04-15-2018, 12:24 PM
The grade crossings probably won't help travel times too much, but disturbing the track along the stretch between the future hub and the Wellington county border with a bunch of grade separation projects would probably force the rail company to upgrade the track to the latest minimum safety standards. With a little incentive from the province or feds maybe the upgrade could be to the highest track class instead of the minimum required for safety changes. For example, upgrading the class of track from class 1 to class 5 the speed limit would change from 15mph to 95mph. Does anyone know what class of track is currently between the future hub and the Wellington county border?
I think closing Lancaster to vehicular traffic will be a non-starter; it is too busy (17,000 AADT in 2014) and the detour would be too long (for residents, EMS, fire, GRT, snow ploughs, etc.).
I would prefer that they add active transportation crossings at St. Leger and Ahrens, and work on grade separations at Duke, Lancaster, and Bingemans. If HSR were to come through we'd also have to grade separate Park and Strange as well; but I see those as lower priorities even if the GO yard eventually moves to Baden.
Part of the problem is that the future/current GO train yard is east of the Lancaster crossing so even with the modest 4 trains of day AM/PM it will be 16 crossings a day when the Park St yard is abandoned and all four trains sleep at Shirley yard because it will go west to the train station (and future hub) before it goes east, and the opposite at night (go west to the hub and back east to the Shirley yard).
So even in the present state (8 GO trains per day (@2min to cross), 4 VIA (@2min to cross), 2(?) freight (@3min to cross), and 1 shunting movement (@10min duration) the intersection is closed for an half hour a day minimum. By the time we move to two-way all-day service on the 1/2 hour you are looking the intersection being closed more than 3 hours per day.
Even at the current train and traffic volume Lancaster's cross-product or the number of potential interactions between trains and vehicles per day is ~374,000; already well over the historical Transport Canada threshold of 200,000 per day for consideration as a grade separation, and approaching the newly recommended threshold (a cross-product of 400,000; adopted from the US DOT). Add any kind of growth to vehicle traffic or train traffic (two-way all-day GO) and that cross-product and likelihood of a crash grows exponentially.
I tried to summarize this problem last year in one of my first attempts at story telling with data in Tableau.
I think closing Lancaster to vehicular traffic will be a non-starter; it is too busy (17,000 AADT in 2014) and the detour would be too long (for residents, EMS, fire, GRT, snow ploughs, etc.).
I would prefer that they add active transportation crossings at St. Leger and Ahrens, and work on grade separations at Duke, Lancaster, and Bingemans. If HSR were to come through we'd also have to grade separate Park and Strange as well; but I see those as lower priorities even if the GO yard eventually moves to Baden.
Part of the problem is that the future/current GO train yard is east of the Lancaster crossing so even with the modest 4 trains of day AM/PM it will be 16 crossings a day when the Park St yard is abandoned and all four trains sleep at Shirley yard because it will go west to the train station (and future hub) before it goes east, and the opposite at night (go west to the hub and back east to the Shirley yard).
So even in the present state (8 GO trains per day (@2min to cross), 4 VIA (@2min to cross), 2(?) freight (@3min to cross), and 1 shunting movement (@10min duration) the intersection is closed for an half hour a day minimum. By the time we move to two-way all-day service on the 1/2 hour you are looking the intersection being closed more than 3 hours per day.
Even at the current train and traffic volume Lancaster's cross-product or the number of potential interactions between trains and vehicles per day is ~374,000; already well over the historical Transport Canada threshold of 200,000 per day for consideration as a grade separation, and approaching the newly recommended threshold (a cross-product of 400,000; adopted from the US DOT). Add any kind of growth to vehicle traffic or train traffic (two-way all-day GO) and that cross-product and likelihood of a crash grows exponentially.
I tried to summarize this problem last year in one of my first attempts at story telling with data in Tableau.
Everyone move to the back of the bus and we all get home faster.