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High-Speed Rail (HSR) - Toronto/Pearson/Kitchener/London
(04-15-2018, 02:40 PM)tomh009 Wrote: While I don't really agree with your traffic routing logic, I don't want to argue about that as I think it's subjective, at least until someone does a real analysis on it.

But I would like to know why you think it's better to have a level crossing at St Leger and a pedestrian bridge at Lancaster, rather than a grade-separated crossing at Lancaster and a pedestrian bridge at St Leger.  

Mostly because Lancaster south (east) of Victoria shouldn’t be a through route. Cutting it off at the tracks would make it not a through route. Of course, so would cutting it off immediately south (east) of Victoria, but then you still have to figure out what to do about Lancaster/Victoria and the crossing. So this is just a side benefit. I think most traffic on Lancaster north of the tracks can use other routes; for example, anybody who is using the expressway north of Lancaster to access Victoria St. can use the expressway all the way to Victoria instead of Lancaster.

Note that I consider a pedestrian bridge a nice-to-have future improvement; pedestrian and bicycle traffic doesn’t jam up and cause traffic flow problems on Victoria so I consider that a (fully-protected, as it is now) level crossing should still be OK for some time to come.

Quote:Especially given that the new Highway 7 alignment will be from Wellington/Shirley rather than Victoria: Lancaster is already four lanes between Victoria and Wellington, so it can carry the increased traffic between the two, while St Leger and Wellington (between St Leger and Lancaster) are only two lanes. Unless we were to widen those two roads, we would be reducing the cross-railway capacity from the current six lanes to two, which seems like a bit much to me. And when freight trains are shunting, traffic backs up significantly on Lancaster and Victoria already, with two lanes it would surely be worse.

Remember the Highway 7 interchange includes two new routes south from Wellington; one an extension of Bruce St. east of the highway and another road west of the highway which hooks up to Edna where the ramps do now. These will both cross under the railway and both connect directly to the Wellington St. ramps. So there is plenty of capacity across the rail line at roads that can actually handle it on both sides of the tracks.

Overall, my approach is not actually looking at moving traffic along Lancaster; instead, I’m suggesting that there are better routes for most of that traffic, especially after the Highway 7 interchange is built. I would be interested if anybody has examples of significant origin/destination pairs that might currently use the Lancaster crossing where there won’t be another route that is just as good.
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RE: High-Speed Rail (HSR) - Toronto/Pearson/Kitchener/London - by ijmorlan - 04-15-2018, 05:57 PM

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