(05-13-2021, 06:10 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: I actually don't mind our system, it's light weight, reasonable for a city like ours. I think massive underground stations would have been unnecessarily expensive and worse for users in most ways.
It lacks longevity which I think is the biggest failure. We can easily end up in a situation similar to Toronto - sans the streetcar system. They had two subway lines to serve a city of immense size up until recently with their addition of some LRT lines - which are basically light subway systems despite having almost the same rolling stock of our LRT. That subway system was obsolete decades ago, so just imagine how fast this flagship LRT will be in 20 years. You can even look at the Scarborough RT for signs of how short term light rail is. It became so shit that that everyone just relied on the bus, then ended up with the reputation it was held together with duct tape. Even in terms of transit oriented development, most of Scarborough is still more traffic oriented and less dense than all of the other GTA suburbs served by heavy rail (heavy meaning full fledged subways, or LRT with substantial underground/elevated sections to maintain speed and vehicle couple length).
We are the single fastest growing region in all of Canada so I can see us outgrowing this LRT faster than we expect. We can add more lines, but the backbone that is phase 1 might as well be written off at this point because we'll need heavier rail eventually. While researching all of this, our region looked into heavy rail...and subways were just barely written off, which I don't know why. If you don't bury or elevate the start of your rapid transit system from the get go, you luck out. For a city like ours and with our population growth, we might as well invested in a long term solution instead of something lazy. You can only expand a surface level rapid transit system before you have to stop. Don't expect to see the ION run more than 2 LRVs before it's obsolete...which probably gives us 20-30 years tops. Most platforms were only built to hold 3...just barely. Not worth over 800'000'000 dollars IMO. We should have started out buying 1/4th of the pie and augment that with more buses/BRT. It's going to seem like a colossal waste of money. Hell a single train station is projected to cost us 100 million. Politics and tax payers may not always be so consistently altruistic.