Seemingly designed to fail

Re: LRT station locations

I had a dream that the LRT was up and running. I took the 202 iXpress from The Boardwalk to the University Avenue LRT station, a transit hub occupying part of what had been UW parking lot A. Walking a few metres to the LRT, I saw students boarding the waiting GO, Greyhound, and GRT buses.

The southern part of UW’s main campus and thousands of highrise units between Seagram Drive and Hickory Street were well served by this station.

The train quickly took me to the Columbia Street LRT station, which connected with the 201 iXpress and other GRT buses. This station served the northern part of UW’s main campus and thousands of highrise units along Columbia Street.

A few minutes later I disembarked at the AlbertMcCormick LRT station to return my library books. Not far away were the Albert and Bearinger strip malls, and even closer was the Lakeshore neighbourhood, the low-rise housing soon to be intensified by mixed-income family highrises. Wonderful, but as I said, it was only a dream. In the real world, the University Avenue station is on Seagram Drive, where it provides service to a park and a curling rink. The Columbia Street station is located between University and Columbia and equally inconvenient for both. Its transit hub is cut off from Hickory Street and the Northfield neighbourhood, and buses must crawl along a narrow congested street to connect with the LRT. If Phillip Street is not widened to four lanes, the hub will have to be abandoned, with buses using UW’s ring road again. The third LRT station is far from Albert-McCormick; a fence cuts off one side from an industrial area while the other side is an empty field.

A transit grid system requires transfer points at major intersections, not halfway between them. Finding worse locations for these three LRT stations would be difficult. It’s almost as if the LRT route were deliberately designed for failure. Ray Butterworth Waterloo