01-22-2016, 10:29 PM
(01-22-2016, 10:35 AM)clasher Wrote:(01-22-2016, 09:11 AM)Canard Wrote: I would like to see our second line (East/West) be Bombardier INNOVIA Monorail 300, running from Boardwalk out to the airport, along Victoria. There would also be PRT circulators (ULTra) operating at Boardwalk, Sportsworld, and R&T Park.
Or we could just the same trains and stuff we already have... might be able to use the existing car barns and the same people for maintenance. The eastern half of Victoria has lots of room to run LRT tracks and the western part of Victoria where it's two lanes doesn't seem to have room for LRT or a monorail track without some serious modification of the entire street taking place. I think it will be a long while before this corridor has enough transit use to justify any kind of trains.
While it would be very cool to have a monorail in town, the transit system has to be a system — which means there has to be a very good reason for different parts of it to use different technologies. Each new technology introduces an additional set of maintenance and knowledge costs over and above the per kilometre costs. It also reduces flexibility because it is impossible for vehicles to travel between technologies.
This is actually the main reason why I am a big LRT fan. For any given project, there may be several appropriate technologies. But to cover a wide range of situations, I don’t believe you can do better than LRT. Once a city has one LRT line, it’s easier to add more, and this can be done even if the new lines are quite different, for example in capacity, or level of separation from traffic, or vertical elevation, or style of service (frequency, speed, stop spacing). All without introducing another technology.