myself that the first (of many) collisions we'll have will be on Borden when someone backs out of their driveway and forgets to check if a train is coming.

My bet is on a car turning right, across a section of side-running LRT.  Someone forgets to check their blind spot for an LRV, and gets side-swiped as they turn across the tracks.

We are Waterloo Region.  I have every confidence that our local drivers will find every way imaginable to bring their cars into unanticipated contact with ION.  Including in ways that we cannot imagine!