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FotO wants on-street LRT, others want a tunnel, but either way would be an improvement on what we have now if the buses are out of the picture.
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It may be an improvement but either way we are left with a single downtown transit corridor and a capacity limit. I think many here would also like to eliminate Gatineau buses some day and how does this fit in with either possibility?
One of my complaints about the FOTO plan was that it was going to require at least half the passengers to stand in order to reach downtown. Is this really what we want to achieve in order to ease congestion? We could accomplish the same thing by restricting the number buses and making far more people stand. This would be a much cheaper solution. Either way, making most people stand will not be popular.
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So if we build a tunnel but then continue to run the majority of the current bus routes downtown as right now then we again run into that problem.
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If we have two transit corridors (the tunnel and Albert/Slater), we have a lot of flexibility on how we design our system. With sensible planning, we can make sure that the number of buses on Albert and Slater does not reach the capacity for the streets, at least not for many years.
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People will ask why we are building a tunnel only to keep running the buses. It won't be acceptable, to council nor the public. The buses have to go. And if they go, we then have to figure out how to get people onto the train. The options are convert or build transfer stations.
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The public already knows that Albert and Slater is at capacity. If we start running trains into the tunnel and reduce congestion on Albert and Slater and improve transit service at the same time, why would the public not be satisfied? Only a small minority is expecting all buses to be removed from Albert and Slater and that is not realistic for many years and will likely require us to build a second tunnel.