Which is basically what we've achieved here, minus the 7 Ave stretch. I'll never understand the reluctance/outright opposition to using the GL as a catalyst to achieve that massive upgrade. Building half the 8 Ave subway was actually considered as a negative point FFS!
7th Ave is interesting - it's got to be near the top of the list for highest capacity at-grade rapid transit lines around the continent.
How they achieved this is was absolute signal priority, not just on 7th, but for downtown as a whole to keep LRTs moving including across all the major avenues in the NW Red line. Having two lines operate reasonably well with 24 trains an hour at peak is an incredible feat.
Of course, at modern ridership levels and frequencies, the design has limitations and reliability. At-grade inevitably has more collisions. Last week switching issues were caused by a car driving into the vehicle trap near 8th Street for example, leading to substantial delays. Importantly focusing on hyper-utilization on a single line means there's no redundancy, if anything happens on 7th - both Red and Blue are impacted severely.
Further, I doubt there's much more space to fit more trains per hour so wait times are already near the floor of what's possible with the current configuration and tech (although 4 car trains can be added to dramatically increase capacity). So for the foreseeable future, headways under 5 minutes are not a thing Calgarians will experience unless they travel to more transit-focused cities.
There's a bunch of lessons learned from 7th, notably:
- If you give transit absolute priority in an area, you can add a surprisingly lot of capacity and frequency cost-effectively at-grade.
- If you do #1, you will get incredible ridership that justifies further transit service improvements.
- There's an upper limit to what you can do at-grade before you run into reliability problems.
So we should be applying lesson #1 to everything transit, particularly buses. Just prioritize them - particularly around pinch points and congested areas - sometimes that's queue jumps, others lanes and flyovers, others just simply closing a bus bay to prevent a time-wasting merge into traffic again. There's so much low hanging fruit on our bus system just waiting for a 7th Avenue treatment - cheap but effective.
Ironically, it seems like the low-hanging fruit is what is keeping us distracted - 7th Avenue is so good relative to under-performance almost everywhere else in the system, it's hard to imagine making many (expensive) improvements on 7th v. all the many improvements needed elsewhere. Culturally at transit it seems a shift towards accepting the LRT being more at-grade v. grade-separated seems to be entrenching, such as the 17th Avenue crossing. Cost control on major projects may be a factor here - transit is so expensive to build it starts to seem unrealistic and insurmountably expensive to build a grade-separated modern system.
I'd prefer we move towards a light-metro style Red and Blue line - full grade-separation, automation, higher capacity and higher frequencies - instead of more towards making these systems more like modern LRT.
