Rabu, 15 September 2021

Go train service is a go for London, finally: Sources - London Free Press (Blogs)

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Too far from Toronto until now for commuter rail service, and seduced for decades by the prospects of high-speed rail through the region, London is finally going to be plugged into the provincially run GO passenger rail system, The Free Press has learned.

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Ontario Minister of Transportation Caroline Mulroney will make it official at an announcement Wednesday: GO service will extend to London starting Oct. 18, with two weekday trips leaving from the city in the early morning, and one return trip in the late evening. There will also be stops in Stratford and St. Marys.

“What we’re announcing here is the first phase of GO service to London,” Mulroney told The Free Press Tuesday. The minister said, depending on uptake and feedback from riders, the pilot project could lead to full commuter service to Toronto.

GO Transit currently extends west of Toronto to Kitchener, making its reach achingly close for Londoners who have long coveted the convenience and economic benefits of a commuter rail link to Toronto.

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Mulroney credited London Mayor Ed Holder’s “strong advocacy” for getting GO service extended. Holder served as the chair of a Southwestern Ontario transportation task force made up mostly of regional mayors that got underway at the beginning of 2020.

The GO trip from London to Union Station in Toronto will take about four hours, the government said. Kitchener will be a two-hour train ride away. Via Rail is letting the province use its stations, Mulroney said, and CN is giving GO trains access to the rail corridor.

Some form of high-speed rail extending to London has been talked about for decades.

In 2019, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government put the brakes on capital spending for a $20-billion high-speed rail link connecting Toronto and Windsor announced by the previous Liberal government.

Instead, the Tories said they wanted to study different ways to improve transportation in Southwestern Ontario. One of the options they looked at was expanding GO Transit westward.

“I would expect that Londoners would react very positively to this,” Mulroney said. “What it provides is a real practical transit option.”

“In addition to using existing networks  . . . what I also heard is the wish to connect more communities within Southwestern Ontario,” she said. The price tag for the pilot project is $2.5 million annually, Mulroney said.

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Metrolinx, the agency that operates GO Transit, estimates there would be about 25,000 new riders annually taking GO trains from the stations in London, St. Marys and Stratford, Mulroney said.

At the beginning of 2020, before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, the Tories came out with a roadmap for transportation investment that highlighted more than 40 ways to improve connections in the region.

At that time, Mulroney told The Free Press there was a willingness on the part of the Ford government “to work with existing networks to move things along more quickly than just massive projects that take a very long time to build.”

The government plan also called for investment in other measures, such as road features and pavement markings that could help driverless vehicles, assessing airport capacity and supporting the commercial trucking industry by repurposing a Highway 402 inspection station as a parking lot.

In the government’s first budget in 2019, it also committed to expanding Highway 401 to six lanes from four between London and Tilbury and installing concrete median barriers, a feature road safety advocates have been pushing for after years of deadly cross-over crashes.

“I’m sure we’re going to build on the action items that were announced,” Mulroney said when asked whether there would be subsequent announcements about transportation in Southwestern Ontario.

danbrown@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/DanatLFPress

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2021-09-15 11:40:22Z
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