Utterly ignorant about transit, come to Vancouver and join the club!
The authorAi??of the following article in the Toronto Sun is utterly ignorant of transit mode and operation and would make a great addition to the Vancouver Sun newspaper.
The very nature of modern LRT with the concept of “reserved rights-of-ways” or RoW’s that are exclusively for the use of streetcars or trams, has made modern LRT very competitive with metro and has made expensive light-metro such as SkyTrain (also used on the Scarborough Line in Toronto) obsolete. By operating on reserved RoW’s, enables a streetcar or tram to obtain commercial speedsAi??near that of a subway at a much less cost.Ai??The commercial speed of a transit routeAi??is largely determined by the number of stations or stops per km., the more stations with LRT the lower the commercial speed, but with more stations per km. the higher customer convenience and ridership.
The fact that LRT has reduced gridlock where it has been built and it’s proven ability to attract the motorist from the car, has made modern LRT a very useful tool in city planning and extremely expensive subways are only built when ridership on a transit line demands full grade separation. As mentioned in earlier posts, the threshold in Karlsruhe Germany for putting a tram line in a subway is around 35,000 to over 40,000 passengers per hour per direction, so there is plenty of scope for modern light rail in Toronto and in Vancouver.
TheAi??columnist for The Toronto Sun says the city is doomed to permanent traffic gridlock because there is no money to build new rapid transit subway lines, yet offers no proof that one subway line will cure the very same traffic gridlock.
The ability for light rail to carry large ridership on cheaper rights-of-ways has made more
expensive transit modes, such as SkyTrain (light-metro) obsolete.
“End of the line for subways, Scarborough had to accept an LRT, so there’s no cash forAi??Downtown Relief Line either”
By Christina Blizzard ,QMI Agency
First posted: Saturday, April 14, 2012You knew it had to happen.
No sooner had city council gleefully voted to foist LRTs instead of subways on Scarborough, over the vigorous objections of suburban residents, then the cry went up from all the smug downtowners.
They want the Downtown Relief Line.
How to explain it to all those self-entitled, Starbuck-swilling snobs?
Oh, this might work: Not a friggin’ chance.
If there’s not enough cash for Scarborough’s subways, there’s not enough for downtown.
Get on your bikes, guys. It’ll be a cold day in Hell, Ont. before this city ever builds another kilometre of subway system.
What planet are these folk living on?
They didn’t just tell Scarborough to get lost.
They’ve sealed this city’s fate. We’re doomed to gridlock forever.
Council’s decision is akin to that of former premier Bill Davis’ cancellation of the Spadina Expressway in 1971.
That move ensured no other expressway would be built in Toronto, including the Scarborough Expressway.
So Scarborough has the worst of all possible worlds. No subways, no decent highways.
This city, indeed, the GTA, is grinding to a halt because of half-baked plans gone awry.
Spadina was the first. It begat the Allen Expressway, which begat the Allen Road when Davis stopped construction.
It now ends at Eglinton Ave., creating a massive bottleneck.
Other transportation disasters include the cancellation of four subways by Mike Harris.
Shovels were already in the ground for the Eglinton Ave. West line when the Harris government filled it in, citing a lack of funding.
It would be up and running by now if it had gone ahead.
Then there’s the Union Station to Pearson Airport direct rail link.
It took years to get any progress on that line. While other cities had multiple transit links to their airports, drivers here sat fuming in traffic, often missing flights when highways jammed up.
No sooner had work started when the protests began.
Local residents complained about the noise. Hello? Do you have any idea how much the value of your property has increased?
Another group popped up saying diesel trains would kill their children. They wanted electric trains, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in extra costs that would add.
Diesel trains on the entire GO Transit system don’t kill babies, but watch out when it’s in their backyard.
Now, some politicians are urging Metrolinx to put more stops along the line. Not quite sure which part of “direct” and “link” they don’t get.
Politicians don’t have the vision to set out a plan for the GTA and follow through with it, no matter what.
They’re meek, timid and too easily cowed by noisy special interest groups.
It’s not just transit.
Look at what happened with the gas-fired plants the provincial government cancelled in Misissauga and Oakville.
The Mississauga one was almost finished when Premier Dalton McGuinty pulled the plug during last October’s election.
Now the government is being sued for $300 million by the financing company associated with the plant.
That doesn’t even take into consideration the estimated $1 billion it will cost to scrap the plant and move it elsewhere.
And McGuinty has the nerve to ask NDP leader Andrea Horwath to tell him where to make $1 billion in savings?
Here’s some ideas: Don’t build $1 billion gas-fired plants and then pull them down. Don’t squander $1 billion on an eHealth boondoggle that benefited Liberal insiders. And don’t waste more millions on an Ornge Air Ambulance fiasco.
If this city had the billions of dollars they’ve put into not building highways, not building gas plants and in fighting any development that does manage to slip past the eagle eyes and slow wits of politicians, who like to nix every worthwhile project, we could build a subway to the moon.
Or at least to Scarborough.
35 – 40 000 people/hr per direction are required for subways eh? Where did you get that number?
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/23/yonge-subway/
“Every weekday in 2010, 388,713 passengers moved to and from the subways at Bloor/Yonge — up by 50,000 a day from 10 years earlier. More than half — 260,370 — got on or off the Yonge train. But TTC “traffic checkers” (the TTC employs 25 people to count its customers) noticed something strange: the number boarding Yonge trains southbound at Bloor from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. has not changed, at about 14,500 boardings, for the past decade.”
14 500. That’s 6 car trains coming every 2 minutes. This isn’t because of lack of demand; the scene at Bloor/Yonge every morning is hell. Layers upon layers deep of people trying to pack onto already full trains heading south. Nope, this is just the limit of the technology.
The 35,000 to 40,000 number comes from Karlsruhe Germany and was the peak hour ridership on the main tram line through the city, that decided transit planners to relocate the line in a subway.
In North America we are 30 to 40 years behind in the science of public transport and was thought to be the threshold for subways in the 60’s and 70’s ain’t no more. Canada and the USA are so dated in their transit philosophies that they are akin to pilots that fly old prop driven Stratocrusisers, being told to fly ‘fly by wire’ Boeing Dreamliners.
Why 6 car subway trains? The norm for subways today is 10 or 12 car subway trains. As for the limit of technology, what technology are you talking about – 1) Metro or subway; 2) LRT/streetcar; 3) Non-articulated streetcars? In todays world (not the 60’s & 70’s) modern LRT/streetcar can move in excess of 40,000 pphpd as evidenced in Karlsruhe Germany.
Zei, I think what Aidan was asking is where you got your number that a subway should not be built before 35-40,000pphpd since that is greater than the pphpd of the Yonge subway, the busiest 2 track metro in North America, a huge success and big reason for the high fare recovery of the TTC. Except for a few lines I would suspect that almost no metros achieve this number and yet there are hundreds of successful (by any measure) metro systems in the world. I believe what Aidan was refering to as the limits of technology was in reference to station capacity at Bloor/Yonge and I believe the Yonge line is limited to 6 or at most 8 car trains (as is the also highly successful Montreal Metro at 8 car trains). From memory don’t recall the Paris metro lines I used were 10 or 12 cars either…..for that matter the Canada Line is successful with 2 car trains. ps I still can’t find any info supporting the 40,000pphpd number have you found a source yet?
Actually Rico, you are utterly ignorant about transit, the fact you are so, greatly indicates that you work for Translink. Transit has changed greatly in the past 25 years, yet you continue with your oh so 1950’s TransLink speak. I must laugh, the Canada Line successful, I guess so, for SNC Lavalin who receive $100 million annually for their part of the P-3. In the terms of good public transit, the Canada Line is a disaster.