T.E.A.M’s LRT – Offering Much More Light Rail At A Far Cheaper Cost.
Again, old Zwie, the Curmudgeon Laurette of transit, is delighted that Vancouver T.E.A.M. mayoralty candidate Colleen Hardwick is talking LRT while those running against her are still talking dated light-metro.
So, let us have a look at costs of the three proposals.
T.E.A.M’s Hardwick’s 58 km of LRT
The Aprox. 7 km Millennium Line subway extension from Arbutus to UBC, not including cars, is estimated cost between $5 billion to $6 billion.
The 18 km Hurontarion LRT now under construction, including cars, is costing $1.4 billion or about $78 million/km.
Using the Hurontario LRT as an example the cost of T.E.A.M’s 58 km LRT proposal is $4.5 billion.
This is far cheaper than 7 km subway.
Forward Together’s Kennedy Stewart 18 km Loopie Line
As stated in a previous post, the cost of the Loop line based on the current per km cost of the Broadway subway at $526 billion/km, would be around $10 billion!
ABC’s Ken Sim’s approx. 18 km Hastings Street, 2nd Narrows Crossing,North Shore Line
Again, based on the cost of the current Broadway subway is estimated to cost a little due to the fact of major engineering needed to cross Burrard Inlet, would be well over $10 billion.
Put another way, T.E.A.M.’s $4.5 billion, 58 km, provides 22 km more LRT, at a quarter of the cost of the combined Forward/ABC’s $20 billion, 36 km of SkyTrain!
Final Notes:
- LRT will offer a higher Capacity than the SkyTrain proposals.
- Alstom, which now owns the proprietary Movia Automatic Light Metro (MALM) system, erroneously called SkyTrain (which is the name of the regional light metro system) has indicated it will cease production of then proprietary railway when the last paid orders are completed in 2025.
- Only seven of the often renamed MALM systems have been built since the late 1970’s
- Being a generic transit mode, there will always be suppliers for light rail, unlike the proprietary MALM system.
T.E.A.M’s LRT offering much more LRT at a far cheaper cost.
Mayoral candidates in Vancouver pitch their public transit plans
Posted Oct 5, 2022
Last Updated Oct 5, 2022
With less than two weeks left until Vancouver’s municipal election, mayoral candidates are hoping to move voters to the polls with their plans for public transit.
In a plan presented on Wednesday, councillor and mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick pitched her idea of getting rid of the Broadway Subway extension and developing four light rail lines across Vancouver.
Hardwick says creating the 58 kilometres of light rail can be done for the same price as the University of British Columbia (UBC) SkyTrain extension.
Incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart recently announced the “Vancouver Loop,” his plan to connect UBC to the Expo Line via the new Broadway Subway extension, and back around to Metrotown via 41st and 49th Avenue.
The extension along Broadway to UBC has been approved and is already well underway. As for the rest of the “loop” to Metrotown, there is currently no approvals or funding in place.
On Tuesday, candidate Ken Sim held an event with the mayors of North Vancouver, Maple Ridge, and Coquitlam to pitch a SkyTrain line to the North Shore along Hastings Street.
The line to the PNE would connect to North Vancouver and to the West Coast Express.
“To tackle the big transportation challenges facing our region, we need to work collaboratively with other municipalities and senior levels of government,” Sim said in a tweet.
Sim and the mayors say that presenting a “united voice” for transit needs in Metro Vancouver will help with funding, and getting new projects built.
When your spending $4.5 Billion, which includes $530 Million more for a new Skytrain Yard not included in the published $4.01 Billion price tag for 16 km of raised Skytrain right of way to the outer suburb of Langley, a rethink is necessary.
Even at its worse point, during its very troubled early operating career in 2019, before Covid 19, the $2.1 Billion Confederation LRT Line was moving 160,000 passengers a day, (80,000 less than expected). Pretty good for 12.5 km long line.
$4.5 Billion for a 16 km long Skytrain line extension that moves less than 40,000 passengers a day in and out of Langley all while the rest of the Expo Line needs billions more than already allocated to it, in upgrades to keep it operating at the same operating capacity, let alone, the many more billions over a period of a decade needed, to actually increase passenger capacity beyond current levels, just adding longer trains isn’t enough to future proof that line.
The team Vancouver plan is quite good. Read about it in detail on Daily Hive. Team is not completely against skytrain and suggest an extention from Arbutus to Burrard station. TEAM would start with putting the UBC SkyTrain planning project on hold, and performing a city-wide consultation on alternatives. Overall, think Team is better than ABC and Forward Vancouver.
ABC suggest a skytrain to PNE and North Vancouver. Instead of skytrain, Bring back BC Rail and make it start downtown, go east on existing tracks to the existing rail bridge to North Vancouver then continue to Prince George. Maybe a new rail bridge can built that can be used by LRT too. Build LRT from North Van to Metrotown and downtown.
Quoted “TransLink’s 2019 study also found that two LRT lines reaching UBC — along Broadway/10th Avenue/University Boulevard, and along 41st Avenue — would have an insufficient capacity to meet long-term demand. Each LRT line would have an ultimate capacity of 6,120 pphpd. Expo Line and Millennium Line each have a future ultimate capacity of about 25,000 pphpd when more trains are added and lengthened.”
Zwei replies; Translink and the CoV Engineering department deliberately reduced the capacity of LRT to a point that they felt it would be equal with buses. Earlier BC Transit studies found that LRT could carry as much or more than ICTS/ALRT
At the worst of Ottawa’s LRT troubles, the Confederation Line was moving 160,000 people a day in 2019, 80,000 less than expected, which means they planned for 240,000 passengers a day originally.
The King Street streetcar line in Toronto moves 84,000 a day, a 14 km long simple, surface, mixed traffic streetcar line with only 3 km of car reduced lanes (not zero car traffic).
The Queen Street Corridor in Toronto has 3 streetcar routes, the 501, 502 & 503, the last 2 simply are branch and peak hour services for the 501 route, they move 66,000 per day entirely in mixed traffic.
That means just 2 streetcar corridors which are far cheaper to build and run than a major rapid transit line (the King and Queen surface streetcar lines) with very little or no physical segregation from traffic move more passengers than your entire Millennium Line does per day. Imagine if they were upgraded to full LRT standards, which on a cost per km basis is between, 1/4 -1/3 the cost of an above grade Skytrain line, there’s an even bigger difference if you include tunnels.
Line 4 and 6 in Budapest Hungary, both surface tram/streetcar lines moves over 100,000 a day with less physical segregation from traffic than most new North American LRT lines.
Your Skytrain is just becoming too expensive for its own good. It now moves less than half the passengers of the Yonge Street Subway Line or Line #1 in Toronto (an expensive, conventional, steel wheeled, steel track, powered with standard electric motors, subway or heavy rail metro) but costs almost as much per km to build and operate (65%-80% of the per km building and operating costs).
Zwei replies: I hearken back to the TTC’s ART study from 1983; “ICTS almost costs more to build than a heavy rail metro with four times its capacity”
To further my point:
1. Budapest’s tram system averages over 1 million passengers a day. There are 6 systems in Europe that do this.
2. Many ( no fewer than 12 systems) European surface tram networks have at least one, if not more than one, surface tram routes that have a higher passenger capacity per hour, than the current capacity of the Millennium Line (4000 passengers/hour/direction)
3. There are more than 10 current tram routes with a greater passenger carrying capacity than the Millennium Line will have after its upgrades are complete (7500 p/h/d)
4.There are no fewer than 8 surface tram routes in Europe that exceeds 100,000 passengers a day.
5. It’s common in Europe and also happens in some some Australian, Asian, South American, African and a few North American tram networks where tram/streetcar routes or corridors service frequencies exceed 36 vehicles per hour.
So not only is LRT cheaper to build and maintain, the assertion by Translink that, LRT doesn’t have the future capabilities and capacity to match the Skytrain Millennium Line was bogus. They didn’t know any better and never bothered to research the other LRT and Tram operations. They also didn’t test model, LRT running in tunnels vs. Skytrains in tunnels (or BRT in tunnels for that matter), they only tested surface rights of ways, when they did the planning for the Broadway Subway Environmental Assessment study.
Why is tram capacity so low in Vancouver? In Europe, simple tramways can carry very large customer flows.
From Prague in the Czech republic, before Covid, the section from Karlovo Namesti east to I.P. Pavolova carries the routes
Route 4 – 8 min – 7.5 trains/h
Route 6 – 8 min – 7.5 trains/h
Route 10 – 8 min – 7.5 trains/h
Route 16 -8 min – 7.5 trains/h
Route 22 – 4 min – 15 trains/h
That’s 45 trains per hour or a train every 80 seconds. Peak hour capacity is over 12,000 pphpd and that is mostly single cars or coupled sets of the older Tatra trams, which is basically our version of the PCC trams.
There are plans to extend the newer cars by adding a fourth module, thus again increasing capacity to over `15,000 pphpd.
I know it’s BRT, don’t shoot please I’m using it to prove a point. On November 7, 2022 the Pie IX BRT Busway will open in the east end of Montreal. It’s runs north-south for 11 km, has 17 stations (2 in Laval and 15 in Montreal) and is expected to carry 70,000 passengers a day starting in November. On opening day during peak periods an articulated bus will run every 60 seconds in both directions, Laval buses will start using the Busway later this year and Regional Exo buses are expected to start using it in 2023. The busway will operate 24 hours a day. The total cost was $300 Million and has been under construction since 2018. The busway will eventually be converted to LRT, some stations and platforms would need to be extended and some surface geometry changed but it wouldn’t be difficult or expensive to do.
Even if it started construction today the price would only be around $450 -$500 Million
This is important, if you can build 11km of surface BRT busway for less than $500 Million in an expensive city and building environment like Montreal, imagine what could be possible in your community. Yes its convertible to surface LRT but it costs only $41 to $45 Million per km, that is 1/5th to 1/6th the cost per km of just the Langley Skytrain extension ($4.01 Billion), which doesn’t include the still unknown total cost (estimated at $530 Million) for OMC #5
The cost per km is even greater when you dig tunnels. The current tunnels under Broadway are budgeted at $516 million per km. If you tried it today, not at the 2019 prices Translink is paying but the 2024 or 2025 prices you will be paying for an extension to UBC, it’s between $591million – $668 million per km or somewhere between 1/11th – 1/15th the cost compared to a surface right of way, depending on which starting year you use for the tunnel costs 2019 or 2025.
By the way, the Pie IX Busway will more people than the new Skytrain extension will and busways of this type could move up to 160,000 passengers a day, before severe operating issues would appear. Switch to LRT and you have even more capacity.
Yes, Skytrain with a grade separated right of way is faster however, the time difference is just not worth the cost difference. When the building cost difference is so great that, even when you consider the nearly geometrically growing operating cost of BRT (as passenger levels increase) even if you never consider conversion to LRT, the monstrously expensive Skytrain construction and high operating costs should make you pause.