08-29-2018, 05:22 PM
(08-29-2018, 03:27 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(08-29-2018, 02:53 PM)jamincan Wrote: Burying under downtown is also arguably one of the sole reasons they embarked on the LRT conversion. The system worked reasonably well out in the suburbs. It was an nightmare downtown, even when I lived there 20 years ago. Ottawa didn't really have a choice but to bury it.
They did have an option of not burying it. It's always a question of tradeoffs. What was the benefit of burying it? The alternative is taking a lane of traffic and giving priority at all the intersections. Value in burying it is to give more space for cars. The same is true here, and given how little traffic congestion we have, I believe burying (or elevating) the LRT would have been a big waste of money.
But no matter* where it is always remember that the main beneficiary of burying transit is generally automobile traffic.**
* Up to a certain density only seen in places like Manhattan or maybe downtown Toronto, but not Ottawa, and with other obvious geological exceptions like rivers and mountains. And of course it is also technically possible to replace the space with something else (a greenspace, bike lanes, buildings) but AFAIK this is not the typical case.
** This is not an attack on cars, or a value judgement. But it is important to understand what exactly we get for our money.
Ottawa did have bus lanes in that section, so it would have been a change from bus lanes that had to deal with traffic lights to light rail lines that had to deal with traffic lights. I expect a lot of bus routes will still use those corridors, whereas they would need to turn those into transit-only routes to keep LRT and buses there (so that each had a way to offload passengers while not interfering with the other public transit vehicle type).