ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[zanate]

There's also little reason to build LRT or any mass transit on the Iron Horse trail, there's not really any destinations or trip generators along most of its length that aren't better served by King Street.

You are missing two very good reasons to build on the iron horse trail: it would be way cheaper and it already has the right of way.

I do agree with the rest of your comments, but again, is not like King St was ripe with possibilities either. In both cases most of the users will be there because the LRT was built there and not elsewhere. The same projects would have taken place along any routing of the LRT.

If construction price is the object, we could build LRT even cheaper next to Ira Needles. But would it be successful?

The problem with the IHT is that it skirts around our densest downtown. The place with the greatest capacity for generating transit demand, completely missed? That would be tragic. It's 1km or so from King Street in downtown to the Iron Horse. That's beyond even the expanded distance of 800m for higher order transit stations that we expect people to tolerate walking to. The Duke and Weber side of downtown are even further out.

Despite the cost savings of reduced utility relocation, you'd face some real challenging construction problems anyway. You still need to build grade-separated crossing of the CN line. The awkward angled crossings at Victoria/Strange, John/Park, and Courtland/Stirling would be like Erb & Caroline times three.

This isn't to say that the current alignment is perfect. We've done a real disservice to uptown and (especially) downtown users by directionally splitting the route, for the sake of saving two-way traffic on all streets. Human Transit nails the problem with this: if you look at the area that's within a certain distance of both directions of a line, spreading out one-way splits reduces coverage:




As for the elevated vs. street level, I think street level transit integrates better with what's around it, but I don't really have a problem with elevated, and the Canada Line looks pretty amazing! But this information suggests that it could cost twice as much as the current ION phase 1. If that's true, I think it's safe to say that an elevated rail system in Waterloo region would never get off the ground. So to speak.