The Vancouver Sun Shills for a Broadway Subway.
The Vancouver Sun, again embarrasses itself, with a news item that that is nothing more than shilling for a Broadway subway.
This story contains so many red flags, that one would think it was a paid advertisement and not news.
- If Sinoski did his/her homework on subways, which he/she obviously hasn’t, he/she would find that subways, because of their high costs, are always a decision of the last resort. The one exception is that subways are built for political and bureaucratic prestige. The peak hour traffic flows alongAi?? Broadway would barely support a light rail solution, let alone a subway solution.
- The UBC forecast of 320,000 daily boardings is laced with pixie dust, really UBC should be embarrassed, yet modern LRT could easily handle this.
- Toronto has subways already, so the argument that high tech jobs will leave Vancouver is a bad joke. Today both Toronto and San Diego operate dated, smaller first generation trams and in the case of Toronto, even smaller non-articulated trams; modern light rail/trams have far more capacity, with some vehicles designed, having a capacity of 250 persons or more.
- The UBC study shows that the authors are mere amateurs, by putting LRT in a tunnel, thinking that a subway is the modern elixir to improve transit. Sorry, not only do subways tend to deter ridership, they steal money away from other transit priorities.
- TransLink’s costs for rapid bus and light rail are so huge, that one would think that the prices were increased on purpose to make the costs of a Broadway subway look reasonable in comparison. TransLink’s planning reeks of professional misconduct!
What the followingAi?? does illustrate is that TransLink is completely unqualified to plan for “rapid transit” and the authors of the UBC study should hang their collective heads in shame for such unprofessional nonsense. But then this is BC, where stupidity and ignorance reign supreme.
If there was any doubt in the past, there is none now: TransLink must go, they have no function except being very expensive cheerleaders for those who want to burden the regional taxpayers with massive taxes to pay for Vancouver politicians “penis envy” a Broadway subway.
The Vancouver Sun as always, further demonstrates that it has ceased to be a newspaper, rather an infomercial for the highest bidder.
What $110 thousand buys you in planning!
Subway line for Broadway corridor is best option but also most expensive, UBC study says
By Kelly Sinoski, Vancouver SunMarch 5, 2013
TransLink has cited a $3-billion subway line along the Broadway corridor as having the ai???highest acceptability ratingai??? among three potential rapid-transit options.
But the transportation authority noted light rail transit or a partly tunnelled LRT ai??i?? ranging from $1.1 billion to $1.84 billion ai??i?? along with a $2.67-billion combination of subway and LRT are also ai???more acceptable than business as usualai??? on the heavily congested corridor.
Bus or bus rapid transit along the route, meanwhile, has not been recommended for further consideration because ai???they do not have sufficient capacity to meet demand in 2041,ai??? according to a University of B.C. rapid-transit analysis.
The analysis comes less than a week after the city of Vancouver and UBC released a KPMG report and made another pitch for a subway along the Broadway corridor, with Mayor Gregor Robertson suggesting the area is at risk of losing high-tech jobs to other cities such as Toronto, New York or San Diego because of ai???gridlock and over-stretched transit.ai???
According to the UBC rapid-transit analysis, the subway would provide the greatest improvement at the highest cost along the corridor, with a projected 320,000 daily boardings by 2041, and would generate 54,000 additional daily trips in the region.
By comparison, a combination of LRT and subway would have a projected 350,000 daily boardings, generate 44,000 additional transit trips and provide ai???rapid transit benefits to a broader areaai??? because it serves two routes east of Arbutus. LRT is projected to have 160,000 daily boardings with 11,000 additional trips by 2041 but has the option of part of the LRT built in a tunnel where Broadway is busiest.
Meanwhile, TransLink has also narrowed the options for rapid transit in Surrey, including a $900-million bus rapid-transit project on Fraser Highway, King George Boulevard and 104th Avenue; a combination of light rail on Fraser Highway with bus rapid transit ($1.68 billion) on King George and 104th; light rail on Fraser Highway, 104th Avenue and King George to Newton, with rapid bus to White Rock $2.18 billion); and SkyTrain ($2.2 billion) on Fraser Highway and bus rapid transit everywhere else.
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts said her city will continue to push for light rail on all three routes: Fraser Highway, King George and 104th Avenue. That option is expected to generate 166,000 daily boardings, compared with 180,000 for the first two options and 200,000 for the four alternative.
The options for both rapid transit lines will now be referred to the regional transportation strategy to consider the trade-offs and benefits and determine the preferred option.
There you go, my daily comment.
1) Subways should only be built where a cost/benifit analysis shows they achieve superior results to the alternatives. For Broadway BRT was ruled out due to capacity issues leaving LRT, RRT and a combo option for further study. Capacity wise LRT can handle Broadway but at the same time it is a no brainer that a Broadway line will have much larger ridership than the Canada Line, whether that ridership justifies a subway depends on what the cost/benifit analysis shows (a quick look shows RRT has the lowest cost per rider but that is only one thing to consider)
2) You still want to say they won’t achieve projected ridership after all of your past ‘forcasts?’ With the exception of the Millenium line built with just the middle segment all the other rapid transit projects in Vancouver have greatly exceeded forcasts and to my belly rub this one seems reasonable or maybe low.
3) For your info Toronto has new streetcars on order and I believe on street testing.
4) LRT is often in tunnels on congested areas around the world.
5) Have a look at other LRT projects proposed or recently completed in Canada Translinks LRT numbers are reasonable (actually cheaper than most). The only outlier is the Kitchner-Waterloo LRT at 45million/km and that is clearly a very different animal than Broadway (the number of vehicles needed alone would account for a huge difference not to forget a maintainance/ops yard for all those vehicles in downtown Vancouver/False Creek).
Zweisystem replies: Despite your ongoing nonsense, you fail to take in the traffic flows along Broadway, which are currently under 4,500 persons per hour per direction. Broadway has several transit destinations including UBC, and the VGH complex of medical facilities. What this means is that a lot of people only take transit for small part of the journey, thus ridership is spread long the line.
The problem with shops and storage is vastly overrated as they can be part of an office complex, etc. The problem with the current Broadway LRT plans is that they are designed to fail, to support a subway option. It is sad to see so much professional misconduct involved in the planning process, abetted by the SkyTrain subway trolls who demonstrate a vast ignorance about public transit and transit issues.
There is no money for subways, in fact there is little money for transit as the three mini metro lines has consumed almost everything.
These are total project costs including the trains and yards. Again, you are failing to include these costs. From what I have heard, $400 million of the cost of the LRT are the rolling stock and yards and that is for only have the ridership of 160,000. If you added the cost of the rolling stock and yards for 320,000 boardings per day, the cost of the LRT would even be higher.
Zweisystem replies: the estimated cost for shops and cars of $400 million is grossly over estimated. One has to remember, both the KPMG and UBC transit reports were not done by transit experts and much of the information comes from TransLink and TransLink has absolutely no knowledge of modern LRT as as such, both reports are badly flawed.
For LRT to cater to current peak hour traffic flows on Broadway, one would need 18 trams per hour per direction. Realistically, we would need about 28 to 30 trams to operate between UBC and commercial SkyTrain station. Cost for the trams would be no more than $150 million, cost for shops etc, another $50 million. But the cost for a subway also would rise to cater to higher traffic flows, plus you need to run a shadow bus service on Broadway because the stations are too far apart.
What the SkyTrain lobby refuse to admit, that there is not the ridership to justify a subway solution on Broadway, just like there wasn’t the ridership on Cambie St. to justify a subway. The result, ongoing fiscal crisis at TransLink.
@Richard
Did UBC consider the multi-car tram line (four cars) at grade along Broadway and West 16th Avenue (not to be confused with single or dual car streetcar line)? More importantly, the real question is who at UBC did the study to select the $3 billion sky train line in the tunnel? It surely was not the Faulty of Engineering at UBC. My first guess is that it was done by the UBC Sauder School of Business obtaining funding from TransLink:
http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/Faculty/Research_Centres/Centre_for_Transportation_Studies
If this is the case, toss the so called UBC transit study into the rubbish bin and there is a direct conflict of interest with Sauder researchers (they are not even engineers and are unqualified economists) doing any study for TransLink. What about the University of Alberta Faculty of Engineering, which has no ties to TransLink, giving its evaluation of sky train? Incidentally, in my mind, the best way to reduce transit demand to UBC is to relocate the Sauder School of Business to SFU (to combine the business school at SFU with the business school at UBC) where the Sauder faculty and students can ride the Evergreen Line which the Sauder researchers also support.
If the Sauder researchers were not fed all the correct costs to consider in their trivial financial models, their study is flawed. I guarantee that the sky train costs did not include the $150 million annual cost for the FTN buses required to make the current 68 kilometres of sky train lines work. For the UBC sky train line to UBC, it works out to an additional $31 million in annual FTN costs which were never considered by the UBC study.
In contrast, the tram line to UBC would eliminate about 200,000 bus service hours costing $115 per service hour by eliminating all the buses on Broadway to save TransLink $23 million annually in operating costs. So, right away, it is clear that sky train is costing TransLink $54 million in additional operating costs. Did Sauder researchers take this into account? Unlikely.
Sky train below grade costs much more to maintain and build than trams at grade. “Sauder researches are essentially glorified monkeys” who are not engineers and who just input data provided by TransLink accountants to arrive at accounting costs having no connection to reality.
Trams have just as much capacity as sky trains, and for the median travel distance of five kilometres here, sky trains offer no time saving over trams. Listen to German music, it might enlighten you:
http://www.rockantenne.de/webplayer/?playchannel=alternative
The numbers are not for current flows, they are for the projected flows in 2040. Given your calculations above, the numbers in the studies are pretty much right on.
@Eric
Now back in the real world, the reality is that the large majority of cities around the world use transit that is all or mostly grade separated for corridors that have the ridership potential of Broadway. Just look at the under construction LRT systems in Toronto, Seattle and Ottawa. They are more expensive than our SkyTrain.
They use on-street LRT and trams for much lower volume corridors or for just a kilometre or two where slow operation does not impact travel time and reliability that much. For high volume corridors, by the time the cost of the trains and yards is included, the difference in cost between on-street and grade separated is much less than for the low volume routes.
Zweisystem replies: Richard you confuse LRT with a streetcar. Modern LRT operating at-grade/on-street in a reserved rights-of-way has proven to be as fast as SkyTrain and carry more than Skytrain. WHY DO YOU THINK NO ONE BUYS WITH SKYTRAIN ANY MORE? WHY DO YOU THINK ONLY 7 SKYTRAIN LIKE TRANSIT SYSTEMS HAVE BEEN BUILT IN THE PAST 35 YEARS? YOU JUST DON’T GET IT DO YOU.
@Richard, there are two main design philosophies for transit:
1) Centralized sky train and subway trunk lines which are for regional use (failed Soviet era thinking). They require lots of buses operating frequently if they are going to be used for municipal use – the case here with TransLink.
2) De-centralized tram lines for local or municipal use. They do not require feeder buses. They reduce transit costs and air pollution. They are more accessible for most people. They blend into the fabric of the community and do not transform the community. They are socially responsible and build the economy throughout the city for people live closer to work. This is what Patrick is saying – they are sustainable.
In 30 years, the sky train villages will become ghettos and hubs of crime. This is what you see in Toronto now and other cities where transit is used as a catalyst to rezone the city to make developers money. The COV does not need the subway to build the sky train villages but the developers would never be allowed to “put more cars on the roads” with the high density developments without transit dangled as the futile offering to mitigate traffic congestion.
Ironically, subways and sky trains do not reduce vehicle traffic – they worsen it and most people in the condos at the sky train villages don’t want to go where sky trains take them. After 13 years of sky train we still have 57% of the trips by drivers. How much more time does TransLink need to get us out of cars before it concedes that it is a sham?
Toronto has the longest commutes in Canada after spending the most money on subways in Canada. If you don’t get it, fine, maybe others reading what Patrick says, will.
Keep listening…
http://www.rockantenne.de/webplayer/?playchannel=alternative
JUST BECAUSE YOU USE CAPS DOES NOT MAKE SOMETHING LOGICAL OR TRUE. Back to something that has been said many times before only 7 Bombardier LIM Skytrains have been built…..big deal, there are many many mini-metros which is what that is. And Skytrains success in Vancouver is pretty convincing.
Zweisystem replies: Oh yes Rico, SkyTrain’s success is convincing, so convincing no one has bought the damn thing. The same fate has befallen Frances VAL mini-metro, again made obsolete by LRT. Sad to say you ignorance of transit and transit issues is nothing more than appalling.
‘Sad to say your ignorance of transit and transit issues is nothing more than appalling’….either you are incapable of reading my post or your ignorance of all transit that is not LRT is showing. Mini-metros are quite common…use the magic of google or wiki to ease your ignorance.
Zweisystem replies: Many light-metros are niche transit modes, built to serve a specific transit problem such as airport people movers (JFK) or built strictly for political prestige (Canada Line). Notably most light-metros are grade separated and/or automatic LRT (Docklands and STAR Kuala Lumpor)
I don’t see Wiki giving degrees in urban transportation.
The Sheppard East LRT line is going to cost 1 Billion dollars and that includes utility relocation, new carhouse, streetscape improvements along the entire corridor(Something you do not get with grade-seperated transit).
Zwei is correct, you can argue that Skytrain costs less, the fact is the majority of cities are pursuing LRT system. Yes, automated metro systems are still being built, notably honolulu, and Brescia, but LRT is the dominant mode right now, and for good reason.
Zweisystem replies: Streetscape improvements = doubling or trebling the cost of LRT!
A note to others: Toronto’s new LRT is being built to standard gauge and is not compatible with the Broad gauge streetcar system, thus the LRT cannot operate on any portions of the streetcar system.
The new LRT lines are being built no where near the legacy streetcar network, so there was never going to be a connection between the networks in any case.
@Justin Bernard
All of the LRT systems under construction or just completed in Canada have significant grade separation. Then there is Seattle’s system too. In the newest post, Zwei says he does not consider them LRT.
Zweisystem replies: The portions of LRT operating on grade separation should be considered metro or light metro, but then modern LRT can operate as a streetcar, light-metro and a commuter train all on the same route. This singular fact ha made SkyTrain obsolete.
Justin Bernard,
Just to be clear in general I consider the capital costs of a skytrain like system to be higher than a typical LRT system on the same route. If there is very significant grade seperation required on the route for system reliability or adequate speed then the LRT may be more expensive (as in recent Calgary/Ottawa/Toronto examples). That said I feel on most routes a skytrain type system generates more riders than a typical LRT system on the same route…potentially resulting in a lower cost per rider (you would need to see what the costs and ridership are to tell for each route) or because I also tend to believe that it generates more new riders a lower cost per new rider.
Have a look at the different Surrey or UBC options presented and see which you think delivers the best cost/benifit. Even though it is the most expensive I would argue the skytrain options are the best options in both corridors (to be fair I had assumed on the Surrey corridors LRT would show the best/cost benifits but I guess 30years of population growth…)
LRT is a flexible technology allowing it to function acceptably in a wide variety of conditions but if you look at ridership most metro or mini-metro type lines are built on higher capacity routes. A substantially at grade LRT could still effectively handle ridership on the Expo line, but it would be reaching the limits of what it would be capable of…so if the Expo line had been built as LRT (25years ago) it would need to be upgraded to a metro line very soon …aren’t you glad they got it ‘right’ the first time and saved that money?(and yes Zei I realize the current Expo system will need 1 billion over the next 30 years to upgrade for increased capacity (includes cost of extra trains/station works/systems and operating the trains over the status quo). No one including ‘Translink’ predicted that ridership on the Expo line would be so high today (amazing what fast frequent and reliable transit does for ridership) and with a connection between the Millenium (Broadway)/Expo/Canada line transit use in all areas will skyrocket. Broadway will be the same as the Expo line is now in 30 years (complete with Zei saying how much of a failure it is and that it will never meet its ridership targets…even though it passed them 20 years ago). Translink says the at grade LRT will have the capacity for the corridor in 2041 but I would bet the writing will be on the wall in 2041. Lets do it right the first time.
Justin also note both the Expo line and Canada line had substantial streetscape improvements and the Canada line had significant utilities relocation as part of their budget.
Zei, you never mentioned you had a degree in Urban transportation you sly dog you based on your comments I would have never guessed it. Also note you seem to have forgotten (conviniently?) about mini-metros like Copenhagen or Turin plus may others. Mini-metros tend to be more expensive than LRT and as a result there are more LRT systems being built but world wide the numbers of riders on metro type systems dwarfs at grade LRT.
I do realize I come across pretty pro metro here and that sucks, it is just I am always pointing out the errors in Zei’s comments so I don’t have much space to say good things about LRT (of which there are many).
Zweisystem replies: One thing to consider, for the cost of 1 SkyTrain line, one can build 3 LRT lines, now 3 LRT lines would give the transit customer far more flexibility and of course 3 times the capacity offered by mini-metro.
No university in Canada unlike Europe, has a Faculty of Urban Transportation, nor do they offer degrees in urban transport.
Copenhagen is now building LRT as studies have shown that LRT will attract more ridership at a far cheaper cost.
As for TransLink, they haven’t a clue what they are talking about and will say anything to keep the SkyTrain brand alive.