Ai??Roses in full bloom at Machiya Station on the Toei Streetcar Arakawa Line in Arakawa Ward, Tokyo, on May 12
Roses along the Toei Streetcar (Toden) Arakawa Line in Tokyo are at their best now, delighting passengers.
The Arakawa Ward government has been cultivating about four kilometers of roses along the streetcar line since 1985. Large roses in red, pink, yellow and other colors are in full bloom around Machiya Station along the Arakawa line, their sweet fragrance drifting through the area.
ai???Theyai??i??re really beautiful. I never get tired of looking at them,ai??? Toshiko Matsuo, 89, said as she approached the flowers. She lives in the neighborhood and takes a walk every day.
According to the ward governmentai??i??s roads and parks section, the best time to see the roses this year is up through late this month.
Updated May 22, 2016 – Added CAD currency conversions.
Bombardier and SNC Lavalin spent years grooming Honolulu City politicians to build with light-metro.
For their efforts, Bombardier and SNC got pipped at the post by Ansaldo with their proprietary light-metro and and the now chagrined burghers of Honolulu are now finding out that proprietary light-metro systems are indeed very expensive and tend to be an eyesore.
With the cost of the Honolulu light metro escalating, the idea of conventional surface LRT may get a fresh look to complete the system, KHON-TV reports. The three-part pdf links total 70 pages The 20-mile (32 km) elevated light metro now could cost USD $8 billion (CAD $ 10.5 billion) or $250 million/km. (CAD $378 billion). So it is natural where light-metro goes, much cheaper LRT must soon follow.
Zwei told them so in the 90’s in a series of letters that were printed in local Honolulu papers, but very few heeded my warnings, but when it comes to vanity transit projects, common sense always takes a back seat.
On our side of the pond, the massive costs of the Honolulu light-metro project must put to rest any thought of SkyTrain being built in Surrey and in fact, i will go one step further and transit planners who advocates ALRT/ART for Surrey should be charged with professional misconduct.
An earlier cost comparison with American cities with transit. One should temper Portland’s higher costs
is due in part that it has 60 miles (96.5 km) of route compared to Seattle’s 17.3 miles (27.8Ai??km) of route.
Honolulu will have 20 miles (32 km) of route if completely built. All costs in US dollars.
With the cost of Honoluluai??i??s rail project doubling, transit officials are scrambling to figure out how much more of it they can afford to build, where it will have to stop short, and what to do from there.
Already-studied alternatives could be a solution.
Honoluluai??i??s rail system is slated to hit at least $8 billion, according to the Federal Transit Administration. Experts say other options that move nearly as fast and for billions less could be tied seamlessly into whatai??i??s already built, and make it not only to Ala Moana but also to Manoa, Waikiki and West Kapolei.
Years ago, as the city closed in on launching the rail project, people on the job recall the atmosphere as officials pushed for heavy rail.
ai???They, the Honolulu client, were going to ram the thing through the process and ram it through downtown,ai??? said Douglas Tilden, who served as the projectai??i??s chief architect at the time for rail consultant InfraConsult. ai???It was wrong. It was going to be so very, very expensive and going to have such tremendous environmental and visual impact.ai???
But the city wanted support from the community. An extensive study paid for by Kamehameha Schools and supported by Hawaiiai??i??s professional organization for architects ai??i?? AIA Honolulu ai??i?? advised the city to go with light rail that was mostly at-grade and went up above where it had to.
ai???We had a nationally recognized transportation expert ai??i?? a lover of trains ai??i?? develop that study,ai??? said local architect Peter Vincent. ai???Rail is great. We need a fixed guideway to help the traffic congestion, but it should have been light rail from the get-go.ai???
That study said light rail would be nearly $2 billion cheaper than a heavy-rail, all-elevated train. It also would have been just 12 minutes slower end-to-end. That means light rail was $150,000,000 cheaper per minute, and thatai??i??s was before the cost of the overhead rail system doubled in the years since.
ai???It was a very valid study and it was just dismissed by the authorities as being not workable,ai??? Vincent recalled.
The modern tram brings fast, reliable and user-friendly public transport to
densely populated European Cities, like Amsterdam. The ability of the transit customer
of having his/hers transit on the pavement and easily accessible, makes
modern light-rail the first choice of transit planners around the world.
Sadly, not so in Metro Vancouver.
A bit of a “Puff”Ai?? article in BC Business.
Frances Bula, a big supporter of light-metro and her “puff stories” on the Canada Line earned a rather unfriendly moniker by those living on Cambie St.
But the “chickens have come home to roost” so to speak and now with over $10 billion invested in SkyTrain and the Canada line, the car is winning the commuter war!
The problem is so simple, that it is far too complicated for the likes of Bula and many other media mavens who opine on transit in the mainstream media to understand.
If you want people to use transit, it must be user friendly; it must be an attractive alternative to the car.
As Bula and Translink have not figured this out, speaks volumes why TransLink is held in such high odor by locals.
Except for residents of the principality of Vancouverai??i??aAi??little piece of Amsterdam dropped into our local equivalent of Los Angelesai??i??the majority of people in the region are wedded to their wheels.
The preceding quote from Bula shows her Vancouver centric thinking, where people living in Vancouver remain blind to the fact of massive car use in the city.
Vancouver cannot even come close to be compared with Amsterdam and by doing so showcases the many biases contained in the article.
Amsterdam, like most European cities offer a customer friendly trams (as well as metro and a comprehensive metro and regional rail services), which Vancouver shuns, in favour of grossly expensive subways and mini-metros which have been proven very poor in attracting the motorist from the car.
Bula further muddies the water with her love affair with SkyTrain and the Canada line and nowhere does she mentions that the proprietary ALRT/ART system is hugely expensive to maintain and operate and the Canada line has greatly limited capacity due to have only 40 metre long station platforms, giving the illusion of being popular by offering short crowded trains.
Light-metro is so expensive to build that it can only offer a limited network that must be reached by bus, both inefficient and time consuming for the potential transit customer.
Yes, as Zwei had predicted many years ago, the car is winning the commuter war and there is a solution, it is called light rail (tram in Europe), a user friendly transit mode that has the proven ability to attract the motorist from the car, but the likes of Bula, Vision(less) Vancouver and TransLink are too blind, too dated in their thinking, and too egotistic to discuss honestly.
Unless there is a complete reversal in transit planning in the region, the car will win.
DOUBLE COMMUTE | The Chmeliks were dedicated transit users until they moved from Vancouver to more affordable Surrey. Now they have two cars
Billions have been spent on new transit lines, better bike lanes and more walkable communitiesai??i??and yet we refuse to give up our wheels. And nowhere is that more true than in the suburbs of the Lower Mainland.
Clayton Chmelik and his wife were poster children for the car-shunning millennial generation for most of their 20s. They lived in south Vancouverai??i??s Marpole neighbourhood and both took buses almost everywhereai??i??first to university, then to their practicums and jobs. They didnai??i??t own a car and didnai??i??t feel deprived.
Now 33, Chmelik, a health manager at a Richmond company, has two cars in his family. He commutes 40 minutes a day each way in his Mazda 3 from his townhouse in Surrey, while his wife has her own car, a Mazda 5, that sheai??i??ll be using to commute to her counselling job when her maternity leave for their second child ends later this year. He estimates it costs them at least $700 a month to run both vehicles, not counting the $10,000 apiece the cars cost to buy. He knows itai??i??s a lot. ai???If I had a choice, I wouldnai??i??t do it.ai???
But he feels like he doesnai??i??t have a choice. First, TransLink eliminated the B-line bus along Granville when the Canada Line opened and transformed his 10-minute commute to Richmond into a 40-minute, two-transfer one. Then, when he and his wife decided to buy a home, a modest townhouse in South Surrey was all they could afford. That new location made transit even more unrealistic.
A candid conversation with a former TransLink planner all most a year ago (I gather from an email he is happily motoring along in his motor home in New Mexico), may shed some light on TransLink’s current planning and fiscal ills. The problem seems to be TransLink’s planners and bureaucrats are afraid of success.
Why?
The fear is that LRT, if built (and especially the Valley TramTrain) would attract more new customers (people new to transit) than their current multi billion dollar transit projects. Despite the hype and hoopla from TransLink, ridership increases roughly matches population growth.
This is why Surrey’s planned for LRT is designed to be an expensive failure and why TransLink shuns TramTrain.
As the retired planner told me; “There is great fear by senior TransLink staff that a Vancouver to Chilliwack TramTrain would attract more non U-Pass new customers to transit than their new transit lines.”
The important phrase is non U-Pass holding customers because every new U-Pass customer is a post secondary students forced to purchase U-Pass plus nowAi?? massive black market in the Metro Vancouver region selling unused U-Passes, more and more people are riding on cheap, but probably not take transit if it were not for the deep discounted U-Pass. With over 130,000 U-Passes issued for 2015/16, permitting multiple boardings a day has greatly skewed TransLink ridership numbers and revenue.
So great was this fear in the past, that senior bureaucrats “sent to Coventry” then TransLink CEO Tom Prendergast because he was warming up to the idea of a Valley TramTrain service.
This, in part, caused him to leave TransLink.
This bodes ill for future transit planning in the region and gives credence for the call to dismantle TransLink and start anew.
Here is the link to an article in the Raise The Hammer (“The Hammer” is Hamilton, Ontario) website about their tour of the ION LRT Construction Site.
The pictures are telling. The development has already started and the line isn’t even finished yet. The start date is Fall 2017, I don’t have a more precise date yet.Ai??TheAi??work on the ION LRT started in spring of 2014! 19.4 km of LRT and 17.6 km of lite BRT (which opened in April of 2015) built in less time than your Evergreen Line for only $818 Million.
From the “You just got to be kidding department”. Evidently too much of the wrong kind of sun can delay trains!
This reminds me of the monotone recording at Victoria Station, in London in 1980; “The 4:15 Victoria to Bournemouth will be delayed by permanently persistent points problems in Purley.”
London Underground has said “excess sunlight” is causing delays for the Tube network.
Bright sunshine beamingAi??ontoAi??CCTV monitors, which are used to give a clear view of the platform before pulling away, isAi??blocking drivers’ line of sight, according to staff.
Passengers at South Harrow station were surprised to hearAi??”the wrong type of sun” was causing their slow journey last Friday -Ai??an announcement which London Underground said was “not ideal”.
The issue of bright sunshine, although rare, is reportedly a problemAi??whenAi??the sun rises in the morning in early spring or winter.
“There’s lots of things we can control but unfortunately the sun isn’t one of them,” a spokesperson for London Underground said.
“The ‘wrong sort of sunlight’ isn’t how we’d usually say it as we want to keep passengers calm and reassure them.
“But basically it’s when the sun is in certain parts of the sky at certain stations, and it shines onto the CCTV monitoring screen in their cab so they can’t see the screen and who’s on the platform.”
Charlie Smith of the Georgia Straight is the one reporter who has studied the transit issue and knows the issues.
Despite the hype and hoopla, especially from provincial politicians (both Liberal, Socred & NDP) the SkyTrain Lobby, the many issues surrounding SkyTrain have been glossed over by the mainstream media. This is still evident today with the many “puff” stories appearing in the Vancouver Sun.
As SkyTrain, as well as most light-metros are user unfriendly and force customers to make unwanted transfers, taking the car is preferable.
Unable to serve ‘local’ areas with affordable transit, ICTS/ALRT/ART has morphed into a regional railway in Metro Vancouver, with TransLink’s planning, a role it is totally unsuited for. To expensive to build to lightly populated areas, means the density myth comes into play. The density myth is simply one needs to greatly increase density along a transit route to make it viable, yet modern LRT puts a lie to the density myth and the many myths surrounding SkyTrain.
Instead of reporting mainly invented events thirty years ago, the mainstream media should do well to deal with the many ills that surround public transit today.
If Charlie Smith can do it, so can the likes of Kelly Sinoski and the other scribes who work for the Sun and province.
Ai??The Expo Line, including its rolling stock, cost $1.23 billion, leaving the region saddled with debt for decades. Stephen Hui
Today, social media is full of fond memories of Expo 86, which opened on this day 30 years ago.
There’s no doubt that Vancouver’s only World’s Fair was a great success, drawing huge crowds to the north shore of False Creek from May to mid-October in 1986.
The theme was transportation and communication. This influenced the provincial government to launch the first SkyTrain passenger service four months before Expo 86 began.
SkyTrain was popular with riders, but it was also phenomenally expensive. And it gobbled up precious funds that could have gone into more efficient methods for moving people.
It might surprise today’s taxpayers to learn that the Bill Bennett government bought the system without going to tender.
The seller was an Ontario crown corporation,Ai??Urban Transportation Development Corporation.Ai??The display of this driverless system at the World’s Fair was designed to spur sales of this Canadian technology around the world.
That helped bring the federal government onboard to support the fair.
In the end, those sales of SkyTrain systems never really materializedai??i??at least not with the original Mark I cars. This left the Lower Mainland with a colossally expensive rapid-transit project covering a relatively small footprint.
Better transit service couldn’t be delivered to other areas for years to comeai??i??not by bus nor by street-level light railai??i??because there wasn’t enough money.
A Crown corporation secretariat 1992-93 annual report showed that over the previous nine-year period, B.C. Transit’s bus service hours only increased by 3.5 percent. (B.C. Transit was the precursor to TransLink in the Lower Mainland.)
In 1991, the Toronto Transit Commission was generating 69 percent of its operating expenses through the farebox, compared to just 49 percent for B.C. Transit. With a smaller portion of revenue coming through the farebox, it meant larger subsidies just to maintain status quo transit service.
It’s worth noting that the TTC rejected buying SkyTrain. That’s because it didn’t carry anywhere near enough passengers to justify the price.
The cost of the Expo Line from Waterfront Station to King George Station was $1.23 billion, including rolling stock, but not including debt-servicing costs.Ai??More than a decade after the line opened, the debt still stood at $1 billion, according to B.C. Transit figures supplied to the Straight at the time.
The annual debt-service costs for 1997-98 were $143.3 million for SkyTrain-related expenditures. It was Vancouver’s version of the Montreal Olympics.
Metro Vancouver became the guinea pig
The first UTDC line using the Mark I cars opened in Scarborough in March 1985. The following year, passenger service began in Greater Vancouver on what became known as SkyTrain.Ai??The Lower Mainland was the high-profile guinea pig.
Not long after, the Montreal-based engineering giant Lavalin bought UTDC, but Lavalin’s debt burden became so large that it went bankrupt.
Ownership reverted back to the Ontario government, which sold UTDC to Montreal-based transportation giant Bombardier. After Bombardier developed larger Mark II cars, it sold SkyTrain-style systems to JFK Airport, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, and Seoul.
But that was a small amount of business compared to the number of other rapid-transit systems sold around the world by Bombardier, Germany’s Siemens, and France’s Alstom.
Had Bill Bennett’s Social Credit government opted for holding a tender before purchasing a rapid-transit system, the eventual winning bid might have been significantly less expensive and carried more passengers.
This could have enabled rapid-transit to be extended sooner to other parts of the Lower Mainland. And that would have reduced gridlock and enhanced overall livability. Consider it a missed opportunity.
Instead, the region was stuck with a brutally costly driverless intermediate-capacity system in which new cars had to be bought from a single vendor, pushing up the price. And subsequent extensions, such as the Millennium Line and the Evergreen Line, had to be compatible with the original purchase.
That’s the real legacy of Expo 86.
Of course, SkyTrain was never about moving people. The real purpose was to spur real-estate developmentai??i??and in this regard, it has succeeded magnificently.
New Transit projects in the UK go through a rather onerous process before approval and the Leeds trolleybus projects did not stand up to scrutiny.
It would be fair to say that not one of the SkyTrain or mini-metro projects could have stood up against a truly independent review, which is too bad because by not having a rigorous process to review hugely expensive transit projects means, that $10 billion in public expenditure on the mini-metro system may have been wasted on a series of never ending “vanity projects”.
Back to Leeds, this must be a blow to trolleybus fans everywhere, but certainly in Leeds, the trolleybus just did not provide the benefits as promised by its promoters and now it is back to the drawing board.
From the BBC.
Leeds’ A?250m trolley bus scheme rejected
12 May 2016
Plans to build a A?250m trolley bus network in Leeds have been rejected by the government.
The Department for Transport (DfT) accepted a report from a planning inspector who said the scheme was “not in the public interest”.
Councillor Judith Blake said the city had been “let down” by the decision.
The DfT said its A?173m contribution towards the project would be used on other public transport schemes in the city.
The proposed project, known as the Leeds New Generation Transport (NGT) scheme, would have seen a nine-mile (14.8km) route built from the centre to the north and south of the city.
‘Very frustrating’
In his report, the planning inspector accepted there “was a strong need to improve public transport in Leeds”.
However, he added “the applicants have not demonstrated that the scheme would meet key objectives of supporting significant economic growth, reducing congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, or enhancing the quality of life in the area it would serve”.
The report also said the public inquiry into the scheme had received more than 1,700 letters of objection – “the most ever in decade”.
Ms Blake, Labour leader of Leeds City Council, said the delay in making the decision had been “very frustrating”.
“Leeds has been let down by successive governments in Whitehall on transport – first Supertram and now with NGT,” she said.
However, Ms Blake was grateful the city was still getting some help with other infrastructure projects.
“I’m pleased Leeds will still be allocated the funding and look forward to working with our partners to bring forward the public transport improvements Leeds so desperately needs as quickly as possible.”
The Capital MetroRail system in Austin Texas uses Stadler GTW diesel electric light rail cars.
TransLink’s and the City of Surrey’s much ballyhooed LRT really doesn’t offer the transit customer very much, except a very inconvenient transfer to the Expo Line and a 39 minute ride (if their are no glitches) on a dinky and crowed SkyTrain car to Vancouver.
The 320 Langley Centre to Surrey Central bus takes 51 minutes to complete its journey; the 395 Langley Centre to Surrey Central Express (limited stop/limited service) takes 40 minutes; the 501 Langley Centre to Surrey Central Station takes 58 minutes; thus a the time for a full transit journey from Langley to Vancouver would take anywhere from almost hour and a half to almost 2 hours, including transfer but not including total commute time.
The Rail for the Valley TramTrain concept could do the trip from Langley (200th Street) to Vancouver Central Station in 50 minutes, including two stops at Braid St. and Willingdon on the West side of the Fraser River and the 10 mph speed restriction on the Fraser River rail bridge.
The Leewood/Rail for the Valley Study time matrix shows that a 23 km. journey from 200th Street in Langley to Scott Road Station, including four stops, would take 22.5 minutes and an estimation of the 22km. trip from Scott Road to Vancouver would take 27.5 minutes – 50 minutes; a full 40 minutes faster than a combined LRT/SkyTrain trip to Vancouver!
The cost, around $400 million for track improvements, signalling and vehicles.
$500 million, certainly looks more affordable than the $2.5 billion Surrey LRT, designed as a poor man’s SkyTrain, especially if one can get to Vancouver faster and in more comfort.
The Stadler GTW light rail car could use city streets and operate as LRT if need be.
Old Zwei has touched this subject many times; Subways age badly and they cost a lot to keep in good condition.
Renewal costs are not generally factored in with budget calculations and tend to be a nasty surprise for politicians who were not around when the subway first opened.
Yet, despite this, subways are the number one transit vanity project of politicians on both sides of the 49th, that is, until the maintenance costs become due, then it is the taxpayer’s problem.
Ai??
An earlier cost comparison with American cities with transit. One should temper Portland’s higher costsBy Gina Mangieri Published:
The modern tram brings fast, reliable and user-friendly public transport toregion are wedded to their wheels.
Ai??The Expo Line, including its rolling stock, cost $1.23 billion, leaving the region saddled with debt for decades. Stephen Hui
The Stadler GTW light rail car could use city streets and operate as LRT if need be.
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