Quote:
Originally Posted by roger1818
One could equally say it is hard to justify a Rideau-Montreal subway with the Confederation line a few kilometers to the south.
The reality is neither Bank nor Montreal road currently have the density to support a subway on their own and the suburbs beyond them will be served by rail with an alternate route.
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More broadly, you don't have to always build subways under streets themselves. This is often done to cut costs in North America, where streets are linear. But it's not a hard requirement. And that North American perspective is what is driving this obsession with subways under those avenues. Get away from looking at only the street and you start to see the need for a North-South corridor (Trillium Line) and East-West corridor (Confederation Line). This is where the planners are coming from.
Both Montreal-Rideau and Bank are fixable with surface transit. Just needs some tough choices to be made (giving up road space).
And on ridership levels, like it or not, what's happening in Toronto is setting a marker for funding grade separation. If you can't get peak ridership to > 10 000 pphpd in a given corridor, the likelihood of getting funding from Queen's Park and the feds for grade separation is low. Just look at the drama over the Scarborough subway. And the Scarborough RT has higher ridership today than we'll ever see on Bank and Rideau-Montreal in our lifetimes.