10-18-2021, 10:47 AM
(10-17-2021, 11:54 PM)ac3r Wrote: The fact of the matter is ROW is going to grow, grow, grow and it's going to need infrastructure to keep up with that. Surface light rail is most definitely not going to suffice within 30ish years, so then we need to invest in something heavy and long term. And no, just trying to cut back on cars, building bike lanes and building pretty paths - well, it's just not going to work, as much as the bike-o-philes here want to say otherwise. If I had to guess, our current LRT will end up like the Scarborough RT, only worse now that we are specifically aiming to densify our city unlike city planners were doing in the 80s: that is, very rapidly becoming obsolete due to overcapacity, technology and little chance to improve what already exists. The SRT lasted - at best, 15 years before they started realizing that thing was not going to last. I'd guess Line 1 of the ION will be bursting at its seams by 2035-2040 at best. It was already standing room only at launch, only to be decimated due to the pandemic. Running dual LRVs is not really a long term solution either.
People who knew transit knew that the Scarborough RT was not the best solution when it was built; an LRT system would have made more sense, and was initially planned, until the Province saw an opportunity to promote their homegrown transit system.
As to capacity overload, we can use the money that would have gone into tunnelling (but really wouldn’t have been spent at all, since there is no way a subway would have been built) to build a second, third, and even fourth LRT line. This gives better coverage. Even in Toronto, for the money that would be required to build a subway system more appropriate to today’s city, a network of LRT lines on every major street could be built, which would provide much better service overall and better resiliency in the face of outages than a couple more subway lines. There are one or two subway lines that should be built, but not the ones that are actually being built; and the one that does make sense (Ontario line) is being underbuilt for no good reason (and with the additional downside of introducing a 4th rail network into the TTC rather than extending on of the existing ones).
Quote: that is, a rapid transit system that doesn't stop at fucking stoplights 3 seconds after departing Queen Station like ours does...lol...
That is fixable. By just giving it actual signal priority and ending safety paranoia (forcing LRVs in dedicated lanes in the middle of the street to obey the same speed limits that are universally exceeded by motor vehicle traffic in the side lanes immediately next to the sidewalk, among other pointless practices which do not significantly increase safety), our end-to-end trip time could be significantly lower.