Sheesh. Bloomington Go looks ginormous, are there additional plans for it to be a hub for some other services?
Yeah it is massive. No clue why to be honest.
According to this, the cost is almost $68 million to build. Also it is described as a:
New construction of a transportation facility in Gormley, Ontario. Completed plans call for the construction of a 315,139-square-foot, three-story above grade, one-story below grade transportation facility.
The Bloomington station also amazed me when I saw that. Really questioning the need for that given the rural location of the station. The area isn't even designated for urbanization, and the Richmond Hill GO line isn't designated for all day GO service. The station would only be in use for a couple hours a day..
$70 million is also a ton of money for a station in any area, yet alone up there. West Harbour only cost $45 million..
That was also my initial reaction but there is a very good reason for it: it's located right next to Highway 404. Long-term, the traffic on the 404 is just going to get worse as the northern areas along it become more populated, and as future extensions are built around Lake Simcoe.
I think that the government wants the station there so that rush hour commuters who get on the 404 up north get off it at Bloomington and switch to the train for the rest of their journey, releasing capacity for people further south on the highway into downtown. This is very forward-thinking and I think it will likely prove to have been a very wise decision somewhere approaching 2030.
The proof of this attitude is in those signs that were piloted on the QEW to try to entice people to get off at Burlington/Appleby/Bronte/Oakville instead of continuing downtown by car. I think you'll start to see planning and initiatives like this as our highways get expanded and the communities along them continue to grow and grow.
As for the cost, the station is almost entirely a parking garage, a massive one at that--those are expensive. Doing a very quick google search, Oakville's parking garage cost ~$41M completed in 2012, and according to the MTO Gormley GO station cost $22M having only a large surface lot and no garage. If you adjust the Oakville garage cost for inflation and consider that this is an entire station not just an add-on garage/compare it loosely to Gormley+Oakville, $70M seems almost exactly right, and reasonable for the scope of the project.
Regarding no all-day service, 1) as said above it's to take the load off the 404 at peak hours, 2) Aurora GO is currently hilariously over-capacity, I would imagine there are even a few hundred people who would take the train each day but have stopped bothering due to the lack of parking--my family is very near this point for rush hour travel, it's gotten to be more trouble than it's worth. Bloomington GO is situated at a location where a significant amount of Aurora GO's potential passengers can drive to Bloomington and have it take just slightly more time than driving to Aurora GO, counter-balanced by the ease of finding parking taking less time--so it could serve to free up desperately needed parking space in Aurora by the rush hour crowd, freeing it up for the people who want to use the midday trains rolling out soon. I used to take the GO bus to Union from Aurora midday sometimes and there simply isn't parking anymore after 7 AM, yet alone midday...if that continues, the midday trains won't get nearly as much ridership at Aurora as they would with available parking.
So it's a much bigger picture than it appears at first glance.
