Not in regular service anyway… I do see the appeal of upgrading to GO service standards as something of a diversion route should Milton and Midtown be built out in a way that gives metrolinx operational control. That lakeshore midtown routing is… very crayon friendly. It genuinely LOOKS great...
There were tracks in place on much of the corridor into the 90s
Although I will say… I’m not opposed to an elevated or surface LRT row directly parallel to park side drive… I dropped my concept in the fantasy thread the other day, but my own inclination is this is better an LRT with a transfer...
I was playing with options for the south end of a Jane LRT, alternatives to branching the Ontario Line West and how to tie a Crosstown / Kitchener corridor interchange station and ended up with something I quite like... Should almost certainly be extended down to the OL proper and I can argue...
King/Coronation are basically stable low density, high value, residential communities (and Water has a pile of floodplain issues). Hespeler Road is a growth corridor. King in Preston also would need some combination of streetcar style ops and directing through traffic onto basically residential...
Concur on the BRT costs being pushed up. If you read between the lines on their option development it's pretty clear that the shortened LRT options were never meant to be very serious, and appears that the BRT is predicated on using basically the approved corridor, not the highway lanes +...
That was certainly my thought in suggesting the weird 561 variant that would end up creating a single seat link between Bramalea and the other two stations... originally I was thinking that maybe the 502 should eb run east to Bramalea once the LRT opens, but even aside from overservicing...
Has anyone seen or heard discussion of something like a 'diagonal' Zum or express? It just struck me that you'd get a pretty coherent patch for a lot of connectivity issues with GO and the initial LRT by extending the 561 to Bramalea Terminal and merging it with the 115
My thought on a Lawrence East LRT is that it's best done as an escape hatch for the capacity disconnect between Scarborough and the rest of Eglinton; build and operate it as a through running branch.
Ultimately I still think this is what's going on with the tunnel; its a distraction to draw criticism away from all his more ordinarily idiotic populist projects.
My take is that this isn't sensibly a standalone line, but does make some sense as a Kingston Road/Waterfront East through route extended to Kennedy meeting EELRT:
Not much of an LRT, basically all on street, but it can quite reasonably duck onto the Stoufville ROW for Kennedy access.
And...