Quote:
Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker
First one has to decide what 17th SE should become. Do we want 'transit city' (for lack of a better term) style LRT on it, short trains, reasonably frequent, small frequent stations, no grade seperation. Or do we want mass rapid transit like the LRT lines we have built so far.
I don't think interlining a transit city style system with a mass rapid system would be very smart, and I am not sure you would generate enough ridership if mass rapid given the proximety of the SE and NE LRT lines which limit the catchment area, and ensure many of the 'new' riders on such a line will just be displaced from existing LRT.
All that being said in 40 years when we might be in a position to build a service such as this, things may have changed a great deal.
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Good points. I think 17th Avenue SE would function well as a low-floor "urban LRT" type system that is not grade separated. So, you are right that this won't mesh well with a fully grade separated SE/NC LRT. Timing would be difficult. Not impossible though. Signal control and reducing the number of cross intersections to perhaps just 28th, 33rd, 36th, 40th, 44th, and 52nd could help. A Barcelona-style low-floor tram, as they have on Avinguda Diagonal, might work. There are definitely constraints, but it won't be impossible.
If you kept longer train consists, frequency would be reduced, but you could probably run 12 trains on 17th and 25+ trains to the SE which would be enough to cover capacity demands. (25 trains x 900 passengers/train x 2 hours peak flow = 45K, which is 50% of the catchment area for the SE and 12 x 900 x 2 = 22K, which is 40% of the GFL catchment area). That would leave 37 trains for the NC LRT (67K, or 44% of the NC catchment area). Those numbers seem reasonable to me. But it is all a matter of operations. Could you run 12 cars down 17th per hour with no grade separation? I don't know enough to answer that.
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