Quote:
Originally Posted by fusili
Why? We have a 30% increase in capacity happening shortly. We have a bus corridor that is way over capacity (Centre Street) on one of two quadrants of the City that have no LRT service to speak of. We have 4 hospitals (FMC, ACH, South Health and RGH) and one post-secondary institution (MRU) that has no rapid transit access at all.
I agree that the 8th avenue subway is important, but relative to it's cost and the need for other transit infrastructure, I am not sold that it should be a top priority. If you think it is, tell me what then goes down on the priority list?
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It really depends on the result of four car trains. Capacity has been maxed out on 7 Ave for six years now. It is very much an open question of how much time four car trains will buy us. I could easily see 7 Ave hitting another wall before 2020. A maxed out 7 Ave is a real problem. It keeps us from being able to leverage our existing investment. TODs make a lot less sense to develop if all the trains passing by are full. Also the benefit to whole system reliability is hard to over stress. We would have far fewer disruptions and cascading failures. The benefit to north- south vehicular traffic in the core would also aid our bus system.
Comparing it to other projects is a bit of a mixed bag. The north central corridor is really in the same boat as 7 Ave. There is a real danger that bus capacity in the area will be maxed out in the same time frame. The probable choke point is also downtown which has ramifications for the whole city. Other bus routes, to areas that won't need higher order transit for sometime (17 Ave E) or ever (Elbow Drive), will be competing for limited space. So here it pretty well just comes down to circumstances. Relieving capacity constraints where ever they arise being the paramount goal. Of course the 8 Ave subway is a much cheaper way to send more people into the core than the NCLRT, so that is a factor.
I think the SELRT is an entirely different matter. I think that if it existed today, it would garner WLRT ridership but at twice the cost to build. The deep SE is probably twenty years away from being built out enough to justify it by itself. That said, the build out of employment centres along the route at Quarry Park and Seton over the next few years could seriously speed up the timeframe. For that to happen though people would need to be willing to commute to these areas via transit in numbers that significantly exceed existing suburban office parks. That is a dubious notion at present, I for one remain unconvinced, but if it panned out, then the relief to Deerfoot congestion would definitely make the project worthwhile.
No other routes really make sense to even be in this conversation. I'm ignoring incremental improvements to various BRTs because they don't really entail major capital expenditures although some might be on the border of qualifying. 17 Ave E is likely decades away from the kind of growth that would justify it being added to the list. 16 Ave N could probably make due with bus lanes for a long time. The airport doesn't make any kind of sense except politically. An inner west side circumferential line, which I'm strongly in favour of, lacks a ROW that would keep costs below astronomical. Past that and ideas start getting really thin.
So, in my mind, until we have some real evidence that IOL employees will take the train, it's pretty much a race between 7 Ave and the 301 to run out of capacity. It could go either way but, for the time being, my bet would be on the existing C-Train hitting the wall first.
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