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Originally Posted by YOWetal
Agree with all this and two additional points.
1. An effective airport link. (this is not) builds political support for transit. Many people only take transit for events. Taking it from their offices to the airport or getting dropped at neaerest LRT would expose them to the system and make them more inclined to support it. Maybe line two is so infrequent slow and the Bayview transfer lengthy that it wouldn't work anyway but it certainly isn't worth it for all but the extreme price concisous now.
2. Related to the last point. Line 2 is so bad that as LRTfriend points out it is not an improvement in service for almost anyone. It was political to bring LRT to as many wards as possible but ending it instead at the airport would have saved a lot of cash to either extend east or west or frankly just reduce the cost making it more sustainable. And I'd argue make for a better result for more people.
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Great to build the airport link, but Ottawa's airport is relatively small. Who is taking the train to the airport? The biggest market will be visitors who are staying downtown. Ottawa residents will not be big users because the vast majority will have to take a bus to the train. Who is going to carry luggage on a bus to a train, to another train and perhaps to another train again. This market is quite limited.
We can complain about Riverside South, Findlay Creek, Barrhaven, but where were we going to build houses? Further and further east and west? I don't believe that is sustainable either. So, the cat is out of the bag since the 1970s in the case of Barrhaven, and the 1990s for Riverside South and Findlay Creek. We cannot turn back the clock. How do we move people? South of the airport, there are few roads. That is why the 2006 plan was prioritized, that and, expanding on the success of the original O-Train.
We cannot get around that we need to provide transportation to these new communities. If it was not a train, then we have to build roads, big roads. Is this what we want? One other posted the horror of twinning the Airport Parkway, and there would have to be other big roads to get around the airport, and those people are permanently not using transit. Good idea?
My thoughts are based on logic. I didn't plan new communities in the south end. It doesn't matter about my opinion on whether they should have been built. They have been built. We need transportation. Should we invest in an expressway, or spend the same money on a rail line?
It is great that we are building rail to the airport and to Riverside South, but both are designed in a poor fashion and the single track backbone is its downfall.
I don't agree that we should have priortized the airport link. Ridership potential would never justify it. It is a prestige project and nothing more. If we were to do something differently, we should have double tracked and electrified the original line as the starting point, but politics demanded it be extended. We already screwed around with people in 2006. Inaction again (in 2019) was not good enough. We are using diesel regional trains that are a misuse for this project. They are slow plodding trains designed for 5 km station spacing, not for an urban/suburban project. We are now stuck for the next 50 years with the wrong trains. Just as many here complained that we chose the wrong train for Line 1. We have repeated making a bad choice.