Rural Commuter Rail

[lrt's friend]

I believe the 500,000 figure comes from the Greber Plan in the late 40s as projected growth of Ottawa to be accommodated within the Greenbelt. I forget the time period.

I think the expectations for built form are going to be substantially different between commuter rail (Go service for the last 50 years) and S-bahn and RER. Commuter rail is going to be based on Park n Ride lots and therefore supports low density housing. 4 trains a day is not going to encourage density around stations. It is now too late for almost all GO stations since these areas are mostly built up. Perhaps some of the park n rides can be replaced with density and local bus transfers.

I will also argue the choice between cars and highways and rail. Which has the bigger impact on our city? I think it is unhealthy to discourage choice of housing in a democratic society. Of course, there are implications and costs of sprawl but we have set up suburbs to be based on cars despite feeble arguments to the contrary. Rapid transit needs to arrive as communities are developed otherwise, we still end up building wide boulevards, massive parking lots and expressways with wasteful cloverleaves. How do you build dense communities based on highways? It is impossible, yet we continue to make this mistake. It is very difficult to retrofit rapid transit and density after a community is fully built.