ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[boatracer]

Apparently Keolis' goal for ION signal timing is "1-2 minutes," which seems far too long to me based on watching a bunch of C-Train videos where they typically last no more than 40-60 seconds. Northfield would be nearly unusable in one direction with the signals down half the time during rush hour in addition to any pedestrian crossings.

3 things to know before the Ion launches

Under-promise and over-deliver?  When I was listening to the radio calls during the commissioning last fall they were aiming for around 25-30 seconds before the train arrived and no more than 10 seconds after it departed.  Assuming it takes 10 seconds for the train to cross the road that's still under a minute...

Also some really poor reporting there about the track lubricators.  CTV makes it sound like they were installed in response to the condo residents complaints, while in truth they were part of the system design from the beginning and were already installed before the first vehicles went out.  It's true though that they weren't activated yet last November and even now they're still getting them dialed in:  While some are overactive and leaving huge blops of grease that even the LRV operators are radio'ing in about as they cause excess wheel slippage, others still aren't quite doing enough and there's the odd corner that's still noisy.  Fortunately those are getting fewer by the day!

As for the vehicle speeds and timings (a recent Facebook topic), I left work on Tuesday night around 5:00 p.m. and drove home down King St to watch trains.  One pulled onto King from Allen about a half a block ahead of me and I couldn't even catch it!  Despite the fact that it made all stops I didn't pass it until Hayward, and that's because it was stopped on Hayward waiting for the poorly tuned pedestrian gate to drop.  If it hadn't been for that, it probably would have remained ahead of me until I turned onto Manitou.  I had a similar experience northbound yesterday.  As I came up Charles the vehicle was just leaving Market Station ahead of me, and again it made all stops and turned into Waterloo Public Square before I was able to pass it.  Admittedly I could have gotten the jump by not taking the same route down Duke that it did, but it still bodes extremely well for the system's rush hour performance.

 Some lubricators ended up in unfortunate locations. One in particular it on Caroline at William, it is right in front of the drvieway to Uptown Tailor Shop. So cars going in bring grease up on the driveway and sidewalk.