Quote:
Originally Posted by IanWatson
Though to be fair, when I put on my "reality" hat and doing a bit of research, the GO system serves a catchment area of 7 million people with 625 kms of track, and gets 200k daily boardings on their trains. Doing the three "dream" lines would be 300 kms of track, and serve a substantially smaller population. Perhaps a good start would be a line to East Hants, with a feeder bus line to Truro?
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GO is kind of tricky becase around half the ridership is limited to the small core stretch between Oshawa and Aldershot (near Hamilton). That stretch is around 105km which is entirely through built up areas. So that leaves the other roughly half of the riderhip to support about 520km. The Milton Line also carries about 15% on a 50km route so that leaves about a 70k daily ridership on 470km which is about 15k per 100km. So for the 300km dream routes to compare they be getting around 45k dairly ridership. Which would be ambitious since it's about 1/2 of Metro Transit's pre-pandemic ridership. But GO also uses huge 12 car locomotive-hauled double-deck trains which on those non-core routes run at a very low frequency.
Ours would be 2-3 car multiple unit trains run all day at higher frequency. Hopefully there would be a train every 1/2 hour peak and every hour or two off-peak per direction. Higher frequency helps attract ridership compared to service only in the peak-period and peak-direction while small trains need far fewer riders to justify each trip.
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