Quote:
Originally Posted by billybob123
In Ottawa, they ran the public transit rail line along an existing freight train line; it went from essentially nowhere, through nowhere, to nowhere. Granted, it ran through Carleton University and I'm sure they provide a large number of passengers, and also near a large government complex on Heron Road (which required a fairly long walk), the rail line didn't get you downtown (needed a transfer) and some of the stations aren't near anything of particular significance.
It has something like 15,000 passengers a day, which isn't a lot - OC Transpo buses serve 500,000ish riders a day.
They want to expand the light rail network to where people will actually take it, since these numbers are unlikely to improve.
An example of what happens when you build a rail line based on conveience rather than ridership. I hope someone brings this up in these open houses. I'd hate to see the NC LRT wind up being useless. Centre Street will cost a lot more but will be a heck of a lot more useful.
|
The Ottawa LRT is joke. It only goes North South, where most people in Ottawa live in the East or West end. Even their proposed LRT expansion is pretty limited. They plan on tunneling under downtown but almost as soon as soon it gets outside of downtown the LRT ends. So basically everyone on the LRT has to get off and get on a bus to reach their final destination. It would basically like the C-Train ending at the Stampede and SAIT. Downtown Ottawa has reached its capacity for buses, last summer there was some construction and it took buses an hour or two to get out of downtown.