Thread: London Roads
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Old Posted May 22, 2012, 3:10 PM
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manny_santos manny_santos is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Wharn View Post
To be fair, it would be difficult to feasibly implement LRT somewhere like London. The traffic patterns make it extremely difficult to build a coherent, navigable route, since it would involve trackage through the University campus, which is not exactly rail-friendly. But I definitely see your point, because they could at least try to determine where the feasible LRT routes would be, rather than just avoiding the topic completely. It also ignores the need to attract industry to London by providing appropriate transportation (read: VMP freeway), and it ignores key missing links in the road system (still no sign of the Gainsborough-Windermere bridge). At least the report acknowledges that the city's bike lane network has room for improvement, but I don't know why Queens Avenue and Western Road are listed as "priority routes" if they already have bike lanes.

Look on the bright side, though: Toronto is currently trying to implement traffic planning initiatives that will actively aim to make congestion worse (LRT boulevards, 40 km/h arterial speed limits), but London is taking a hands-off approach. Not as progressive as K-W or even Hamilton, but at least it's not utterly destructive.
If we ever have LRT in London, I think it will be on existing railway tracks, although those don't serve very many key points in the city aside from downtown. Railways do come close to UWO and Fanshawe, but not close enough; at this point the only way to reach either of them would be to build underground spur lines. Not impossible, but very expensive, although I think it would be cool to have subway stations on both campuses. Aside from that, the only major commercial, residential, or institutional areas served by the railways include Hyde Park/Oakridge, some parts of West London, some of the Dundas East area, the Western Fair District, Victoria Hospital, the Westminster neighbourhood near Pond Mills Road, and perhaps most importantly, London International Airport. Still, those are better than nothing (Ottawa's O-Train doesn't come close to serving the whole city), and such a system definitely needs to have connections to St. Thomas, Strathroy, Sarnia, Chatham, Ingersoll, and Woodstock.

I think mass transit in London, if it ever happens, will be BRT, supplemented by a regional rail network, possibly connected with GO, connecting the aforemented communities with Downtown London and certain suburban locations. BRT will probably happen in my lifetime; regional LRT or HRT is likely much further away.

LRT (or BRT) boulevards are a bad idea if there is insufficient ROW. Spadina Ave in Toronto seems to function well with a streetcar line down the middle from what I've seen, but I know that many Torontonians complain about St. Clair Ave West since it got a streetcar line down the middle several years ago. Perhaps the best thing the TTC did was putting the northern terminus of the Spadina line underground, instead of having a congested above-ground station right at Spadina and Bloor. I have also seen BRT boulevards in Mexico City, but in most cases they function well as roads with very wide ROW were chosen, and 3 or 4 regular lanes each way still are in operation.
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