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Originally Posted by Tropics
And how are you going to do that? Where is the land capable to do that?
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With great care, and particular attention to slope stability.
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Are you going to remove Centre Street for vehicle traffic?
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No, though traffic flow may be temporarily reduced or detoured in some areas.
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Are you going to bury the entire line?
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Of course not.
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Are you going to elevate the entire line?
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Perhaps a lot of it, but certainly not all of it.
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Are you going to spend astronomical amounts of money buying out one entire side of the whole of Centre street to build the new line on?
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Are you entirely new?
No.
No one thinks that's going to happen, not even you. If you won't argue honestly, then just don't say anything at all.
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Where are you going to place the parking lots for these stations? Or are you planning on forgoing any Park N' Go for the entire north central line so that anyone who lives more then a 15 minute walk from the actual stops have little actual practicality on using it?
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Take a look at the other lines. That should honestly answer your question for you.
We will quite simply DO ALMOST EXACTLY WHAT WE DID BEFORE. Most park and ride stalls will be needed north of Beddington trail. Perhaps we'll be building a Parkade beside a school and relocating the playing field to the top of it in the inner city? Maybe people will just have to stop driving to a parking lot and take the bus? Wait, a ton of them already
are? Yes, that's right, they are. Either way, it's a scarcely a real problem, and there are numerous,
obvious solutions all over.
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People who think I am short sighted or misguided with what I suggested might want to look at the actual feasibility of what they themselves are suggesting and how doable it actually is. Not very. At least with the line running west of the Deerfoot you have the land to actually build the line, the stations, and the parking lots. And the line gets built at 1/3rd the price compared to having to build an entire line up Centre Street.
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I work on projects like this, I know this is a feasible project, even with the soil stability issues coming out of downtown, even with the corridor running at capacity, even with the tight site constraints. We closed the Centre Street Bridge into downtown for years to rebuild it not too long back, and people found alternate routes. There is excess capacity in the local network, people are just too shortsighted to make use of it. I know this, because I live in the area (Rush hour traffic? hello 4th street!) This area is one of the most suitable to do major road closures of any in the city, because it is a grid, not a bunch of cul-de-sacs and loops. Most of the streets are approximately equivalent width to one another, and are all tied together. This means that with very little work, efficient detours are
entirely plausible. They may even work
better than the current traffic pattern.
Look around at other cities, this kind of thing has been done, done again, done differently, and done a couple other ways just to make sure again. We've got a lot of experienced people to solve this problem. They all say it's something that can be done, and without great effort or ingenuity. They
also say that the Nose Creek alignment is worse than useless, and that it would be better to do nothing at all, than to build that alignment.
Though I will admit that the cost of the Centre Street alignment is prohibitive, the alternatives are a worse overall option, and the ridership numbers of routes in the area do show that we need to build a train line here.
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Park N' Go is CRITICAL for any LRT lines, you cannot ignore it and you cannot "not" have parking at along any new LRT line and have it be a practical commuting service for people who work downtown. I do not see how it is feasably or practically possible to build an LRT line up Center Street. I agree it would be good if it was at all really possible, but I do not think it is. The west line had major issues with getting the line through and paying huge money for land it needed, and that line was a piece of cake compared to going up centre street all the way to Beddington.
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Previously addressed. Put some numbers on your comparisons--without something concrete, I might as well just tell you that this will be way, way easier to build than the west line was. It would be as accurate to say so, such a statement should hold at least as much weight as yours, no?
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The Deerfoot Nose Creek line might not be optimal, but it IS practical and actually doable.
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It is practical to spend tens of millions of dollars building useless things. Yes, tell me another one. What shall we build next, fearless leader? Let's stick to the useful end of the spectrum, please.
As has been mentioned numerously before,
THAT OPTION HAS BEEN SOUNDLY DISCOUNTED. By both the layman who takes the bus, and by the professionals with authority. If we are all wrong, please better illustrate to me how that could possibly be the case. Preferably, with real-world data. It's already been collected, all you've got to do is look it up.
More than a hundred and fifty years ago,
it was possible to jack up an entire city and import landfill, just to accommodate gravity drainage plumbing. You're saying that building a tunnel is too hard now? I'll admit that our skilled trades are in some trouble, but this is not a hard problem to solve! We've built plenty of tunnels for the train. We've built elevated sections. How is this any different? I'd love to have the opportunity to build this! I feel like I am explaining to my two year old why he cannot touch the hot stove for the fifth time!