Comment 113394

By mdrejhon (registered) - website | Posted August 12, 2015 at 10:53:25 in reply to Comment 113391

More people will take more north-south buses to get onto the LRT (e.g. a Gage bus to catch the all-day King LRT instead of, say Barton bus). Conservatively, estimate is >30,000 people by 2031 -- triple current B-Line ridership.

Today's B-Line Express bus, which despite not operating evenings and weekends, still captures 20% of the Hamilton metro-area transit ridership, approximately 11,000 riders out of 60,000 daily. But thinking beyond, we can get to 100,000 daily riders on the LRT by 2045 -- 20 years of proper development (including revitalization of waterfronts, business expansions on piers, downtown densification, future subsequent LRT extensions, all-day 2-way GO service, etc). That's more people on that one LRT route, than all of HSR's ridership today. It's not unrealistic, given some cities' examples, such as Calgary - their bus ridership before 1981 was abysmal too -- far less than their LRT ridership of their main LRT route less than one generation later!

That's 3x to 10x the number of people as today's B-Line. And Gore is the transferpoint between A-Line and B-Line, and most of our jobs is still downtown (But going forward, we will have even more jobs being created downtown).

This is the figurative "stick of dynamite" for Hamilton downtown revitalization over the next couple decades (As C-Train was for Calgary to an extent, back in 1981 onwards), even at only 30,000 LRT users. Transit use in Calgary was also extremely abysmal in 1981 just like today's Hamilton, and we've already had enough studies that made sure, re-re-confirmed that people will come if we build it.

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2015-08-12 10:59:26

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