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ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit
I also saw that barrier on Charles st. downtown that was bent... probably some drunk hit it and drove off.
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KevinL, ijmorlan: so, Lancaster is the only yard on the entire route from Millhaven that is susceptible to this? Wow, I had no idea.
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(04-28-2018, 05:07 PM)Canard Wrote: KevinL, ijmorlan: so, Lancaster is the only yard on the entire route from Millhaven that is susceptible to this? Wow, I had no idea.

Not saying it's the only one, but as it's nearby I can speak more definitively.
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(04-28-2018, 09:32 AM)ijmorlan Wrote: Anybody know if they have security monitoring it when it’s at Lancaster? It seems to me like a very attractive graffiti target and I understand they watch it when it’s parked near the OMSF.

Is it actually an attractive graffiti target? I thought most of the graffitists (?) wanted lots of people to see their tags, and in the case of our trains, they are guaranteed to be cleaned off before going into use. Now, if it's pure vandalism, that would be different.
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(04-28-2018, 05:10 PM)KevinL Wrote:
(04-28-2018, 05:07 PM)Canard Wrote: KevinL, ijmorlan: so, Lancaster is the only yard on the entire route from Millhaven that is susceptible to this? Wow, I had no idea.

Not saying it's the only one, but as it's nearby I can speak more definitively.

I’m not entirely sure Canard’s sarcasm is maximally helpful to the conversation, but to put in my 2 cents, I don’t know exactly what yards it stayed in but Mac yard seems unlikely to be a good location for graffiti (too much security, I assume) while Lancaster seems like an excellent location: downtown, accessible, probably not much security. Other yards, we don’t even know where it went. Personally, my guess would be a local switcher would take it somewhere not that far from Bombardier, and then it would get picked up and taken straight to Mac. Of course I could be wrong since I don’t know much about railway operations, certainly not in detail, but it’s not really that far from Kingston to here so it isn’t clear that it had to get separated out very many times.

So I think there is a reasonable possibility that an over-the-weekend sojourn in Lancaster would actually be the biggest risk for vandalism. But without knowing more about where it’s been the last few weeks I can’t form a firm opinion.
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(04-28-2018, 05:15 PM)tomh009 Wrote:
(04-28-2018, 09:32 AM)ijmorlan Wrote: Anybody know if they have security monitoring it when it’s at Lancaster? It seems to me like a very attractive graffiti target and I understand they watch it when it’s parked near the OMSF.

Is it actually an attractive graffiti target? I thought most of the graffitists (?) wanted lots of people to see their tags, and in the case of our trains, they are guaranteed to be cleaned off before going into use. Now, if it's pure vandalism, that would be different.

OK, that’s a good point. I was thinking in terms of it being an unusual and clean slate for painting rather than just another tank car. But you’re right about wanting the tags to be seen. I believe New York used to have a massive graffiti problem on their subway until they started aggressively cleaning their trains and most of the graffiti went away: knowing that whatever was tagged would be cleaned up before the next day reduced the attraction.

Actually, I recall reading an article that claimed they cleaned the cars at the end of the line, meaning a tag wouldn’t even come back later that day. I now find that hard to believe because unless there is a large cleaning facility at the end of every line and extra trains to make up for the ones in the cleaning facility how would that work? So I suspect it was actually at the end of the day, which is still a large effort but could be done in the yards without making huge changes to on-the-line operations. But I don’t actually know. On the other hand, once the graffiti problem is mostly eliminated, performing a thorough cleaning at end-of-line might be feasible because there will presumably be only a few tags accumulated on one run.
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Oh my god, I can't believe we are wasting so much time on this. Can we move on?
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Quote:Schmidt said the impact on the intersection will be relatively small. Light rail trains are not like emergency vehicles, which automatically trigger a traffic light change to proceed through an intersection.

Trains may modify a light if running a bit behind schedule, either extending a green light or shortening a red light.

"It's more of a slight modification rather than a hard stop each time the train comes," Schmidt said. "It's designed to work with the network."

https://www.therecord.com/news-story/857...le-street/

This confuses me. I thought it was settled that the LRVs would never have to stop at an intersection precisely because they do control traffic lights like an emergency vehicle. What am I missing here?
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(04-28-2018, 08:16 PM)Canard Wrote: Oh my god, I can't believe we are wasting so much time on this.  Can we move on?

I don't see how this is wasting time. Is there something else to talk about?
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(04-28-2018, 08:28 PM)PhilippAchtel Wrote: What am I missing here?

Some dialogue that has changed over the years, depending on who you ask.

Keolis (the operator) has said that LRV's should never have to stop for a red light.
The Region has typically said that signal priority will only be given to an LRV if it is behind schedule.

Keolis operates Gold Coast Light Rail, and this video shows pretty well how traffic signal priority works there. I use GCLR as an example quite often when comparing to ion, because it was built and operated by many of the same system partners as our own system. Their consortium was even called GoldLinq! A couple of the folks in the OMSF even came here directly from Australia.

https://youtu.be/glea0y5aNJA
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(04-28-2018, 08:42 PM)timc Wrote:
(04-28-2018, 08:16 PM)Canard Wrote: Oh my god, I can't believe we are wasting so much time on this.  Can we move on?

I don't see how this is wasting time. Is there something else to talk about?

It is a massive annoying waste of time to constantly hear, every single time an LRV shows up, "OMG IT CANT STAY IN LANCASTER BECAUSE OMG OMG SOMEONE MIGHT SPRAY GRAFFITI ON IT" when it has literally spent three weeks in yards all across Ontario that look exactly like Lancaster. It is not like Lancaster is some magic magnet that suddenly BOOM OMG SPRAYPAINT explodes everywhere and destroys LRV's.

Angry
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Oh, wow. I have not noticed comments like that at all.
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(04-28-2018, 08:43 PM)Canard Wrote:
(04-28-2018, 08:28 PM)PhilippAchtel Wrote: What am I missing here?

Some dialogue that has changed over the years, depending on who you ask.

Keolis (the operator) has said that LRV's should never have to stop for a red light.
The Region has typically said that signal priority will only be given to an LRV if it is behind schedule.

Keolis operates Gold Coast Light Rail, and this video shows pretty well how traffic signal priority works there.  I use GCLR as an example quite often when comparing to ion, because it was built and operated by many of the same system partners as our own system.  Their consortium was even called GoldLinq!  A couple of the folks in the OMSF even came here directly from Australia.

https://youtu.be/glea0y5aNJA

Very cool video.

Have to ask, why is ridership so relatively low? It's only 21,000, but somehow the ION will be 27,000 to start, considering KW is about slightly more than half the size of the Gold Coast.
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(04-28-2018, 08:42 PM)timc Wrote:
(04-28-2018, 08:16 PM)Canard Wrote: Oh my god, I can't believe we are wasting so much time on this.  Can we move on?

I don't see how this is wasting time. Is there something else to talk about?

Well, there is Phase 2, and we could talk about all the places where it won't go!
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(04-28-2018, 08:45 PM)Canard Wrote:
(04-28-2018, 08:42 PM)timc Wrote: I don't see how this is wasting time. Is there something else to talk about?

It is a massive annoying waste of time to constantly hear, every single time an LRV shows up, "OMG IT CANT STAY IN LANCASTER BECAUSE OMG OMG SOMEONE MIGHT SPRAY GRAFFITI ON IT" when it has literally spent three weeks in yards all across Ontario that look exactly like Lancaster.  It is not like Lancaster is some magic magnet that suddenly BOOM OMG SPRAYPAINT explodes everywhere and destroys LRV's.  

Angry

Let’s just say that I’m not the only person who just has to bring up that thing every time a related topic comes up.

But in any case if you’re referring to anything I’ve written you’re misrepresenting it. I don’t think I’ve seen any message that could be reasonably summarized as “OMG IT CANT STAY IN LANCASTER BECAUSE OMG OMG SOMEONE MIGHT SPRAY GRAFFITI ON IT”.
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