03-10-2022, 09:01 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-10-2022, 09:01 AM by danbrotherston.)
(03-09-2022, 10:03 PM)jamincan Wrote: A regional LRT service between New Hamburg and Guelph would be an interesting prospect. In particular, the villages around KW often have nice cores that are hard to replicate. It would be nice if we could build greater intensity around those centres without the commuting pattern defaulting to the car.
Guelph to KW has some merit because of the size and density of each city, but given we have an existing rail line, it probably makes sense to utilize that. But New Hamburg and Baden are small and extremely sprawling (I know, I lived there) you aren't going to get many people on transit.
(03-09-2022, 11:09 PM)bravado Wrote:(03-09-2022, 10:07 PM)plam Wrote: And I wanted to reiterate ac3r's point that there is rail service to surprisingly small towns in Europe. It would be really nice to have that here. (But no, I don't think we have the political support for it).
Also: A lot of people from surrounding areas would likely rather drive to small towns and take a train into the big city. Thus, a small town could service more people than actually live there. This could be a good way to keep traffic in a better and more diffuse area out in the country.
This would only be true if we significantly increased the cost and effort of driving into KW. Our government won't even consider restricting vehicle traffic at this point. These are not bad ideas, but they aren't ideas that make any sense in the current context in our city.
(03-09-2022, 09:40 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:(03-09-2022, 04:25 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Hyperbole? Almost all existing student housing is within a 20 minute walk, and with the majority being less than 10 minutes from UW. When you include Laurier and Conestoga College the percentage of student oriented housing within 10 minute walk of a post secondary campus is probably >90%.
Elmira on the other hand, minimum travel time, by car, speeding straight down 85 from the south end of Elmira is already 15 minutes. No LRT is going to come close to being faster than walking from almost all student housing.
S Field Dr. in Elmira, at the tracks, to UW station is about 13km along the tracks, or 10 minutes at 80km/h.
So with the right LRT service, I think that compares pretty favourably to a lot of existing student commutes.
That being said, not every building could be literally on the station, and realistically if we ever get LRT to Elmira it would probably poke along at 70km/h, and depending on how many stops there are the real speed would be way belong my 80km/h, and so on, but to just cede all interurban transport to road-based vehicles is in my opinion unambitious, especially in the medium to long term.
"all interurban transport to road-based vehicles"...yeah, I'm not doing that at all obviously there should be a train to Toronto, in fact, we already have an (admittedly poor and underinvested in) train doing that already.
The problem is not the mode, but our development patterns. Students aren't going to live in Elmira without a car not just because they can't get to campus, but because they cannot get to a hundred other services, and because few communities are even built walkable. Just building a train isn't going to change any of that.
I'm all for developing transit focused walkable communities. I'd love to see the planned Breslau station be surrounded by a dense complete urban community rather than a sea of parking. But given that we won't even do that in a greenfield situation, we are not going to change our development patterns sufficiently in a situation faced by NIMBYs to justify it.
I just see other options as more realistic.