ION Stage I: what would you do differently?

[ijmorlan]

I actually don't mind our system, it's light weight, reasonable for a city like ours. I think massive underground stations would have been unnecessarily expensive and worse for users in most ways.

It lacks longevity which I think is the biggest failure. We can easily end up in a situation similar to Toronto - sans the streetcar system. They had two subway lines to serve a city of immense size up until recently with their addition of some LRT lines - which are basically light subway systems despite having almost the same rolling stock of our LRT. That subway system was obsolete decades ago, so just imagine how fast this flagship LRT will be in 20 years. You can even look at the Scarborough RT for signs of how short term light rail is. It became so shit that that everyone just relied on the bus, then ended up with the reputation it was held together with duct tape.

The Scarborough RT is not comparable to our LRT system. It was essentially an experimental system which became orphan technology in Toronto due to being just one short line in a huge transit system. In Vancouver the same system constitutes most of their rapid transit network and works very well. I think climate also has something to do with it.

The idea that our LRT system has an inherent longevity problem is sufficiently ill founded that I think it’s fair to call it factually inaccurate. Tram systems have operated for over a century, and modern light rail has operated for several decades at this point.

The subway system is not obsolete, just insufficient for the size of the city. It’s a bit hard to argue because I’m not sure for example what you mean by “some LRT lines”; none of the official LRT lines has opened yet, but on the other hand the Queens Quay line and the Spadina line are sometimes called LRT, and the Queensway portion of the Queen car definitely counts as LRT.

There is no reason to believe our LRT will be slower in 20 years. If it is, it would be due to an expansion of the safety paranoia around it. If the safety paranoia goes down, we can expect improved speeds. Being in its own lanes, there is no reason why motor vehicle traffic levels have to make any difference at all to its running time.

We are the single fastest growing region in all of Canada so I can see us outgrowing this LRT faster than we expect. We can add more lines, but the backbone that is phase 1 might as well be written off at this point because we'll need heavier rail eventually. If you don't bury or elevate the start of your rapid transit system from the get go, you luck out. For a city like ours and with our population growth, we might as well invested in a long term solution instead of something lazy. You can only expand a surface level rapid transit system before you have to stop. Don't expect to see the ION run more than 2 LRVs before it's obsolete...which probably gives us 20-30 years tops. Most platforms were only built to hold 3...just barely. Not worth over 800'000'000 dollars IMO. We should have started out buying 1/4th of the pie and augment that with buses/BRT. It's going to seem like a colossal waste of money. Hell a single train station is projected to cost us 100 million. Politics and tax payers may not always be so consistently altruistic.

If we add more lines the existing line doesn’t have to be a “backbone”. I think the whole notion of funnelling all traffic into a couple of corridors is problematic. Looking at Toronto for a moment, for approximately $50 billion you could put LRT lines on most of the major concession grid roads in the city. Or you could build a much larger subway system than what they have which would nevertheless leave huge swathes of the city riding the bus in mixed traffic.

BTW you are incorrect about the platforms. Every single ION platform was built to hold trains of exactly 2 LRVs. By running a 5 minute frequency, we could have 24 vehicles an hour (12 2-car trains), which could move something like 4800 people per hour in each direction. If that’s not enough, build parallel lines. It’s not in the cards now, but in the future we could have a Weber St. line, a Westmount line, a Fischer-Hallman line, and so on. This makes more sense in the long run than one single subway line because it provides higher quality transit to more of the city.

Side note: the idea of building a subway through Uptown Waterloo is entirely unserious and would only be made by somebody who is unaware of the ground conditions. As an architect you should know that you can’t just force a tunnel through or under a creek without significant cost increases. This is not to mention the enormous expense of tunnelling under the best of conditions.

And again, what do you even mean by “obsolete”? It’s century-plus-old technology and shows no sign of irrelevance anytime soon (self-driving cars don’t help with mass transit, even if they existed, which they don’t yet). If you mean overloaded, maybe, but as I said there are lots of parallel roads on which more lines could be built.