syn
Senior Member
Are we actually expecting some new technology?
All this talk of technology sounds like a bit of a red herring to me. There’s no technology that’s going to magically solve the capacity issues at hand.
A LIM-based technology would allow for shorter train heights and therefore smaller tunnels. LIM seems like the obvious choice, although I don’t believe it would save that much money overall; tunnelling is only a small fraction of project costs. We might save $25 Million to $100 Million on tunnelling.
Again, the fatal flaw here is capacity. We can’t just hope for a magic technology to make that problem go away. The line as proposed is a 20k pphp line. 20k pphpd is not compatible with “smaller trains”
That's the problem. There isn't a solution that will solve the capacity issues the way an actual subway could.
This is so strange. We're talking about using a light rail variant for a downtown line that demands maximum capacity, and building full-fledged subways in the suburbs.