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Originally Posted by J.OT13
When the Confederation Line reaches capacity, and it will happen within 30 years or so with the TOD planned around the stations, the City will have no choice but to look into building a second rapid transit line, and Montreal Road in the east is the only option. Bonus is that it can be extended as the Cumberland Transitway, serving the precious suburbs.
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Right. 30 years is beyond that TMP. But that point, hopefully all three levels of government are in a better fiscal position and can push the next burst of expansion....
And hopefully, Montreal-Rideau will have had enough development that it's actually a reasonable dense corridor. Right now, even minor suburban avenues like Markham Rd in Scarborough or Lawrence across Toronto have more traffic, residents and transit users.
Would be interesting to see what's done to connect or interline a Rideau-Montreal subway if the Confederation Line is maxed out. They build a second set of tunnels underneath?
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Originally Posted by J.OT13
In the west, Carling would be the only logical route, but linking it to the Montreal Road subway would be tough.
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Not so much technically challenging, as technically expensive. They could just tunnel across downtown to connect. Would be insanely expensive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by J.OT13
That brings us to the Bank Street subway. They will be able to increase the capacity ever so slightly with minor frequency increases to Trillium through piece-meal double tracking, but it won't be long before a full shut-down for a proper double track upgrade is no longer feasible, That's when the Bank Street subway comes in (sometime in the next 30-40 years).
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Quote:
Originally Posted by J.OT13
The Bank line can be surface/elevated south of Billings to South Keys or the Airport (giving all of Trillium capacity to Riverside South), Carling can be surface/elevated west of Trillium to Kanata North and Montreal can be surface/elevated east of St-Laurent all the way to Millennium. This massive project would need to be phased in as needed, just like the current Confederation/Trillium project, over 20-30 years starting around 2048.
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They'll never build a Bank St. subway to relieve the Trillium Line. Ridership can be redirected to Confederation Line and Southeast Transitway during construction. It's not like we built a whole parallel subway just to relieve the Transitway, in Stage 1. We shut down the eastern Transitway. Nobody will have any qualms shutting down the Trillium Line with less ridership and more alternatives for diversion. And if the Trillium Line is twinned and electrified, all through ridership is diverted and any transit usage on that street is entirely local. Hard to make a case for a subway then.
If anything, I'd argue there's a substantially better case to build a subway under Bronson and to abandon the northern half of the Trillium Line.
Quote:
Originally Posted by J.OT13
Back to Carling, it could be a spur branch of the Montreal-Rideau-Bank subway.
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Never understood why people would want to connect a hypothetical Rideau-Montreal subway with a Bank subway. It'd make far more sense for a Rideau-Montreal subway to be interlined with the Confederation Line and becoming the Kanata Branch. So Kanata to Trim via downtown. And then the Barrhaven to Cumberland (via downtown) line becomes the other LRT going through the DOTT.