I'm sorry.. I understand wanting a subway instead of LRT in Scarborough, but I don't understand wanting a BRT instead of LRT in Hamilton. Especially if the province is paying 100%.. Why? A BRT is the same thing as LRT except the vehicles have tires and are not as long.. it still takes a lane of the road. It seems like a downgrade in almost every way.
You tell me.
But I think I understand.
There's a lot of car lovers in Hamilton that love the urban expressway (Main-King artery) to continue. They are 5-lane-wide 1-way streets (about one-to-two blocks laterally apart) so the stoplights are perfectly synchronized to them. There are almost two dozen beautifully synchronized stoplights that allow us to speed from Gage Park through 403 onramp in a mere six or so minutes (that's more than half the width of the Hamilton metro area!) all green lights without a single red light, provided you keep a consistent 50-60kph speed. It is a beautiful feat of traffic engineering without expropriating to build a freeway. It is known, amongst traffic engineers, of the best synchronized traffic light arteries in North America -- tantamount to ramming a non-grade-separated semi-freeway through an urban area.
I am a car driver, and in a way I love the urban expressway making it possible for me to drive to Aldershot GO station in just 12-15 minutes flat from Gage Park, but I would trade it all for a gentrified Main/King/Barton + LRT + three Hamilton GO stations + allday GO service.
BUT
It severely degrades the quality of storefronts along most of the route, and even after 6pm when parking is allowed, people do not dare use streetside parking lest that cars behind them ram into them at 60kph+. They don't stop for storefronts. There are shuttered storefronts. People are too focussed on driving through the synchronized stoplights to make sure they catch the next set without slowing down. They don't look at the streetscape.
Once upon a time, James Street was a 1-way street. Our lovely James Street, that's now revitalizing. That was before James Street Supercrawl started. Now they turned it into 2-way sometime ago. People started pulling over to park to go shopping. The area started to revitalize. Car owners screamed and waved fists at the traffic de-engineering sacrilege, but pedestrian whoop-assed and enjoyed James Street. Now it sustains over 100,000 people per year at the SuperCrawl. There is no longer a shuttered store on James Street (except for that structurally unsound building; one that's now getting development proposals). People are no longer focussed on staying synchronzed with stoplights
Today, the Red Hill Valley Expressway exists, and now we have a good east-west freeway. Our fully grade separated freeway was built only in year
2007. Now people have a way to zoom crosstown through Hamilton,
Hamilton's first ever cross-town east-west freeway was only built in 2007. This has actually reduced the number of cars on Main-King compared to pre-2007. So now we can afford to install an LRT.
For the first time in history, we can finally de-synchronize the super-dangerous urban expressway. There can finally do a mixed gentrification (one that doesn't leave anyone out) of Main and King street.
The LRT gets built in King Street, and the Main Street becomes a 2-way 5-lane street with streetside parking (could be 2 lanes per direction, one full time streetside parking, and one offpeak streetside parking -- the traffic engineers will have to figure it out).
Gradually, a street that ceases to be an urban expressway, becomes a much calmer street that attracts businesses:
- underused parking lots becomes developed
- strip malls revitalize from soviet-60s-style to a more attractive modern style or replaced with bigger developments.
- dirty low-value residential houses become fancy patio restaurants (zoning on Main Street can allow that, since Main is a business treet)
- run-down fast food restaurant with crumbling parking lots, replaced with nicer versions of itself, or mixed retail and underground parking.
- actual lovely independent coffee cafes open (and maybe a well-behaved Starbucks or two)
- artist studios flourish (i.e. moving away from overvalued James Street, relocating to Main)
- more area jobs, tough people actually wanting to enjoy the area and work, rather than being trouble makers or stuck on welfare, etc.
- community centres flourish better
It would take twenty years, but this is also why we're getting an LRT as a catalyst for continued Lower City revitalization. Hamilton is far by, the poorest Ontario city to receive LRT funding, but it is also the city of the biggest potential lift (tide rise is much huger than for Kitchener, Ottawa, or Toronto LRT routes).
At the same time, I worry about the Hamilton poor, but the good news is -- the city is big enough to support everyone and we need to do it gradually in a mixed way. Barton Street has plenty of cheap-rent storefronts, and it will provide new locations for people gradually out-priced off James/Main/King over the next 10-20 years, and if you want to go even cheaper, there's more places further north into the industrial areas. There's plenty of room for both high/low income, even if the average salary of Lower City is slowly rising as the old boomtown-era Hamilton retirees make way to new Torontoians taking over their places. And with more jobs available in the Lower City thanks to business growth, will also slowly reduce the number of welfare recipients to an extent (like how businesses are succeeding more on James Street and even Ottawa Street nowadays, and hiring more people than they used to).
It may not be as big a revitalization as Boston's Big Dig --
but we're finally about to erase an obsolete crosstown urban expressway when we're receiving this LRT! This is really huge, if the we can fight the resistance. We are about to see the possible erasure of a 9-lane/10-lane urban expressway in one of Ontario's most massive traffic-calming engineering feats, with huge resistance from Hamilton car owners. Think of demolishing Toronto's Gardiner!
Before:
- 9-lane to 10-lane urban expressway (total, in a pairs of one-way arteries)
- Perfectly synchronized 60kph traffic lights
- Cars never stop
- Some storefronts are shuttered
- Dangerous; there are deaths
- No peak streetside parking
After:
- Two-way street operation on Main (two lanes in each direction)
- Much more pedestrian friendly. Safer to cross street
- Permanent streetside parking (on at least one side of street)
- LRT on King Street
- LRT synchronized to traffic lights
- Cars slowed down will see businesses, and pull over more often, like they do on James Street.
It won't be an instantaneous revitalization. It probably will take 10 or 20 years but eventually, Main Street could become one very long mixed revitalized street similiar to Louisville Kentucky's "Bardstown" street.
Here's a good example. The whole Lower City is so deprived in some ways, that we don't even have a Starbucks within a 10 kilometer span! Try to find a Starbucks on Google Maps in Lower City east of Locke Street! But now we have the brand new 541 Cafe (Barton) and the brand new Tim Horton's museum, plus a new cafe is opening three blocks from us. Two years ago, there was ZERO coffee cafes within walking distance of where we now live (except the pre-renovated Tim Hortons)...
We no longer need Main/King to be urban expressways anymore. It's time to turn Main/King into 2-way streets. The brand new Hamilton freeway (Red Hill Vally Expressway) is going to be expanded in coming years (plenty of room for new lanes). So it's time to tone down the urban expressways called Main Street and King Street, and de-synchronize the stoplights. It's a danger to kids living 20 meters away in streetside houses.
The Main-King already has a BRT. It's called "B-Line Express". Because the traffic lights are so perfectly synchronized, it's a
bona-fide BRT without needing dedicated bus lanes. This is why some Hamiltonians believe more in BRT, since it also helps keep the traffic lights synchronized for both cars and buses (at least when zooming by empty stops -- the buses simply breeze past, BRT-style).
But now you understand why some here prefer BRT over LRT: our synchronized-car-priority-lights (which buses easily follow) urban expressway will become desynchronized -- and synchronized to the LRTs instead. And the 2-way street conversion. Crosstown lower city driving will become much slower via Main-King (possibly 2x slower for some), but there are also speedy crosstown options such as taking Burlington St E.
In addition, I haven't even dived into the fact that we're leaving the Mountain (like 905) out when building Hamilton's first LRT strictly in Lower City (like 416), which makes Mountain feel like they're getting nothing when they currently have poor bus service. Some in the Mountain would like to sabotage the LRT by demanding bus expansion instead.
TL;DR: Understanding why some Hamiltonians prefer buses over LRT, requires understanding several things:
(1) our perfectly synchronized-lights urban expressway called Main Street & King Street; and
(2) the Mountain-versus-LowerCity rivalry, akin to 905-versus-416 rivalry. Mountain with poor bus service, LowerCity now gets LRT.
(3) the false perception that Hamilton is too poor to get LRT, and more buses are all we can afford
