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ION Stage I: what would you do differently?
#31
(05-13-2021, 05:23 PM)panamaniac Wrote:
(05-13-2021, 05:05 PM)ac3r Wrote: You get what you pay for haha. Dollar store rapid transit really.

Indeed, although “bare bones” might be a better way to describe it.

Perhaps. Could have saved hundred millions dollars and added a few more dozens of buses (or just articulated buses) to the 200/7 routes and waited just a few years to build a proper LRT, but then all the benefits of having everything apart from actual rapid transit would have been lost. Who wants to ride the loser cruiser when you can take an LRT or own a business/condo next to said LRT? Nobody was building 30-40+ floor skyscrapers "steps from the iXpress" lol, but now every condo and business in the city is trying to capitalize on it - which, sadly, was basically the point.

I do have some research on failed light rail systems in the USA I've been meaning to dig up and post here, that explore how LRT/tram systems failed to really deliver. They all promised massive, once in a generation rapid transit investments.
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#32
(05-13-2021, 05:23 PM)panamaniac Wrote:
(05-13-2021, 05:05 PM)ac3r Wrote: You get what you pay for haha. Dollar store rapid transit really.

Indeed, although “bare bones” might be a better way to describe it.

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.

What does bug me about our system is the bad design of the components, which could easily have happened in a more expensive system. Most of our actual bad choices were not related to cost.
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#33
(05-13-2021, 04:24 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:
(05-13-2021, 02:50 PM)Bytor Wrote: The final column is the 0.4m/s² acceleration time rounded up to the next minute and then difference between that and the scheduled time in an attempt "steelman" the current schedule.

Are you sure that’s an appropriate acceleration for LRT? LRT can accelerate faster than mainline rail; I believe 1m/s² is easily attainable, with the maximum noticeably higher than that.

Searching online, it looks like most Flexity models are rated for either 1.2 or 1.3 m/s².

Incidentally, I think the revised calculation is indeed using 0.5 m/s², based on Sheet1.
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#34
(05-13-2021, 06:10 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: 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. Even in terms of transit oriented development, most of Scarborough is still more traffic oriented and less dense than all of the other GTA suburbs served by heavy rail (heavy meaning full fledged subways, or LRT with substantial underground/elevated sections to maintain speed and vehicle couple length).

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. While researching all of this, our region looked into heavy rail...and subways were just barely written off, which I don't know why. 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 more 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.
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#35
(05-13-2021, 10:02 PM)ac3r Wrote:
(05-13-2021, 06:10 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: 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.

Quote: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.
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#36
I think any suggestions of tunneling when ION was initially built is incredibly naive. At the time it was planned, it was largely driven by the region financially with funding commitments from the provincial and federal govts (while expected) only confirmed later. I do wonder, though, what might be done in 20 years to improve the capabilities of the system.

I think the main problem it has right now has less to do with surface running (better traffic priority could address that) and more to do with geometry. The most problematic bits seem to be the tight turns at Allen St. and in DTK. By then, the opposition to losing on-street parking would be less and they could hopefully fix the Uptown section to run entirely on King Street down the centre of the street. DTK is harder. I do wonder if they could have a tunnel from somewhere north of the Central Stn and continuing under King St. to around Ontario where it would switch back to Charles at the surface, but I seem to recall there being challenging geology around there.
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#37
(05-14-2021, 08:06 AM)jamincan Wrote: I think any suggestions of tunneling when ION was initially built is incredibly naive. At the time it was planned, it was largely driven by the region financially with funding commitments from the provincial and federal govts (while expected) only confirmed later. I do wonder, though, what might be done in 20 years to improve the capabilities of the system.

I think the main problem it has right now has less to do with surface running (better traffic priority could address that) and more to do with geometry. The most problematic bits seem to be the tight turns at Allen St. and in DTK. By then, the opposition to losing on-street parking would be less and they could hopefully fix the Uptown section to run entirely on King Street down the centre of the street. DTK is harder. I do wonder if they could have a tunnel from somewhere north of the Central Stn and continuing under King St. to around Ontario where it would switch back to Charles at the surface, but I seem to recall there being challenging geology around there.

Ultimately, tunnelling a section like that is about prioritizing cars. If we instead closed King and made it a transit mall for the same section, and prioritize the train at the intersections, that would cost a lot less and provide the same benefit, but it would inconvenience drivers more. In fact, I still argue that surface stations are better for transit riders.
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#38
(05-13-2021, 03:02 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Thanks! Your spreadsheet calculates the difference at five minutes per direction, and without rounding it's about 10 minutes per direction. Of course, this doesn't take traffic lights into account (or assumes that the LRT has priority).

Not really. Like I said, you have to take in to account the dwell times. The column with the scheduled time between stations doesn't remove that it just shows the difference in scheduled times from one to the next. You'd have to reduce that column by 1, and then the final column has a lot more zeros in it.
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#39
(05-13-2021, 06:06 PM)ac3r Wrote: Perhaps. Could have saved hundred millions dollars and added a few more dozens of buses (or just articulated buses) to the 200/7 routes

No. Absolutely not. "Moar busses" is a stunningly ignorant thing to say about solving the overcrowding and delay issues that plagued the 200/7. We already had busses ever 3 minutes and 20 seconds during peak, and every 5 minutes outside of peak. There's only so many busses you can put on a busy route on congested streets and we were at that point.
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#40
(05-13-2021, 07:58 PM)tomh009 Wrote:
(05-13-2021, 04:24 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: Are you sure that’s an appropriate acceleration for LRT? LRT can accelerate faster than mainline rail; I believe 1m/s² is easily attainable, with the maximum noticeably higher than that.

(05-13-2021, 07:58 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Searching online, it looks like most Flexity models are rated for either 1.2 or 1.3 m/s².

They are capable of doing that, but do they do it? The app on my phone that I've used to track speeds has never shown more than a 0.4m/s² acceleration.

(05-13-2021, 07:58 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Incidentally, I think the revised calculation is indeed using 0.5 m/s², based on Sheet1.

That was a later edit, not what was shown in the screen cap.
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#41
Here is the table recaculated for 1.5/ms² acceleration.

Remember that station to station time includes the dwell time while my generated theoretical times at a given acceleration do not. This means that any difference after rounding up to the next full minute which is only 1 minute is essentially zero time.

Mod edit: deleted base64 image data
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#42
(05-14-2021, 11:14 AM)Bytor Wrote:
(05-13-2021, 07:58 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Searching online, it looks like most Flexity models are rated for either 1.2 or 1.3 m/s².

They are capable of doing that, but do they do it? The app on my phone that I've used to track speeds has never shown more than a 0.4m/s² acceleration.

1) I wouldn’t trust a phone app to capture instantaneous acceleration very well.

2) Proposed service improvements can take into account the capability of the system even if current operations don’t take advantage of those capabilities. For example, maybe they only accelerate at that rate because they know the signal won’t trigger in time if they go faster, so no point in punching it only to slow down a moment later. But in that scenario the fix is to improve the signalling system.
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#43
Does anybody else see an image there? In the edit window it shows an image, but in the actual post I only see the BB code with base64 raw data.
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#44
I see the base64 raw data. On Safari Mac
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#45
(05-14-2021, 11:10 AM)Bytor Wrote:
(05-13-2021, 06:06 PM)ac3r Wrote: Perhaps. Could have saved hundred millions dollars and added a few more dozens of buses (or just articulated buses) to the 200/7 routes

No. Absolutely not. "Moar busses" is a stunningly ignorant thing to say about solving the overcrowding and delay issues that plagued the 200/7. We already had busses ever 3 minutes and 20 seconds during peak, and every 5 minutes outside of peak. There's only so many busses you can put on a busy route on congested streets and we were at that point.

It's not really an ignorant statement at all. Articulated BRT was considered and studied. An articulated bus can offer something like 80-85% of the capacity that Flexity Freedom LRVs do and they were the next strongest contender. We also did studies on monorails and subway systems. The LRT was obviously the preferred option because we got a lot of funding for it from the provincial and federal governments, and at a regional level, they considered that it would offer more economic benefits over BRT. We could have easily built a BRT network with both grade separation and signal priority without sacrificing much in terms of capacity and would gone with exactly that if we didn't get money from higher levels of government. As I said in another comment somewhere, the LRT was alluring as an economic engine, but our actual network isn't all that rapid.
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