Grand River Transit

[Pheidippides]

I doubt either of your scenarios where the arm stays down in 'dwell time' is correct. The systems are made well enough these days that a train should only trigger them on departure; and it should certainly retract after the train has passed.

You are correct according to the Transport Canada Grade Crossing Standards for circuitry:

http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/railsafety/grade...ds-312.htm
16.3.1  Where railway equipment regularly stops, or railway equipment is left standing, within the activating limits of a warning system, the warning system must be equipped with a control feature to minimize the operation of the warning system.


My point about the crossing being a bit of a bottleneck for buses remains though because of other standards:

http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/railsafety/grade...ds-313.htm
15.2.2  The descent of the gate arm must take 10 to 15 seconds and its ascent must take 6 to 12 seconds.
15.2.3  The gate arm must begin its decent once the gate arm clearance time has elapsed, calculated in accordance with article 10.4.
15.2.4  For a grade crossing where railway equipment enters the grade crossing at more than 25 km/h (15 mph), the gate arm must rest in the horizontal position not less than 5 seconds before the arrival at the crossing surface of railway equipment.

http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/railsafety/grade...ds-312.htm
16.1.1 The time during which the warning system must operate, before the arrival of railway equipment at the crossing surface, must be the greatest of:
• 20 seconds, unless the grade crossing clearance distance (Figure 10-1) is more than 11 m (35 ft), in which case, the 20 seconds must be increased by one second for each additional 3 m (10 ft), or fraction thereof;
• the Departure Time for the design vehicle (article 10.3.2);
• the Departure Time for pedestrians, cyclists, and persons using assistive devices (article 10.3.3);
• the gate arm clearance time, plus the time to complete the gate arm descent, plus 5 seconds;
• the minimum warning time required for traffic signal interconnection as referred to in article 19.3(a);
• the time for the design vehicle to travel from the stopping sight distance, and pass completely through the clearance distance.


That means in a typical 60min period at peak frequency, with trains every 8min or 7.5 trains per hour (x2 for both directions), there will on average 15 trains crossing per hour. The crossing will be at least 13m wide (2x3.5m lane + 2x3m trail) which means the signalling must be on for 20.7 seconds before the train arrives plus a minimum of 6 seconds for the gate arms to go up again or about 27 seconds per train crossing or a minimum total of 6min 45sec (11%) of every hour. Granted that is still far less than a regular road intersection which is probably red 50% of the time in a given hour, but the nature of the set-up will be a bit of a domino effect in that busses waiting to turn from ring road to the new transit plaza will be either blocking active users on the Laurel Trail and/or ring road users while waiting for the all clear from the signals to pass; especially when there will be upwards of 30(?) busses per hour using the crossing.

In addition, the staff member I spoke to tonight at the PCC indicated that there maybe additional barriers/signalling to limit access to the transit road to busses only that would be triggered by the signal priority system on the bus; but perhaps I misunderstood his comment.