(10-31-2021, 12:59 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(10-31-2021, 08:52 AM)KevinT Wrote: Lol, I dream of the top of Charles being a portal where the LRT goes underground, I just can't figure out where it could pop out farther 'north'. I have childhood memories of 6 week summers spent with Oma in Essen Germany riding streetcars that went underground through the core... I'd love that here!
Edit to add: I also dream of Block Line station looking like Pimisi in Ottawa, with ION hugging the rail corridor until turning to follow the hydro corridor to Fairway instead of the Hayward S-nail we have now.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "top" of Charles, are you suggesting it should be underground north of Downtown? Why would the LRT need to be buried there?
Between Eby and Benton would be a great place for a downtown portal, and my reasoning is to be much quicker getting through the downtown than all the short blocks and curves it has to navigate now. Part of that slowdown though is because of the sharp corners it takes to re-align to Duke and King, and burying it through the downtown wouldn't get rid of the need to at least align with King at some point. You can't take diagonals through building basements to reduce those curves, so burial is not a problem-solving option for the LRT alignments that we have now 'north' and 'south' of downtown Kitchener. My mental vision of LRTs gracefully ducking under Benton will forever remain just a vision.
I think that a concrete improvement for the LRT downtown though would be to improve the signal priority. It works fairly well on King between Moore and Allen, but for some reason the traffic engineers didn't see fit to roll those permissive signal waves around corners, and that's where the LRT gets hung up. Also having to pull the train out of a station and creep to the next stoplight to trigger the signal is ridiculous, drivers should be able to trigger them from the cab before (or at the very least as) they leave the station.
Quote:Here's the question I'd ask you folks who think the LRT should be buried. Would you still believe the LRT should be buried if the downtown (or uptown) cores were car free? I.e., if there were no cars permitted in the area you want the LRT buried, would you still think it should be buried? What benefits would there be to burying it there? Because as always, there are disadvantages--and not just cost but accessibility.
I'd be thrilled to see the downtown work as a transit mall, but don't think it's vibrant enough to convert both Charles and Duke where the LRT is routed, and punching car and bus traffic straight up King between them certainly wouldn't play well with that either (it's just too confining). I know the one-way Charles and Duke car loop of old was seen as the opposite of a city building idea, but I think (personal opinion, I'm no urban planner) that it would have worked well with fewer lanes on those two streets plus bike lanes and wider sidewalks to keep them from being the mini highways they were, while running the LRT straight up a King street pedestrian mall European style. Again, a pleasant mental vision I'll never see.
...K