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You can sell this to them though. I've seen many times on 5th where busses needing to go north cut across traffic and slow down everyone. Bus lanes with priority signals and you've got yourself a rapid bus system downtown. Also, the lanes could only be active during rush hours, opposite to the parking. Would be easy for people to understand and adapt to.
And even if they don't take that bus, if the person next to them who was driving is now on that bus, there's less traffic for them. It's always the sell for transit priority projects but two lanes is a pretty small price.
The Arts Common Expansion probably doesn't conform
Is below what they were imagining? I am struggling to understand exactly what they were thinking back in the 1980s, I don't think the Blue Line existed at the time they planned this?
Exactly in the ultimate stage. so they could build a tunnel on 7th without interupting service, and run it without an OMC or delivery site on the Blue Line, and continue to run the rush hour NW to NE trains.
Actually, I agree with this is as the ultimate project - save billions by avoiding tunnels and makes transit more reliable: just create another 7th Avenue. It would improve the capacity of 6th Ave by 3 to 5 times easily.
Isn't the "it's too expensive" the kind of thinking that gets us into these kind of situations to begin with. Imagine how cheap it would have been to subway the red line when it was first run through. Expensive AF then, but shoulda done it.
There are many things at play which drove that. It is entirely viable to build on 8th, but the businesses aren't going to like the tradeoffs that enable that, and if council starts imposing criteria on the project without understanding the cost of those requirements, the project would descend into Greenline style madness.
The reason they didn’t do subway initially was to get more line built. I believe it’s one of the reasons are lines are so successful is because the built out so far in The early days. Didn’t Edmonton build subway like through downtown and didn’t get that far out initially?
Edmonton also was much more fiscally conservative in the 80s and 90s than Calgary, and ended up with much less stuff as a result. Pools, what eventually became the Arts Commons, City Hall (with office component), and LRT expansion all happened in Calgary and not in Edmonton because Calgary borrowed money and Edmonton didn't.
