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Originally Posted by JeffB
At best, his poll reflects his readership. He vehemently favours Carling, which will appeal to other people who favour Carling. So no surprise, his poll shows people favour Carling.
I'm not as well versed on the logistical drawbacks of Carling, so can someone give them to me in a nutshell? The biggest ones I know of are the narrow median, the large number of intersections and the likely large number of stops compared to other routes.
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Some of the drawbacks we're going to face eventually when the secondary line is built, but others are specific to Carling as a primary line.
The debate is quite fraught because the various actors are generally talking past each other anyway.
A lot of the Carling supporters - Ken Gray amongst them - are not concerned with providing a fully "rapid" LRT line. BRT would continue to operate on the Parkway and the Transitway to the north, at essentially the same level of service as right now (particularly with regard to the express buses). It's kind of like the N-S LRT all over again, but on Carling. The system they contemplate is more of a "semi-rapid" line running mainly on the surface.
Other Carling supporters are really just McKellar Park NIMBYs who favour Carling simply because Carling isn't in their backyard. This group kind of assumes that buses would cease operating on the Parkway with a Carling line. They take umbrage at the City's high cost numbers for Carling, so they latch on to the likes of Ken Gray without fully understanding that what he is supporting is something that can't and won't replace BRT on the Parkway.
Then there is the City, which is dogmatically insisting that the line be absolutely fully grade-separated regardless of where it is built. This dogmatism of course drives up the Carling option to insane levels but it also drives up the cost of their preferred option as well.
I don't support Carling primary for a variety reasons, but it doesn't have to be as expensive as the City makes out - but it's certainly not going to be as cheap as Ken and the McKellar Park NIMBYs want it to be either.
As to the issues that a line down Carling faces:
The first is the space it will occupy. If it is on the surface or trenched, you're looking at taking out a lane in each direction for the tracks. If elevated or tunnelled, we're talking major costs. All options would require utility relocations, though the elevated would probably have the fewest. The surface option would also require space for station platforms, further reducing Carling by another one or two lanes depending on the design. A trenched line might be able to get away with station platforms under the road, but if not, then it faces the same space issue for platforms as the surface option.
As it is, Carling is a tough nut to crack for reurbanization anyway. It has narrow lanes and narrow sidewalks, yet for it to become an urban arterial we really need to widen the sidewalks and add bike lanes and maybe some tree cover too. It's quite conceivable that running a surface line on Carling and making these other kinds of streetscape improvements within the current RoW would reduce Carling from three thru lanes per direction to just one. That might be a good idea, but that's not what the people who claim it will just take two lanes are saying, either.
Operationally, we've still got to deal with Tunney's Pasture, both from the east and from the west. Either we have a stub line out of Bayview (which would have the effect of reducing frequency on the Western LRT on Carling vs in the downtown tunnel) or we leave the BRT in place as is to serve people from the east. From the west, we would have to keep running buses on the Parkway from LF so that people from points west who work at Tunney's Pasture have a reasonable way of getting there.
If any of the semi-rapid versions were built, I think we would see express bus service from Kanata remain all the way in to Tunney's or even beyond.
The Carling route is approximately 1 km longer (LF to Bayview, 7 vs 8 km) than is the Richmond-Transitway route. To maintain the same frequency, more trains would be required (probably one more per direction, so at least four more cars). To maintain schedule, the trains would have to move one seventh faster. Considering the fact that a Carling route will have more stations* and tighter turns and more grade changing, this is really an impossibility.
Dealing with the O-Train also becomes an issue. If the City weren't so neurotic about running LRT at grade, it could run the Western LRT line on the surface either side of the O-Train trench (and rework the new pathway!) - the route of the old Champagne Arterial proposal - as far as Gladstone, bringing the westbound track across the trench at that point and then descending to go below Somerset, leaving the O-Train largely as is. Similarly, the two train types could track share with differentiated platforms - were the City not neurotic about that too. However, the more likely eventuality is to stop the O-Train at Carling.
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I know I didn't mention cost, but since the argument of the high cost will be dismissed out of hand by Carling proponents it isn't worth discussing.
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Cost of course, but one more thing about Carling is that there is a lot more property acquisition involved, and with a lot more landowners. The Western LRT is fairly simple: most is City-owned, and most of the rest is NCC-owned. Only at Cleary where the line shifts across is there really anyone else to deal with. On Carling we've even got the MoTO, err, MTO, to deal with. Negotiations and expropriation hearings could conceivably go on for quite some time.
*Excluding Lincoln Fields and Bayview, here is my guess of the stations, west to east:
Western LRT (5): New Orchard, Cleary, Dominion, Westboro, Tunney's Pasture.
Carling (9): Carlingwood, Maitland-Broadview, Cole-Churchill, Kirkwood/Queensway, Westgate/Merivale, Holland/Fisher, Civic Hospital, Dow's Lake (Carling O-Train), Gladstone.
Personally I think another station should be inserted on the Western LRT route by moving Dominion westwards and Westboro to Churchill, with a new station at Island Park. Others want the New Orchard and Cleary stations consolidated at Woodroffe, in which case the two ideas together would result in no net change to the proposed.
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