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Bare bones? The busy ones were palatial compared to the Eglinton LRT. Even what you showed (not sure which station that is), is going to keep you dry, which the Eglinton ones won't.
What you have pictured here is Lees station. Similar to the Scott Street trench. These are some of the few stations where they had to actually spend money to grade separate. So they took advantage of the construction and added more shelters. These "palatial" stations were still just giant steel and glass shelters. The concrete you see is stabilizing the walls of the trench with some stairwells and an elevator or two. Other than the trenches themselves, this stuff was not expensive to build or maintain. A huge bargain, when you consider that they got over three decades out of them. And these trenches are now all being repurposed for rail, so those investments weren't a write-off either.
When I lived their in the late 1980s, the stations all looked similar. The bus stops downtown were different of course - at that time, they were saying that downtown was temporary, and the intention was to build a tunnel.
To be fair, the Eglinton Line should not be used as a metric for palatial design. Literally any station that had any form of effort into it would seem grand compared to Eglinton. Even the curbside bus shelters that Viva had prior to the rapidway is more impressive than Eglinton:
I expect to be able to stay dry in any bus shelter. That's not achieved on Eglinton.
And please tell how many "truck protests will occur in the future"? By the time we get this built, we would probably have most restrictions lifted and there wouldn't be a reason for truck protests to happen.
My Crystals Ball said many more protest will happen in the future and will have nothing to do with the current bullshit protest.
Thing is we will have a ton of pedestrian protests, you know the standard ones where you have large crowds holding up large signs. Those will almost surely block the tramway from running, rather than vice versa. Meanwhile if we look at frequency of truck protests, those really only happen in very specific circumstances. I believe in the last 3 years only 2 truck protests have occurred, the one we currently have, and some event called United We Roll that I have never even heard of. In short you are enacting a policy to remove something that happens so infrequently. As a downside, you get a tramway that poorly integrates with the existing O-train system, thus reducing the ease of travelling between the two cities (transferring to the Otrain will require 200m+ walking connection that is unprotected from the cold and muddy Ottawa winter).
