Quote:
Originally Posted by stevena07
Salt Lake is big enough for two hubs, or "sub-hubs". The station on top of the North Temple Viaduct would be the hub for the northern Wasatch front. Most people from Davis county and north would get off at north temple. The current hub, or the Intermodal hub can be the other sub hub for the southern end, from Utah county through Salt Lake County.
The Intermodal hub was not built in a good location, and will not be able to handle the future capacity of all of the trax lines and frontrunner. A northern sub hub will be needed. Just imagine trains from the Airport line, University line, Sandy(draper), West Valley, and Jordan, all traveling to the Intermodal hub. It doesnt work. Not to mention a fully operating Frontrunner.
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From a functioning standpoint it makes no sense to have two. It adds about 3 minutes to both the airport line and the frontrunner line. Having two stations that close makes Frontrunner function more like a local transit system versus the regional function that it was intended to serve. Plus the impact on vehicular and pedestrain traffic on 400 West is negative. Add the davis county LRT and it creates a very tight meshing of three lines junctioning in a half block area. The frequency of the trains, the need for new traffic lights from a shortened viaduct and the turn radius for the airport lines results in complete failure for that intersection. the North Temple area becomes the most critical intersection to the entire system. The potential conflicts and delays and the engineering required are not worth even considering it as a location. For the Airport line to be a success, it has to have direct connection with Frontrunner and the easiest, most cost effective and least impactful place to do that is at Central Station. The other benefit of Central Station is that it has a much higher redevelopment potential due to the nature of existing land use and property ownership.
Central station isn't in a poor location. Given the logistics at the time, North Temple and the area around it had too many obstacles that would have taken too long and too much money to remedy. The current site has plenty of room to expand and it can handle all of the proposed lines travelling to it with some additional track and expansion. The bottleneck on the system is throughout downtown, where the system is the slowest. A downtown bypass is needed to handle the additional Jordan and W Valley lines, and the right of way is in place to do it along 400 or 500 West. The downtown trunk line will exceed it's capacity with all three new lines.
(and glad someone caught my spelling error in a previous post, it was intentionally placed)
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