ION Stage I: what would you do differently?

[ac3r]

I think we spent too much for what we got. We could have spent less and got close to the same, or more and got a system that would have been truly independent, not relying on the very roads we all claim to despise here, that goes just as slow as cars at times and has to stop at red lights to let them pass.

You make some good points in your post. And cut-and-cover is indeed cheaper -- but the costs of underground or elevated stations would have also been far higher than the fairly basic ones we have now. And accessibility would have been worse.

However, my main issue is the bolded portion above: the design of the system does not dictate the speeds we have today, nor does it require stopping at red lights. The system can be speeded up by relaxing speed limits and providing traffic light priority. And an elevated/buried system would still need the same amount of time for dwell times, deceleration and acceleration, though it might have been able to smooth out some turns to make them faster.

Summa summarum: As our population grows and the transit usage grows, our current LRT can certainly be made to run significantly faster -- and that's without any substantial additional capital investment.

For sure.

While buried or elevated sections would have cost more and accessibility would need to be taken into account, access to such stations would not be any different. All you need are ramps or extremely simple elevators to deal with that.

We'll surely need to improve speeds if we expect this portion of the LRT to be reasonably rapid as the city grows. I don't know why it's so slow either. However, there are parts that we'll never really get to speed up much at this point. It'll never make the turn from the train right of way onto Borden any faster, it'll never make the turn at Allen any faster, King to Waterloo Public Square nor at Northfield. These are the areas where I would have (with a bigger cheque book) said okay, let's cut and cover or elevate this so we don't have to worry about anything now or in the future. I even doubt they'll ever get it around Hayward faster than it goes now because those turns are very tight. Considering they could have bought that derelict, empty industrial lot that is there, they could have elevated the LRT there and ensured it went at a respectable speed.

Either way, it's too late to make any real changes. We can only hope they can make a few tweaks to improve speeds in certain sections. And I hope that any future lines they do they actually take the idea of true grade separation into consideration.