I'm partial to the idea of running it on the surface. I hear that the feds are pushing for closing Wellington to vehicles at some point in the medium term as part of their Precinct planning. Presumably between Elgin and Bank, if not Kent. If that were the case, then running trams along the east side of Portage/north side of Wellington and through the car-free zone would run smooth and quick without any significant cross-traffic all the way to Elgin. And when the time comes, it'd be well-positioned to be extended to Mackenzie and up to the Alexandra Bridge to complete the loop.
Surface options have benefits beyond being orders of magnitude less expensive:
- They're much faster and easier to access (getting down to a LRT station is like 2 minutes of stairs and escalators, vs just stepping onto a platform)
- You get to see the city from transit, and transit in the city. Compare the tedium of the Metro's tunnels to the experience to taking the Skytrain, for example.
- You can have more stations, getting people closer to where they need to be.
- and yes, it's still orders of magnitude less expensive, which is money you can spend on other improvements to the system (like sturdy train doors)
Normally, this is outweighed by the fact that it's hard to keep surface transit reliable and to ensure its priority because of all the cross-traffic. But in a Wellington scenario, none of that applies. I'd be surprised if a tunnel option were anything more than a whisker faster than a surface alternative. And then with walking time taken into account (both to and from fewer stations and the much longer surface-to-platform access time), I actually think that the surface option would be faster for passengers.
The other big argument for a tunnel is a direct, tunnel-to-tunnel transfer to the Confed Line. Call me a blasphemer, but I think the importance of direct transfers to and from the Confed Line are less of a 'need to have' and more of a 'nice to have'. From the Gatineau perspective, there aren't enough transfers to make a lack of a direct connection a sine qua non dealbreaker. You want it to be easy, but there are more important considerations.
A walk from Wellington to the Sparks/Queen entrances for the LRT stations is like 100-150m, easily walked in under 90 seconds. That counts as quick and easy. Heck, for much less than a tunnel under Sparks, you could build escalator tunnels under O'Connor and Lyon which allow a direct diagonal route from the surface at Wellington to the mezzanine at Queen.
My concern is that a direct connection will be overvalued at the expense of much more useful attributes. If a direct connection to Lyon means that trams advance no further into downtown, that's a poor trade. I think most riders would rather have to walk 100m to the Confed Line, if that means not having to transfer at all when heading to the eastern half of downtown.
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