Comments

1. Haveacow says:

   December 29, 2013 at 2:32 pm

   I am surprised that it took Railway Journal that long to pick that up, the announcement was back in late November? I am also surprised that few have picked up on that the LRT portion of the contract is only $536,000,000 for 19 km of surface route and about $282,000,000 for up to 16 km of very light BRT service to Cambridge. The BRT people should have been all over that, even though its not real BRT but a very much glorified express bus with a few km of painted bus only lanes but mostly running in mixed traffic. However, they did heavily invest in intersection signal control and bypass lanes at those same intersections as well as quite a few new buses for this system, to be fair.

   It is interesting how much was purchased for $818,000,000 compared to the Skytrain. To be sure both the LRT and BRT systems do not have the carrying capacity of the Skytrain but, those capacities can be increased over time very cheaply and all the Cambridge BRT systems can be used for the whole Grand River Transit System not just the BRT program buses.

   Once the LRT system is extended in the near future to Cambridge they will have made a serious investment in their whole transit system, all for only slightly more than the Evergreen line. The next phase not only includes switching BRT to LRT in Cambridge they included a big investment in BRT like signaling control all over the K. W. area as well as upgrades to major bus corridors feeding the central LRT line. By 2031, spending around 1.4 -1.5 billion they will have 35 km of LRT line and have made major investments in speeding up many busy area bus corridors, all for how many kilometres of Skytrain.