David James is a blog reader with some keen observations on the merits of various DOTT and west LRT proposals. You will frequently find his intelligent comments on my posts, gently pointing out the error of my ways. David isn’t particularly a fan of the “Loblaws” route I outlined yesterday, but he kindly drew up a drawing illustrating the route, and provided some commentary on its merits.

The top right of the illustration below starts the route beside the 30 storey condo tower Minto built a few years ago. Underground, it swings onto McRae, under the Loblaws parking lot, and westward under Byron Road or the linear dog park:

Here’s David’s description: The cyan line representing the LRT line is about 8 m wide, while the orange stations are about 20 m wide (probably a bit excessive) and
sufficient to accommodate 180 m 6-car trains. The stations look like side-loaded, but that’s just because it’s easier to draw them that way. The orange width is sufficient to encompass the centre platform stations.

The curves on either end of the hydro corridor portion of the route are
of 130 m radius. The alignment along McRae’s actually results in a backward-bending alignment, which would not be the case were one of the other cross streets to be used, but none of them are quite as suitable. At any rate, these are not exactly high-speed curves. The routing along McRae also requires the relocation of the hydro tower at Richmond
opposite Loblaws.
To get logically-placed stations on 200 m of tangent track was a bit tricky. The eastern station ends up having one end right at Richmond Road and slightly off-axis to McRae, while the western station has to be either behind the Westboro Station development or beneath the old streetcar hill that is now Byron. The City sold some “spare” land from the old streetcar RoW along Byron to the Westboro Station developers, so the space for a station behind the Westboro Station condo is even more constrained than it otherwise would have been.
I took the liberty of naming the stations. Since the condo at Golden is
called “Westboro Station” I decided to make the nearest station bear the name “Westboro”. The station under McRae I named “Richmond” for lack of a more suitable name.

Eric again:  don’t blame David for the design shown, he actually prefers the Transitway – Dominion – Cleary – Richmond option. He kindly illustrated the route I suggested at the last advisory committee meeting for the west LRT.

This is the last post in this series on the western LRT. There will be a public meeting at Tom Brown Arena on Nov 29th in the evening. Open house 5.30 to 8.30; presentation at 7pm. Watch for the advertisments in the newspapers.