reaperexpress
Senior Member
Definitely! The Eglinton-Crosstown line is a highly important line in terms of demonstrating to the public what LRT con do.
The current plan shows its flexibility particularly just outside the ends of the tunnel. On the east, it rises up to the surface, running alongside traffic, before dipping down under the busy Don Mills intersection. It then runs along Eglinton crossing the DVP ramps at grade (hopefully with very powerful priority) and across the existing grade separation at Wyndford Drive.
But for the rest of the route, it seems to be ordinary streetcar-in-a-ROW design.
Selective grade separation can go a long way toward improving speeds and public image of Light Rail.
<EDIT: never mind>I'd like to see corresponding grade separation on the west end, with the line running on a bridge over Black Creek Drive (with no station) and diving back into a tunnel for Mount Dennis station at Weston road. This was one of the options put forward in the design stage, but it was dismissed due to cost. But we now know that this city apparently considers cost no object in building rapid transit, so the decision to build at-grade is worth revisiting. Indeed, the amount of time saved by this single grade separation would be similar to the amount of time saved by the Scarborough Subway (2 minutes).</never mind>
It would have been great to include the Scarborough RT as the east end of the ECLRT, showing how fast LRT can be when independent of a street, and muting the desire to build a multi-billion dollar subway extension to replace the city's fastest rapid transit line.
The TTC says it couldn't interoperate the SRT and ECLRT because the route would be too long to maintain service reliability. Yet they have no problem extending the YUS subway ad infinitum, so clearly what they mean is that the standard of design is too low to maintain service reliability.
With more grade separation on the above-ground portions, the SRT and ECLRT could operate as one, and we could eliminate the Kennedy transfer without bankrupting the city.
Instead of transferring at Kennedy to the B-D line and again at Bloor-Yonge (as if that station needs more riders), Scarborough riders can simply stay on the SRT until Don Mills or Yonge, and transfer to the DRL or Yonge Line.
Spending a few hundred million extra on the ECLRT to improve speed and reliability would have exactly the same impact as spending billions of dollars on the subway extension, allowing those billions of dollars to instead be put toward the DRL.
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