Looking just south of Hunt Club in Streetview ... it's farm on one side ... and 1 story light industrial on the other. Not a residential unit in site. Looking south of Baseline at Navaho ... very light. There's no way that this corridor is generating 1,000s of riders per hour. If there are thousands of trips an hour, they are beginning and ending somewhere else, and simply being express bused through here.
Personally I haven't driven down there in decades ... but I can't believe that road is carrying the kind of traffic that Sheppard East is, either. It currently maps completely green in Google Maps Traffic at 5:30 pm while I can see yellow and red on Sheppard East.
Look at Woodroffe and Majestic or Woodroffe and Knoxdale. South of Hunt Club is the Greenbelt, and the stuff you're seeing at Hunt Club is a High School and the Nepean Sportsplex.
A lot of the ridership is coming from Barrhaven via the Transitway, but that corridor generates a fair bit on it's own. There's residential subdivisions on either side of it. During rush hour it's normally quite packed.
A lot of the corridor's ridership is also generated by Algonquin College.
Another thing is aside from one place along the line, the west side of the road has a transit ROW reserved. That's why it looks 'empty'. You can clearly see it with the satellite view.
So you neither have frequent stops with lots of passengers, nor do you have much road congestion. It doesn't look at all comparable.
Those are pretty big assumptions to make from a Google Earth examination
. The pinch points along Woodroffe are from Baseline to the Queensway, and at Hunt Club.
That route carries 2 Transitway routes, 4 or 5 Express routes, and a handful of local routes. It's very busy. During rush hour there's buses every 2 to 3 minutes.
I bet by 2031 they'll have a full Transitway down that road too ...
It's a trunk Transitway route, so it's possible. I think they're going to wait for the LRT to upgrade the whole corridor though.
EDIT: Traffic volume data for Woodroffe between Baseline and the 417: Currently, about 40,000 vehicles-per-day use this section of Woodroffe Avenue. During the morning peak hour 2,400 vehicles-per hour (vph) are heading northbound toward Hwy 417. During the afternoon peak hour there are approximately 1,750 vph travelling in each direction.
Here's a map I found online showing traffic counts (
http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/publications/brochures/24hourvolumemap.pdf): Sheppard East between the 404 and Victoria Park carried 38,688 vehicles per day in 2006 (most recent data I could find).
Sounds pretty similar to me...