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Originally Posted by 5seconds
You can absolutely make improvements with a bus. This is also from the link:
"The City is studying options for staging improvements in the form of bus rapid transit (BRT) on exclusive transitways"
Which means, to me at least, that they would be looking at dedicated bus lanes and roads. If done well, this could bypass many of the choke points you mention. (Or bypass regular traffic, thereby lessening the effect of the unavoidable choke points)
Would it make sense to begin the process of obtaining the land identified in the SELRT plan, and developing that ROW into a dedicated bus route? Would that allow the LRT path to be developed slowly (cost effectively) or would that just cause more work than just sticking the LRT in right away?
I just thought that if they developed the ROW with roads and bridges that would work with BRT, they could build that infrastructure in a way that they could then use it for LRT down the road. Is that crazy?
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The land is already being acquired; what doesn't make sense to me is developing a ROW twice, for two slightly different purposes. And unlike the Ottawa transitway (which, as in the last two posts, is the best example to use here) we would still want to start the SELRT within a 10 year time frame.
And buses, even on a dedicated transitway, travel a lot slower than LRT, and the distance here is the biggest factor in travel time. And designing the bus system in the SE to feed into LRT stations, which wouldn't be effective with BRT stations, is the biggest factor in convenience.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dado
The advantage of an exclusive rapid transit RoW, be it LRT or BRT, is in the constrained areas of Inglewood and Highfield.
I don't really see a lot of savings by using BRT rather than LRT in terms of getting out of that difficult area, though there may be "savings" of a sort from not building the north-south tunnel downtown. If you have to push a rapid transit facility through Inglewood, it's going to cost a lot of money regardless of what runs on it.
My recommendation would be to build the SELRT as far as South Hill Station (that would be next to the irrigation canal just south of Glenmore Trail). There's enough space at that station to serve as a transfer facility, something none of the other stations further in have. Beyond there, existing roads with a few linkages as needed would basically do the job. If funds allow, the SELRT could be taken to Douglasdale (114 Ave) since that location has a bit more going for it as a terminus with retail and commercial nearby and being near a Deerfoot interchange, but it is an extra 2.5 km.
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Just to comment on the bolded points here... Most of the cost of this project is Downtown, most of the rest of it is in Inglewood. Stopping it at Douglasdale could work, but past Douglasdale is the cheapest part of the line.
Ultimately, temporary improvements won't really have any benefit. We should be "saving up" in order to build the entire line at once. In the SE corridor, the final train is really the only solution to the area's own unique transit problem, so that's really all we need to build. The work being done now (acquiring the land, preparing station area plans, deciding on NCLRT so that it can definitively be linked or not to the SELRT) is the right step towards that; this SETWAY idea is not.
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Does this mean we can now kiss good-bye to the construction of the SE LRT for at least another decade?? The planning process on this link takes us deep into 2012. Add on the investment required to build a seperate BRT right of way and stations and you begin to wonder if we'll ever see an LRT in the SE... Personally I think the SETWAY is a step in the wrong direction.
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