Kyle Campbell
Active Member
All being said though, it's definitely the heaviest "light" rail system around, considering it'll be carrying almost 2.5 times the ridership of the Sheppard Subway on day 1, it's a real stretch that it should have been LRT at all in any incarcerationIf they had gone high floor, it wouldn't have changed the capacity of the system, they would have scaled down the platforms to 80m and shortened the trains. The confed line is very comparable to Skytrain in terms of capacity.
In hindsight it still probably would have been a better choice, but as mentioned many pages back they were originally considering more traditional lrt like running without full grade seperation for phase 2 when phase 1 was originally designed.
Now we join the very small ranks of low floor grade seperated systems (note my deft avoidence of launching another "what's a metro" debate ). Other examples are Sevilla Spain (which even has platform screen doors) and U6 in Vienna
The counter point is our Line 1 will have less than 20% of the TTCs Line 1 ridership, and even the most optimistic population growth estimates for Ottawa don't see us exceeding the confed lines max capacity within this century. We're big enough for rail transit, but not that big.
Last edited: