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Ottawa LRT
#61
(12-10-2016, 12:49 AM)Canard Wrote: Their system is 2+ billion and half as long as ours.  So that's 4x more per kilometre.

And in a much more developed city core. Like, say, a city that didn't get around to building LRT until it was too late...
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#62
Oh absolutely. I'm just saying, they spent WAY more on their system than we did - 'coz they could!
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#63
In some ways, they actually had advantages of getting on with their system much earlier. Look at the eastern terminus at Blair, and the track heading west from there. Because it had been long ago created as a transitway right of way, there weren't the same acquisition costs, or building encroachment issues as we had. Certainly, some hard work had to go into the inappropriately-curved segments around Train, and then the obvious tunneling costs, but in many ways their system has been less disruptive.
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#64
Lots of people will tell you that the cost of BRT and then conversion to LRT was astronomically more expensive than if they'd just done Light Rail from the start.

It seems like dynamite on paper, but essentially they're rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.  Even the stations are being totally demolished and done over.

[Image: Tremblay-Station-exisiting-Transitway-st...24x793.png]
Photo Credit: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showpost...count=2442

Quote:"The issue is that the 1980s-era BRT that is the foundation of the LRT project was sold as cheap-and-easy-to-convert-to-rail, which it was neither. Ottawa ought to have gone with LRT from the beginning, and not wasted so much cash or three decades of city-building."
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#65
(12-12-2016, 10:39 AM)Viewfromthe42 Wrote: in many ways their system has been less disruptive.

It's interesting, this.
It's been hugely disruptive to the Transitway, but impact is largely limited to that. There isn't the same public sense of "Constructionpocalypse" as we have here, since Ottawa is not disrupting nearly as many general traffic roads.
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#66
How much are transit riders, accustomed to a quick trip on the Transitway, being inconvenienced? Surely there are longer travel times in that respect.
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#67
This is clearly a false equivalence. If Ottawa was building an LRT system today where nothing existed before (as we are) it would be just as disruptive, if not more.
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#68
(12-14-2016, 07:36 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: This is clearly a false equivalence.  If Ottawa was building an LRT system today where nothing existed before (as we are) it would be just as disruptive, if not more.

Ottawa and KW are different situations.  It's okay for different situations to have different impacts.

The Transitway was largely built using
(a) excess space in highway right-of-ways (eastern transitway),
(b) defunct rail corridors (the Scott St trench),
© greenspace corridors (Ottawa River Parkway to Barrhaven) and
(d) reallocation of existing lanes (downtown).  

For better and for worse.  Fewer road construction impacts, but at a price that the Transitway often seems to avoid some destinations as much as it serves others.
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#69
While visiting my folks over Christmas, we popped up to Ottawa for an afternoon to check out construction of the Confederation Line.

Some sections are very far along; but to my surprise, others (mostly in the West) haven't even been started!  They have a short section of single track completed in which they're now testing out their first LRV... but that section is pretty... jenky.  On the connector between the Belfast Yards and the main line, the droppers between the messenger and contact wire are all skewed at a violent angle; and some of the droppers aren't even connected to the contact wire!

The stations are going to be grand and very impressive, that's for sure - they really went all out on those.  Metro-quality, for sure.  It really feels to me like this system should have been Vancouver SkyTrain (Bombardier INNOVIA Metro 300) tech, not a tram.  Like, they went 90% of the way of having a really high tech, full on intermediate light metro... and were just like "Oh shoot, we blew all our money on the stations - okay, let's throw streetcars on it".  There's no point really to having low-floor LRV's when you're never doing step-on/step-off and all the stations are dedicated and the entire line is totally separated (not a single crossing of any type).

A lot of the line uses existing Transitway BRT Right of Way, and while taking photos I kept leaping out of my skin for an instant when I'd see a bus go by, thinking it was a train testing. Smile

Anyway, enough about that, on to some photos!

   
This is the Cyrville station.

   
Looking East, toward Blair.

   

   
The main entrance off Cyrville road. Just behind me, a similar, albeit slightly smaller structure exists, allowing access from either side of the overpass.
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#70
   
This is the Blair station.  It's the end of the line.

   
Like many of the other stations on the line, this one is being built partially upward from the existing Transitway BRT stops. I'm not entirely sure how they'll integrate the old with the new architecture; and as a huge fan of Brutalism, I'll be sad if they don't keep the concrete and orange/red structures, which are sort of iconic.

   
From the highway. (No, I wasn't driving!)
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#71
   
This is the stop at Ottawa's VIA station.  They have this "loop" road, sort of like you'd see at an airport, where you can endlessly spiral around waiting for someone to arrive.  The Confederation line bisects the loop, underneath, and the stop is just a short walk away from the main station hall.  It's going to look fantastic when complete.

   
Downtown, we drove right over top of the tunnel - and not a single road was [fully] closed.  Minimal disruption here, despite a massive undertaking going on right below. This is actually where that huge sinkhole was!

   
So this looks familiar...

   
...but this does not! Ottawa has a couple of these spring tensioners (instead of weights) in the Belfast Yards at a few strategic locations. They have a spiral spring inside of them. Springs are no good if your goal is constant tension - force varies linearly with stretch on a spring. These devices compensate for that with a carefully designed spiral profile on the side, which does the actual winding. Brilliant! You can read more about them here.
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#72
Quote:There's no point really to having low-floor LRV's when you're never doing step-on/step-off and all the stations are dedicated and the entire line is totally separated (not a single crossing of any type).

I do recommend one day visiting the parts of town where LRT is intended to run at grade, with level crossings. Stuff that was planned in the initial, cancelled North-South LRT plan.

Down in Barrhaven, the LRT is intended to cross the Strandherd Bridge, and then peel off Strandherd Rd to run down the centre of Chapman Mills Dr. Since LRT isn't going to be extended down there for quite a while, they've built a centre median busway in the interim.

There are no rails to see now, but it's an interesting exercise in imagining what is to come in 30 years.
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#73
So the plan is one day to have a section that more closely resembles typical street-level LRT?
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#74
It was part of the original plan. We shall see if they reuse the idea when they start seriously considering building it.
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#75
Ah. I'm not really familiar at all with Ottawa (Barrhaven didn't show up on any search), but I did manage to find a couple of roads you mentioned. I can't really visualize at all how that area would connect to the existing LRT line.
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