ShonTron
Moderator
Scarberian's last activity was 5 days ago. I'm worried.
The LRT mob caught up with them. After all, the first Transit City EA is tonight, and I couldn't see them missing it over their dead bodies.
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Scarberian's last activity was 5 days ago. I'm worried.
I really wonder how much space there will be in the corridor between Union and Dundas West once the route to Georgetown goes to four tracks to handle all-day Brampton, very frequent airport, and VIA and the route south of the West Toronto Diamond has the extra load of all-day Milton and GO Bolton at rush hour. By the time GO Barrie joins in at Lansdowne things start to look a little congested. Maybe it is a good thing they are putting off what might seem like a no-brainer subway route right now since the future GO/VIA/Airport cost of having nowhere to expand would probably be far more expensive than a subway under Roncesvalles. It would be interesting to have the GO/Airport service in a subway to the airport while TTC subways run on the surface in the rail corridor.
The Weston sub is really, really wide. People should go check it out. There's space for almost anything we would want to send down that corridor, short of a 6-lane expressway.
Check out this link showing the Weston sub just south of Lansdowne. There's 5 tracks currently in the corridor, there's room for another track on the south side and 3 more on the north. That's room for 9 tracks! There's consistent space in the corridor for 8 or more tracks. Look how wide it is at Black Creek.
You could have 4 tracks for GO and VIA Georgetown and Milton line services (2 express, 2 local), 1 for the Bradford line, 2 subway tracks and their associated platforms, and still have space left over.
I can see there being a need for 2 Milton, 2 Georgetown Local, 2 Georgetown Express, and 1 Bolton at Bloor. Considering platforms at Bloor it seems a little tight. The corridor is wide between Lansdowne and Stachan but very tight elsewhere especially once you factor in any form of platform space or bridge support structures from overpasses.
They have allocated space for 6 tracks on Lakeshore north of the Gardiner as can be seen in the Waterfront West LRT documents. Considering the Lakeshore Line is only VIA + GO on a single route to Hamilton could require 6 tracks, a corridor handling Airport + Georgetown + Milton + Bolton + Barrie could easily require 7 or 8. I figure 8 to Lansdowne, 7 to the West Toronto diamond, 6 to Church St Weston, 4 to Brampton.
We also need to ask ourselves:
What are the urban design consequences of having 4 tracks through places like downtown Brampton?
Hamish Wilson kept commenting on Spacing and those cycling blogs on how a bike path is a terrible idea in the corridor because the lands should kept for rail transit, but it's a really wide corridor as I've noticed.
That's serious, serious overkill. Once you have trains running the same way on the same track, the capacity of 4 tracks is immense. Every 3 minutes on each track (for which there is no need or demand now or in the foreseeable future) is 40 trains per hour per direction.
Lakeshore to Hamilton most certainly doesn't need 6 tracks. They're only adding a third track as far as Oakville right now, and it's 4 on the way into Toronto. 6 tracks should be including the tracks for the WWLRT.