ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[insider]

Aerial shot from 2 days ago



taken from Waterloo Park's twitter account: https://twitter.com/WaterlooPrk/status/6...6300796928

[timio]

Get ready to pile detours upon detours upon detours. Park street at the CN rail crossing closes next week for up to 6 weeks.

No official detour route announced yet.

[Waterlooer]

Buses will be travelling on Park, right on Dominion, left on Strange, then Left on Victoria Street to get to the terminal. So many detours!

[tomh009]

Get ready to pile detours upon detours upon detours.  Park street at the CN rail crossing closes next week for up to 6 weeks.

No official detour route announced yet.

It's getting hard to get to the other side!  Park, King, Waterloo, Margaret all out of action.

[schooner77]

I'm just an interested observer and looking forward to the change that this will all bring, but I'm sitting and watching them dig up the exact same stretch on Caroline at Allen for the third time in 10 months. I'm sure there's a reason, as I know next to nothing about this type of infrastructure construction. But surely, this is a redundancy of some sort? I haven't seen them pull out any other debris from the ground, except copious amounts of dirt. They've dug a 10 feet wide trench, laid down a black, flexible tubing of some sort and then covered most of it back up. I would've thought that whatever underground upgrading that was to have been done, would've been completed ages ago.

Secondly, with construction now at the intersection of Allen and King, the road closure sign is in front of the Adult Rec Centre, and not back up at William. There's been a parade of cars, dodging through the Brick Brewery parking lot, then into the back of the Adult Rec Centre and out at the corner of Caroline and Allen. Confusing to say the least.

[ookpik]

There's been a parade of cars, dodging through the Brick Brewery parking lot, then into the back of the Adult Rec Centre and out at the corner of Caroline and Allen. Confusing to say the least.

And potentially dangerous. The lane between the Senior's Adult Recreation Centre and Brick Brewery is relatively narrow for two-way trafic. It's also hard to see around the corners before turning into the lane. And there are slow(er) moving seniors in the parking lot. Likewise with Erb & Good Funeral Home next to Brick. 

People cutting through these parking lots, especially impatient people frustrated with detours who are speeding through them, could be a serious menace to those who have a legitimate reason to be there.

[timio]

I'm just an interested observer and looking forward to the change that this will all bring, but I'm sitting and watching them dig up the exact same stretch on Caroline at Allen for the third time in 10 months. I'm sure there's a reason, as I know next to nothing about this type of infrastructure construction. But surely, this is a redundancy of some sort? I haven't seen them pull out any other debris from the ground, except copious amounts of dirt. They've dug a 10 feet wide trench, laid down a black, flexible tubing of some sort and then covered most of it back up. I would've thought that whatever underground upgrading that was to have been done, would've been completed ages ago.

I've observed them removing the original sewer pipes in the past week or two.

It may go something like this: Dig up the street, lay the new sewer, fill. Dig up the street, lay the other infrastructure that goes above the sanitary and storm sewers, fill. Dig up the street, remove the old stuff that is no longer in use, fill. Different contracts mean work at different times, and it's not safe for them to leave the entire street as a gaping hole for the duration.

I wouldn't want them to remove the old sanitary sewer before the new one was ready to go. That would be slightly messy.

[schooner77]

That might be the case, it's not really in my wheelhouse. They did lay a great deal of large, concrete pipe last fall. It is hard to believe that one street, a small less important street, should be out of action for such a long time, especially with very long periods of inactivity.

[Canard]

Scheduling and availability of crews has a lot to do with it, too. On a project of this magnitude, it may seem like they're doing redundant things or things don't make sense - but we don't get to see the Gantt chart of the whole thing. I trust they know what they are doing.

[Waterlooer]

Photo of Allen and King today: 

[ijmorlan]

Scheduling and availability of crews has a lot to do with it, too.  On a project of this magnitude, it may seem like they're doing redundant things or things don't make sense - but we don't get to see the Gantt chart of the whole thing.  I trust they know what they are doing.

I know of at least one non-obvious thing they did that was clearly good planning. While the rail line was out of commission for a week to finish building the new Laurel Creek crossing, it was also dug up on Caroline and just North of University to install infrastructure crossing underneath the tracks. Both of those were filled in and the track put back in working order before the Creek crossing was done.

[chutten]

I don't know how many members are tech-minded, but I am and we're talking about Waterloo, so I'm assuming it's fair to talk about :)

A problem I keep having with thinking about this construction and "Why are they doing X then Y instead of doing X+Z1 then Y+Z2 for parallelism?" is because, unlike in modern computers, the actors in this project aren't general-purpose.

CPUs (and, increasingly, GPUs (see OpenCL and GPGPU architectures)) are general-purpose and their cores can run in parallel to maximize cowork. Individual cores could be instructing the disk controller to fetch from storage, encrypting a block of memory using AES, decoding an MP3 frame for gain adjustment, and supplying crosstalk between physics hardware and a running computer game... and anything else we want. They are programmable.

Human workers aren't. Either the work is specialised so that workers are unable to do it (why don't we lay bundles of dark fibre for a rainy day municipal network when we tear up <major arterial road>? Because it requires specialist training), or the work is governed in such a way that workers aren't allowed to do it (why don't we bury those overhead lines that are susceptible to cars and weather in addition to being eyesores? Because WNH owns the hydro lines and the poles, telcos own the comm lines, and so forth. The people tearing up the street have no power over any of those parties.).

So it becomes a matter of both resource allocation (where to send the specialists) and synchronization (getting all the permissions and crews in order before start-of-work). From anyone who's studied NP-completeness, scheduling isn't an easy problem, even in a finite system.

There are ways to cut this gordian knot: for the fibre case there are municipalities that have a self-trained populace acquiring permission to and actually renting and operating the earth movers to go about burying fibre across the hills and dales to build a municipal fibre network (paying for the interconnect fee and cabinet rental at the POP through subscriptions much lower than competing narrowband competitors). However, as density increases, these problems get harder and the complexity increases in a non-polynomial way.

Anyway, I hope this ramble helps people who aren't just me understand why there's inefficiencies in the system. The tl;dr is that this is the price for generating a complex system. In return we get this wonderful region of ours.

I think it's worth the price of admission.

[Square]

I'm just an interested observer and looking forward to the change that this will all bring, but I'm sitting and watching them dig up the exact same stretch on Caroline at Allen for the third time in 10 months.  I'm sure there's a reason, as I know next to nothing about this type of infrastructure construction. But surely, this is a redundancy of some sort? I haven't seen them pull out any other debris from the ground, except copious amounts of dirt.  They've dug a 10 feet wide trench, laid down a black, flexible tubing of some sort and then covered most of it back up.  I would've thought that whatever underground upgrading that was to have been done, would've been completed ages ago.

Secondly, with construction now at the intersection of Allen and King, the road closure sign is in front of the Adult Rec Centre, and not back up at William. There's been a parade of cars, dodging through the Brick Brewery parking lot, then into the back of the Adult Rec Centre and out at the corner of Caroline and Allen. Confusing to say the least.

I want to know also what is the black flexible tubing used for?  Also a few weeks ago they said they were installing sleeves across King street.  Does anyone know what are these and what they are used for?

Thank you.

[timio]

Shots of the rail line from the University:
Looking south from E5 bridge


Looking north from E5 bridge

[plam]

I don't know how many members are tech-minded, but I am and we're talking about Waterloo, so I'm assuming it's fair to talk about

A problem I keep having with thinking about this construction and "Why are they doing X then Y instead of doing X+Z1 then Y+Z2 for parallelism?" is because, unlike in modern computers, the actors in this project aren't general-purpose.

Thanks, I appreciate the analogy. Scheduling constrained resources is indeed difficult. Sometimes they don't try, sometimes they do and then it's still hard.