I was asking for a distinction between an electric LRT and a subway extension built above ground, not suggesting there is one. However, I have heard people say that a characteristic of an LRT is short trains (somewhere between extended street car and subway length). I'm not sure if that is a technical restriction, or one based on the economics of operating such a system. I'm asking to hear to from anyone who knows of a reason why you would build an LRT to link with a subway instead of building a subway extension above ground. Then my secondary question is - if you chose to build LRTs to mate to the subways - is there a point at which you would be better off converting these LRTs to subways in the future, and how far off that future would be.
You need to make your posts interest an engineer like
james_t_kirk. Simply put by laymen like me; Light Rail is lighter — cars, engines that move them and railbed that carries them, and thus they carry lighter loads than Heavy Rail, like CN, CP, VIA, or the trains that carry passengers underground. If your system is largely underground you may call it a subway. Or a GnomeRail; there are no rules. If you build most of it above, you may well sow confusion insisting it be called a subway. But that may be a useful strategy in arguments.
Converting any one of them to another would involve all sorts of technical stuff — like tearing up the light rails (where installed), beefing up the bed (where needed) and re-laying new rails at perhaps new guages. But the big bucks would have to go for buying up the new right of ways required and/or for the dental work necessitated by biting the bullet and shutting down the old right of way and doing without what you've all depended on for a decade while you got everyone's tax-averse shit together to make the conversion happen.
By all means plan many decades ahead an have low capacity startup bus routes replaced by higher capacity rail and deicated RoWs (whether you call them streetcars, LRTs, Diamond lanes or whatever) then heavier rail, under or above ground. David Gunn tried that and David Miller sold it to us as TRansit City, but it was far from the first such plan. Visionary managers like RC Harris — we named the water plant after him. Safe water everywhere was his plan, without it we'd be like Flint, or worse — have drafted such transit plans for decades, his was 1912 and said we needed the DRL
then. That was why he put the rail deck into the Bloor Viaduct.
And nearsighted pols like Lastman and the Fords have always junked them for cheap and easy politicking, and seat of the pants plans drafted on a napkin. Schemes like Ferris Wheels and 'subways subways, subways' to nowhere. Like the City Fathers of Flint, and like Mike Harris who filled in the Eglinton crosstown we were already building, and even Rob had to admit we needed.
So go ahead make your big Go as We Grow Plan for up-converting as needed, but keep it in a drawer at TTC HQ of MetroLinx, and only reveal it bit by bit. We don't have a good record with good planning.
And you will have noted we have an even poorer record of coming up with the money for any of it. Dougie's promised he'll do it all by being more careful with the Petty Cash expenses and that nonsense got him elected.
