ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

They can still design for three-car trains, even if they only build for two-car trains.  Ensure that all platforms etc can be extended to handle a third car, when the time comes to extend them.

But hopefully they will increase frequency before they start even thinking about adding a third car to the trains.

Correct - the 30-year operations plan in the Project Agreement has a very detailed roll-out plan for coupling 2 LRV's together, and also on how they will increase service frequency.  At the end of the 30 year projection, each train is two LRV's coupled together, 14 in total, exercising the future additional 14 LRV purchase option from Bombardier, running at 7.5 minute headways.  Schedule 15-3 Appendix D Baseline Service Plans 2017 to 2047

I really really really hope that any consideration to increase capacity beyond that would involve running trains closer together, rather than longer - 7.5 minutes is still too long in my mind.

Very much agreed. I think it really ought to run every five minutes all the time (except maybe overnight). Of course the vehicles would be by no means full late at night but the point of running service like this is to provide service that everybody knows they can rely on and will therefore use. This is how it works in Toronto with the subway. Even if it dropped off to every 10 minutes late at night that wouldn’t be too bad. But the idea of spending all the money for the track and vehicles and then only operating them every 30 minutes at some time periods seems questionable.

I had a thought about how the base service level was determined however. Remember that more service will cost more to operate, and will increase the cost of the contract. The headline contract price ($1.9G, oh my!) includes 30 years of operation at the service levels detailed in the RFP. So one cannot help but wonder if one factor determining the proposed service levels was what the final headline contract price would appear to be. While none of this makes any difference to some people — as far as I can tell, there are people who would consider it a bad thing even if it got built and operated for free — there may be people at the margin who can be kept onside with a more moderate contract cost. In future years we can decide, as a Region, to run more service, and the headline expense at that point will be only the increment to do so.

Of course this is another example of non-motor-vehicle transport being treated differently. What road project has its 30-year maintenance and operations cost splashed across every newspaper headline when it is proposed or when the contract is signed? Or worse yet, first has its capital expense publicized, then the 30-year all-in cost, then people write letters to the editor about how the cost has ballooned from just the capital expense number to the 30-year all-in, as if the difference is due to obvious oversights and corruption?