04-14-2018, 01:46 PM
(04-14-2018, 12:12 PM)Pheidippides Wrote: As much as I would like to see the Ion up and running I think starting it at anything but the intended service level would be a mistake. You want every user's first experience to be a good (and lasting one). If it isn't even as good as existing bus service that will just fuel the nay-sayers and dampen momentum toward phase 2 (and 3).
The only analogy I can think of at the moment is a Broadway show opening without the full cast with the NYT theatre critic in the audience and needing a good review and word-of-mouth recommendations to be successful enough to convince investors to fund the next big show in development.
Thanks for the details, and I think you make a lot of good points.
However, I would suggest that opening with always-every-15-minute service would be OK. This only requires about 7 vehicles. This is planned to be the best normal off-peak service, and I think people would understand if we said “we’re waiting for enough vehicles to run better service during peak hours”. Opening with every 10 minute service would definitely be OK because the iXpress hardly ever exceeds that frequency, and the capacity of the LRT at every 10 minutes is way higher than an iXpress every 10 minutes. This requires about 10 vehicles.
My suggestion to open with 12 vehicles is even safer: brand new vehicles which have just completed a successful burn-in don’t need spares. By the time of the first (likely) failure, the remaining 2 vehicles will have arrived and completed their per-vehicle testing. And even if there was a failure, you could just revert peak hours to every 10 minute service until the vehicle is repaired.
I agree that opening with really poor service is a bad idea (say, every 30 minutes, unless a vehicle happens to be having trouble).
But all of these assume that the vehicle delivery is just going slowly. Right now it looks like testing of the overall system is going slowly, and since they have been stunningly uncommunicative about what is actually happening, we are left to speculate about causes, everything from sheer laziness to aliens.