Asterix
Active Member
But if the speed increase is negligible then best not to spend all that money on the ROW, use the money for a new streetcar route or something. And the St. Clair ROW could have had B/D equivalent spacing and still be local enough.
A large chunk of the money was spent on street beautification projects and utility work whose connection with the ROW is only the fact that if they were tearing up the street to do one thing, might as well do a couple others.
As mentioned by other posters, the main intent of the ROW wasn't so much to increase speed, but the reliability. Your experience with the streetcar is significantly improved if you know that one will arrive every say, 4 minutes rather than three 12 minutes from now.