11-17-2019, 08:48 PM
(11-17-2019, 02:43 PM)tomh009 Wrote: The document projects roughly 10x the ridership for Kitchener/Breslau as compared to today. Maybe reasonable. But the surprising thing is that they expect 80% of that to be to Breslau. Is it an airport traffic projection?
This is a disappointingly status quo plan from Metrolinx, not surprising but still disappointing. What I mean by that is, they're planning to be a park and ride, and nothing more. If they took an aggressive car-lite growth plan from KW, where a significant portion of the commuter traffic had access to the central station through LRT, that would be by far the obvious choice...as it is, they're basically going to limit ridership by parking. But we all knew this was the plan when they proposed Breslau.
If they were truly amitious, they could build a complete high density community around Breslau, but that would take cooperation and planning, but that's about the only way that Breslau could be built without being nothing more than a park and ride sink for the region.
As for the actual plan, the bypass is the right choice. We already have frequent delays because of freight operations, a few small improvements aren't going to change that. And yes, it sucks that passenger rail is in this state, we probably shouldn't have privatized our rail network, but this is the world we live in, and CN is not in the business of accommodating passenger traffic, that won't ever change, no political pressure, nothing short of the bypass or eminent domain would make those tracks prioritize on-time performance of passengers over freight.