The Other SkyTrain Saga – Part 2
It just gets better and better.
If we look at the traffic flows for Broadway, which are under 4,000 pphpd, there is no way a subway would meet any honest business plan requirements.
But in BC, business plans are a dime a dozen, you get what you pay for.
It is interesting that those promoting the Broadway subway, are doing so to fulfill there own agendas of land development or civic hoopla, not caring at all about the taxpayer.
Vision(less) Vancouver TransLink, and the majority of Metro mayors are extremely dishonest promoting the Broadway subway, so dishonest in fact that they should be prevented from operating TransLink.
Another nail in the coffin for Scarborough subway extension: Editorial
Toronto taxpayers could be on the hook for an additional $165 million for the controversial Scarborough subway extension. Time for a re-think.
The arguments against building the controversial Scarborough subway extension just keep rolling in and adding up.
The latest? The city could be on the hook for an additional $165 million in costs for the ill-conceived $3.56-billion project.
Thatai??i??s because the Building Industry and Land Development Association, better known as BILD, is arguing it should not have to pay development charges totaling that amount for the extension because planning justifications for it are flawed, ridership numbers have been exaggerated, and the city failed to spell out the operating costs for the subway as required by provincial legislation.
If the councillors in Toronto are smart, they’ll scrap the subway idea; and if the Vision councillors were smart, they’d be going ahead with the tram line on Broadway instead of scheming for the subway line to make SNC Lavalin boring the tunnel lots of money and to have Bombardier sell TransLink its crappy s-trains which no reputable transit organization in the world wants. Believe it or not, articulated trolleybuses have more extrinsic passenger capacity than the lousy s-trains in the tunnel for the subway proposed by the Vision party in Vancouver (4,980 people in real time at any instant).
http://www.railforthevalley.com/latest-news/the-other-skytrain-saga/#comment-114487
“Intrinsic and Extrinsic passenger capacity in the context of transit”
When you talk about passenger capacity in pph of the transit system, it is an intrinsic property such as pressure in “psia” or enthalpy in “BTU per pound mass”. When you talk about the number of people on the transit system, it is an extrinsic property – the magnitude. It is important to understand the difference between the number of people on the transit system (extrinsic) and the passenger capacity in pph of the transit system (intrinsic). Ask anyone at TransLink to explain what intrinsic and extrinsic mean in the context of transit. You’ll get plenty of confused looks from the planners at TransLink. Taxpayers are entrusting billions of dollars to the “planners” at TransLink for their “expertise” to design transit, nevertheless.
“Headway is a measurement of the distance or time between vehicles in a transit system. The precise definition varies depending on the application, but it is most commonly measured as the distance from the tip of one vehicle to the tip of the next one behind it, expressed as the time it will take for the trailing vehicle to cover that distance. A “shorter” headway signifies a more frequent service…. metro systems operate with headways on the order of 1 to 5 minutes, and vehicles on a freeway can have as little as 2 seconds headway between them.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headway
Articulated trolleybuses along Broadway can operate at a service frequency of two minutes, easily. Along Broadway: the articulated trolleybus route from Commercial Drive to Arbutus Street over six kilometres in Vancouver with 25 stations spaced 250 metres apart can carry 6,000 people at any instant: 25 stops per direction * one articulated trolleybus per stop * two directions * 120 people per articulated trolleybus = 6,000 people. This is the extrinsic passenger capacity of the trolleybuses from Commercial Drive to Arbutus Street, and it exceeds the extrinsic capacity of the subway (4,980 people) by 20%.
In other words, the lowly articulated trolleybus can remove 20% more cars from the roads than the s-train in the tunnel for the subway. Huh? Does anyone at TransLink know what he or she is doing? It sure doesn’t look like it to me.
Here are my two predictions for 2016: first, TransLink which has built crappy s-train lines having less extrinsic passenger capacity than the extrinsic passenger capacity of trolleybus routes will be hammered for fraud. Second, clueless Peter Fassbender, Minister of TransLink, will be gone for not being smart enough to recognize how s-train is a scam which has cost taxpayers billions of dollars to make transit worse than if inexpensive trolleybuses were used, instead.
Eric its kind of complicated, the guys in Toronto who are taking the city to the OMB (Ontario Municipal Board) are the same guys a few years ago who were telling the City of Toronto’s, council members in the Scarborough area to fight LRT in the first place and get a subway instead. They don’t want the subway now because developers have to pay some pretty hefty development charges for the subway extension. The mayor rightly so does not want to reopen this can of worms, again. Having grown up in Scarborough I can tell you that the residents don’t trust LRT because they have never seen it before and yes, it might take away some road lanes. They were convinced by the province and the then Metro Toronto Council back in 1981 that, the Scarborough RT would be cheaper than a subway and way better than the LRT technology that was originally planned for that line. Plus, the forced transfer from the subway to the RT at Kennedy subway station always adds between 5-15 minutes to your travel time to Scarborough City Centre. So local residents just don’t believe anyone when people like me or other city planners say yes, LRT is not a slow streetcar its just as fast as a subway, it just depends on the quality of the right of way the vehicle uses. They have been screwed by the rest of Toronto and there is no more trust, that’s why they want a subway. They know what it is and what it can do. The Toronto Star’s insistence that LRT is better/cheaper I bet, only convinces people who don’t live in Scarborough or remember how it felt when they realized they had been screwed by the Province and the rest of Toronto.
Well the RT turned out to be a dud! Sorry Skytrain fans, Drivers or not! The cars were really small claustrophobic tin cans that couldn’t handle the curves designed for the ALRV’s (Articulated Light Rail Vehicles) originally intended for the line. Those ALRV’s originally designed for the line, which were exactly, like the ALRV streetcars Toronto still use, are relatively comfortable, don’t shut down if the line gets too much snow or freezing rain and don’t squeak and squeal like a banshee coming out of hell, on every turn like the RT cars do. Which is really ironic because the RT cars have flexible trucks designed exactly for that purpose, so they could be used on tighter curves than traditionally trucked streetcars could normally handle. Daily now for almost 3 decades, Toronto’s Articulated streetcars handle far tighter curves and only give a moderate amount of phlange squeal on these impossibly tight radius turns of 30-35 feet, or 10-11 Metres. One of the big design considerations of the Toronto’s new Streetcars is that they be able to handle those very old tight radius turns, and considering their length, they do it quite well. The standard minimum turning radius for modern North American and European LRV’s is 25 Metres or 80 feet! You can have modern LRV’s that turn far tighter turns but it costs you with non standard designs and parts.
Thanks for this explanation. How does speed or trip time of Skytrain vs. bus enter into the calculation?