What does this forum think about building out the BLAST network in Hamilton all in one go vs B-line LRT then the rest of the network later.
edit to add my thoughts: Building BLAST all in one go will yield more short-term benefits. LRT has its advantages for the B-line compared to BRT but are those advantages worth sacrificing building out the entire BLAST network faster and saving money on the LRT. This isn't my field of expertise so I'm curious what this message board thinks.
There's a bit of a chicken vs egg situation here. The plan for the
future of the HSR is to terminate all the non-express frequent mountain lines at West Harbour, which is a fantastic idea enabling a ton of 1-seat rides to GO, but will require abandoning the downtown bus hub at MacNab. Without the hub, you need something with a ton of capacity and frequency to pick people up that are getting off at King/Main and move them East and West across the city vs having people just standing around at the curb in the rain. A lot of the future transit planning uses the LRT as a backbone to tie everything together.
The A-line actually got some federal/provincial funding to start morphing into a BRT-lite with queue jumps and some mild transit signal priority. I've mentioned this a few pages ago, but I have no idea what the status of this stuff is. I think what the city has planned to rethink the L line (now called the 60/60A) actually has a lot more potential than the A line for infill development. An express bus from the center of the mountain (where a ton of building is forecasted) that hits Mohawk College, James/King, and West Harbour would be a game changer for regional transit. I'd love for the city to start thinking about bus lanes today, like RapidTO, vs trying to force them in later, leading to a lot of pushback and simultaneous construction nightmares. Getting a bus lane on Upper James or Mohawk is going to be a disaster if there's also simultaneous high rise construction... we should be proactive instead of desperately trying to catch up like the King St corridor. Look at all the massive condos going in that will be flooding the roads with cars downtown because we've wasted two decades, instead of building an attractive transit alternative that a professional would WANT to use (LRT, light metro, all-door boarding modern BRT), versus options that a broke person being FORCED to use (the B-line Bus).
One thing I'll note about the comments here arguing, essentially, "Metro or bust", it's like you folks are unaware of the many urban tram networks throughout Europe. It's not like Hamilton's LRT plans are some zany half-baked experiment and Alberta's LRT is the ONLY model for running a quick tram through a city. Many German Stadtbahn's built decades ago run high floor trams through dense pedestrianized streets and signaled intersections, not on discrete right of ways like Alberta. While they work well, if they were built today, they would be low-floor LRT's because the technology has evolved and are much easier and cheaper to incorporate into the cityscape.
Hell, Berlin has been moving to use low-floor Flexities, just like Ontario...
Case in point: Tampere, Finland went through the same drama that Hamilton has been doing. They’re around the same scale as us. Humming and hawing over BRT vs Metro vs LRT for years. They came to the exact same conclusions Hamilton did: we’re never going to be big enough to justify a light metro, BRT has a poor return on investment, and trams are a mature reliable technology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampere_light_rail their urban sections look very similar to Hamilton’s plans:
