ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

From a practical point of view, what's the smallest phase that could be built and commissioned with it still making sense?  Station by station (say 1km apart)?  Or is the whole system complex enough that multiple stations or stretches would need to be done (say 5km at a time).  If the Region had developed a local ecosystem of contractors who could work on this project, I could foresee a decade long plan that saw the system grow incrementally in various directions rather than waiting for one big stretch at a time.

With where the Region wants an east-west line (Ottawa) there isn't really an easy option to build it in phases at least initally. This is mainly due to how it would interconnect with phase 1. At Mill you would need a grade separation because of the CN tracks, unless you work out something with CN to not have trains during the day. Which effectively means an underground or above ground station to adequately interconnect with phase 1 at Mill. Then you have to figure out the Alpine and Homer Watson roundabouts. Going east you'd need to figure out where you're coming back above ground or below ground after Mill and are you interconnecting with Borden? After Weber it can easily be phased same thing with going west from Alpine.

A Victoria route needs to wait on the MTO so that can't be built at least soon, and again how are you crossing the spur past Park St and how are you dealing with crossing the tracks at King.

A University route is likely the simplest but again how are you dealing with crossing phase 1.

Once we get to Cambridge it's certainly possible to build it in phases but you really need to get to Pinebush before that makes sense.

So it does really depend on mainly how Line 1 is interconnected with how a cross town line is built in terms of how many km could be built at a time. It would certainly build up our local contractors wealth of knowledge (Capital, Steed and Evans, Musselman, Cox?, and Regional?).

You can build a disconnected segment in Cambridge to connect meaningful destinations (and that probably also has the highest ridership opportunities anyway). But then you must duplicate all the storage and maintenance facilities.