Thanks for the warm welcome, thedude.
Quote:
Originally Posted by the dude
main should be two-way but it'll be a tough sell to drivers...
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The first thing I'd argue is that putting LRT in dedicated lanes actually benefits drivers, for the same reason that it benefits LRT passengers: each mode no longer gets in the other's way.
LRT in itself actually reduces congestion, because a dedicated lane running, say, 300 passenger vehicles every ten minutes will carry considerably more people per lane-hour than an equivalent car lane. Since LRT actually gets people out of their cars, it can produce a net reduction in drivers so the remaining lanes are more clear.
Of course, LRT also drives changes in land use and density that change transportation patterns, so mapping congestion becomes a problem of organized complexity rather than a single-variable analysis. Overall, I would hazard a rough guess that LRT works out to be congestion-neutral or near enough as makes no big difference. (Of course I think congestion is a Good Thing, but that may be too much for committed drivers to accept at first blush.)
Now LRT only reduces net congestion as long as it maintains a high rate of flow-through per lane-hour. That means it needs to move freely down the street - and
that means it needs dedicated lanes and signal priority.
As for the two-way issue, I'd argue the following:
Putting both LRT directions on Main St. lowers the construction cost per kilometre, so we can get more bang for our Metrolinx buck. It also makes the system easier to navigate, and usability is a huge issue for getting people to choose transit.
The value-add economic development that takes place in the transit corridor - like the value-add economic development that takes place in cities in general - is based around accessibility, proximity, density, mixed use, and network redundancy (i.e. several routes to get from any point to any other point). Two-way streets are more conducive to all these features; whereas one-way streets are only good for speeding you
through a place.
The best way to replicate the flow-through of multilane one-way streets is to maximize the network effects of the grid - many routes from anywhere to anywhere else. That effectively means making all the major streets two-way, which eliminates the bottleneck that currently occurs whenever an artery gets clogged by construction, auto collisions, etc.
This actually makes more effective use of total lane capacity. It's a funny thing about road engineering that adding more lanes to a given street is subject to diminishing returns. E.g. if I have a two-lane street that manages 800 vehicles per lane-hour, doubling the number of lanes produces less than double the vehicle capacity. As a result, two streets of two lanes each carry more vehicles than one street of four lanes.
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