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Originally Posted by powderjunkie
full-ish is an optimistic assumption in this scenario (it'll kinda suck so not that many people will ride it), but that was also going to be true for a Millican terminus.
Kevman's point is that there is little intrinsic value in connecting the N and SE. Main benefit is sharing a maintenance & storage facility (which also means substantial deadhead costs every single day for the next century). But the Millican terminus was going to need 2 MSFs anyways!
But if you move off the desire to connect the lines, you open up a lot of [much cheaper] options:
1. beltline terminus further west (gets you ~350 meters from 7th Ave connections)
2. shallow cut&cover terminating underground before eventual 8th Ave subway (100 meters from 7th ave)
3. shallow underpass under CP tracks; come to surface north of 9 Ave for a terminus between 7th and 8th Ave (optimal connections forever)
4. for something fun you could run a single track couplet/loop - for instance up 4th St to 8th Ave (station) and back down 5th st. (There's a whole bunch of complexities and that example is just illustrative - in the past they were considering couplets for 10th&11th or 11th&12th, which really helps mitigate a lot of the issues running at-grade)
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And after a few stops downtown you could go SW to Mt. Royal.
To me the underground option feels more like a vanity project and isn't actually satisfying a transit need. A green line down 10th Ave makes for some pretty easy connections to the 7th ave lines and, as you said, 350m is a pretty painless transfer. There are longer transfers within the same subway station in New York.
I'd love to know the actual breakdown of the costs per segment. If someone told me it was going to cost $2 billion to link 4th St. to Eau Claire, I'd say we could fund public Ubers for the 100 people a day that need that connection. But if that same $2 billion got you the Eau Claire line north it's a no brainer IMO.