Quote:
Originally Posted by Wigs
Hamilton is too small to have a subway and it would be seen as cost prohibitive.
The LRT will be quick if given priority signalling. I've ridden the ion in Kitchener-Waterloo recently (May) and never felt it was too slow, for example.  |
I want to agree that the ION isn’t slow, but it is. I’m a student in Waterloo and ride it quite regularly. While the non-street running sections are fast, the line turns into a streetcar in uptown and downtown with lots of sharp turns and a couple loops, which unfortunately keeps it as fast as a good bus route.
I’ll admit that saying a subway in Hamilton makes sense is a stretch. Firstly, I think it comes down to the density of the lower city both past and present. Despite years of outflow, Hamilton’s prewar lower city is large and nearly as dense as old Toronto. It begs the question, what does a fully repopulated and infilled lower Hamilton look like?
Furthermore, KW is a sprawling postwar city. And yet, their LRT works as it is built upon a feeder bus network, not necessarily walk-up density to drive ridership. If we are serious about BLAST, then we are going to have high capacity feeder routes pouring onto the B-line. However, B-line assumes the precedent of HSRs poor service. Our future feeder routes will be of nearly equal capacity to our trunk line, particularly the A, T & S lines. So, we will have a corridor built for primarily serving lower Hamilton being burgeoned by a disproportionately high capacity feeder network, unlike the relationships seen between feeders and trunks on GRT and the TTC.
It becomes clear that it is hard to get an LRT to fulfill the walk-up needs of the lower city and the transfer needs of the rest of the city. Let’s not forget most of the LRT money isn’t for the LRT itself though; it’s for the utilities underneath to support growth. If we are already spending billions to rip up King, we might as well put our transit underneath/above it too. The marginal cost may not be too great, and it should have at least been studied by metrolinx. Let’s not forget that there is a historical precedent for higher order transit in Hamilton, whether it be the 1950s subway plan or the 1970s ICTS that only ran to the mountain.
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