Winnipeg | Transit | Rapid Transit

[Greco Roman]

Originally Posted by madsad

There are no formal plans or commitments for light rail in Saskatoon of any sort. All there is is hearsay, wishful thinking, and conjecture from politicians, etc. I don't know where you are getting this from.

http://www.saskatoon.ca/org/city_planning/resources/publications/future_growth_study.pdf

States that Saskatoon is strongly considering LRT and will need to secure land with railway lines for the future implementation of LRT and would also be used for bicycle and pedestrian pathways, when the city has enough demand to warrant an LRT system.

[Andy6]

The weather argument isn't that it is impossible to have a cold-weather LRT system. It is that it will drive up costs by forcing Winnipeg to choose a system that is custom designed for the city's very unusual climate conditions. It also makes proposed downtown routes that rely on laying rails down the centre of Portage or Main Street seem awkward, at very least, given the icy conditions and extreme cold that would make it difficult for people to get on and off in the middle of those streets. While it is true that buses can break down in cold weather, a broken-down bus doesn't bring other bus traffic to a halt. A broken-down LRT car can potentially shut down the entire line.

[Greco Roman]

Originally Posted by Andy6

The weather argument isn't that it is impossible to have a cold-weather LRT system. It is that it will drive up costs by forcing Winnipeg to choose a system that is custom designed for the city's very unusual climate conditions. It also makes proposed downtown routes that rely on laying rails down the centre of Portage or Main Street seem awkward, at very least, given the icy conditions and extreme cold that would make it difficult for people to get on and off in the middle of those streets. While it is true that buses can break down in cold weather, a broken-down bus doesn't bring other bus traffic to a halt. A broken-down LRT car can potentially shut down the entire line.

Cold weather has disrupted Edmonton's LRT system, but not often and any delays are quickly resolved Weather hasn't stopped them from expanding the system.

Anyways, I'm just going to agree to disagree with you. Good night and keep fighting your good fight.

[nordique]

they have lrt in moscow don't they?

edit: my point being that snow/cold weather is a weak excuse for why lrt isn't gonna work here.

[DAVEinEDMONTON]

Originally Posted by supai

In terms of average temps it doesn't seem to be too much of a difference. Edmonton does have extreme cold but there is definetly much more days above zero in the winter. Given how much farther north it is quite interesting.

Edmonton gets Chinooks just like Calgary...not as often or as strong but enough to warm up a lot of the winter days.

[sledhead35]

i agree, winter conditions are not reason enough. but im wondering if light rail can tolerate the kind of shifting that occurs here?

[vid]

Can freight rail tolerate it?

With all that cold weather how the hell did you guys ever manage to have a street car system? It must have broken down all the times, and icy roads were killing people left and right!

[Greco Roman]

Originally Posted by vid

Can freight rail tolerate it?

With all that cold weather how the hell did you guys ever manage to have a street car system? It must have broken down all the times, and icy roads were killing people left and right!

Exactly!!!!!

How does freight rail exist? How did the street car system ever manage? My goodness, the delays must have been and I guess still are staggering

As I said before, weather is not a valid reason to discount LRT outright.

[Andy6]

Originally Posted by Greco Roman

Exactly!!!!!

How does freight rail exist? How did the street car system ever manage? My goodness, the delays must have been and I guess still are staggering

As I said before, weather is not a valid reason to discount LRT outright.

The streetcars moved very slowly compared to a modern LRT. They were rickety wooden boxes on wheels. How often they were delayed because of weather I don't know, although they were so small that they could probably could have been pulled off the track fairly easily if they got stuck. They were also lethal -- streetcar-related injuries and fatalities were very frequent in Winnipeg in the early 20th century.

The point about the weather was that it could make acquisition of an LRT system even more exorbitantly expensive than it would normally be, since whatever system Winnipeg bought couldn't really be an off-the-shelf system but would require extra engineering for the city's extreme temperatures and slushy roads. I don't know that for sure, but I'm at least trying to think through the practicalities of this idea.

[DAVEinEDMONTON]

Originally Posted by Andy6

The point about the weather was that it could make acquisition of an LRT system even more exorbitantly expensive than it would normally be, since whatever system Winnipeg bought couldn't really be an off-the-shelf system but would require extra engineering for the city's extreme temperatures and slushy roads. I don't know that for sure, but I'm at least trying to think through the practicalities of this idea.

Yes...it cost tens of millions extra to put heaters in the LRT cars and the cost of keeping the snow and ice off the rails and the LRT stations has almost broken both cities municipal budgets...lol

Andy6...you have no basis in fact to suggest that their are extra costs because of cold weather...this whole arguement is flawed...other cold Canadian cities have successful LRT systems...weather is not a factor.

[Andy6]

Originally Posted by DAVEinEDMONTON

Yes...it cost tens of millions extra to put heaters in the LRT cars and the cost of keeping the snow and ice off the rails and the LRT stations has almost broken both cities municipal budgets...lol

Andy6...you have no basis in fact to suggest that their are extra costs because of cold weather...this whole arguement is flawed...other cold Canadian cities have successful LRT systems...weather is not a factor.

Well, for example, when I lived in Boston, the transit authority had purchased fancy LRT-type streetcars for the Green Line from an Italian manufacturer. While they were working all right when I moved there, I was told that they had had a lot of problems with them initially, requiring expensive retrofitting, because the Italian manufacturer was not really familiar with snowy winter conditions of the sort that Boston often enjoys.

Again, you seem to be missing the point that I am making, which is not that it is impossible to have an LRT city in a cold climate (although no Canadian city with an LRT has nearly as cold winters as Winnipeg does -- a claim that I have backed up with actual statistics rather than vague opinionating) but that the requirements for things like extra heating and insulation and protection of the undercarriage from road salts and so on will reduce the range of choices open to Winnipeg's transit authority and increase the amount of special engineering that would have to be done on the cars that Winnipeg would purchase, further increasing the price (which would be unusually high anyway due to the small number of cars that Winnipeg would be ordering).

It is beside the point in any event, since even if weather were not a factor and Winnipeg could buy any LRT system out there, it seems likely to me that even the cheapest of them would be unaffordable. But maybe someone has some actual statistics on how much an LRT costs?

[vid]

Originally Posted by Andy6

The point about the weather was that it could make acquisition of an LRT system even more exorbitantly expensive than it would normally be, since whatever system Winnipeg bought couldn't really be an off-the-shelf system but would require extra engineering for the city's extreme temperatures and slushy roads. I don't know that for sure, but I'm at least trying to think through the practicalities of this idea.

You know, the TTC has to have cars custom designed for its system because it has the sharpest turning radii of any street car system in the world. All you need is the technology to make tracks usable on the dozen or so days it goes below -30.

Why would Boston buy LRT from a company in a country that hardly sees snow? It's their own fault if they went with a company that has no experience. (In Thunder Bay's transit contracts, previous experience with conditions similar to ours is important for a proposal to be considered. If your company has only provided vehicles for Mediterranean climates, we want nothing to do with you.)

Insulation and heating? How thick does this insulation have to be? You're only a few degrees cooler than Edmonton. Both cities use many of the same buses. It can't be that bad. I guess buses are specially engineered for Winnipeg's climate too, right? With extra insulation and special treatments to protect them from salt. That must cost a lot.

[Andy6]

Originally Posted by vid

You know, the TTC has to have cars custom designed for its system because it has the sharpest turning radii of any street car system in the world. All you need is the technology to make tracks usable on the dozen or so days it goes below -30.

Right, and that costs the TTC something, just as the technology you're suggesting would cost Winnipeg something.

Why would Boston buy LRT from a company in a country that hardly sees snow? It's their own fault if they went with a company that has no experience. (In Thunder Bay's transit contracts, previous experience with conditions similar to ours is important for a proposal to be considered. If your company has only provided vehicles for Mediterranean climates, we want nothing to do with you.)

Right. So you're limiting your options and increasing the price that you can expect to pay as a result of there being fewer potential competitors for your contract.

Insulation and heating? How thick does this insulation have to be? You're only a few degrees cooler than Edmonton. Both cities use many of the same buses. It can't be that bad. I guess buses are specially engineered for Winnipeg's climate too, right? With extra insulation and special treatments to protect them from salt. That must cost a lot.

It probably doesn't cost that much because the cost can be spread across the hundreds of buses that the City of Winnipeg would order, and across the current and future orders from other smaller cold-weather cities that also order buses (like Thunder Bay). In the case of LRTs, Winnipeg's order would be tiny, and for any given manufacturer it would be unlikely that the potential market for LRTs in cities as cold as Winnipeg would be worth making any production adjustments for at all, unless they were fully paid by Winnipeg. In other words, it might well turn out that no manufacturer is going to say, "we'll eat part of the cost of weatherproofing the Winnipeg order because if we do we'll grab a bigger slice of the extremely-cold-city LRT market" -- there really isn't any significant market of that kind, Thunder Bay's aspirations to LRT notwithstanding. So the cost goes up. You're right that we don't know by how much. How much LRT will cost is something I'd want to know before I committed my city to buying it.

[DAVEinEDMONTON]

Originally Posted by vid

You know, the TTC has to have cars custom designed for its system because it has the sharpest turning radii of any street car system in the world. All you need is the technology to make tracks usable on the dozen or so days it goes below -30.

Why would Boston buy LRT from a company in a country that hardly sees snow? It's their own fault if they went with a company that has no experience. (In Thunder Bay's transit contracts, previous experience with conditions similar to ours is important for a proposal to be considered. If your company has only provided vehicles for Mediterranean climates, we want nothing to do with you.)

Insulation and heating? How thick does this insulation have to be? You're only a few degrees cooler than Edmonton. Both cities use many of the same buses. It can't be that bad. I guess buses are specially engineered for Winnipeg's climate too, right? With extra insulation and special treatments to protect them from salt. That must cost a lot.

The higher costs of LRT are not from insulating and heating LRT vehicles...it is from the costs of building the stations, special use bridges, underpasses where needed, underground holding tanks for water to eliminate flooding, tunnel construction if you go fully underground and for land acquisition to create right of ways.

[newflyer]

Originally Posted by h0twired

What route did you take?

Unless you went from one end to the other and there was some unforseen accident or breakdown, I highly doubt you were on the C-Train for an hour.

I took the train from Brentwood to Southland .. there was long delay between Chinnok and Heritage. I think one of the train ahead of us brokedown.

[newflyer]

Originally Posted by Andy6

There's nothing "cosmic" about it other than the astronomical cost. Rail public transport is extremely expensive. Even Toronto can't afford to build any more of it, and the Saskatoon thing is an urban legend. Does anyone even know how much an LRT from the University of Manitoba to downtown Winnipeg would cost? Trying to find a reasonable ballpark figure would be a good first step toward assessing the merits of such a proposal. I'm guessing it would be something on the order of $500-750 million, but I don't know for sure.

I am guessing it would run over 800 million.

[madsad]

Originally Posted by Greco Roman

http://www.saskatoon.ca/org/city_planning/resources/publications/future_growth_study.pdf

States that Saskatoon is strongly considering LRT and will need to secure land with railway lines for the future implementation of LRT and would also be used for bicycle and pedestrian pathways, when the city has enough demand to warrant an LRT system.

Light Rapid Transit (LRT) & the Public Transit System

Studies have been conducted on the relationship between land use and LRT usage. It was reported in the 1992 Transportation Study that in terms of operating costs per passenger, an LRT system was found to be feasible in CBDs with commercial space of 2 million square metres or greater. In 1998, Saskatoon’s CBD contained 541,451 square metres. Clearly, Saskatoon today is not large enough to support the operation of an LRT. However, there may be a need to examine the feasibility of securing abandoned railway corridors or other underutilised rights-of-way for future public transit use. The 1992 Transportation Study concluded that while the need to secure land for future transit corridors is not warranted now, it would be appropriate from a planning perspective to secure abandoned rail lines as there are other possible uses for these linear corridors (i.e., roads, bicycle/pedestrian paths, open space).

The future form of Saskatoon will have tremendous economic and operational impact on the public transit system. The following requirements are important to the future efficiency of
the Saskatoon Transit System.

This stuff is a bunch of ifs and maybes. The City has obviously not committed to the smart growth principles in this document anyway, as evidenced by the rampant sprawl in Saskatoon (with token "new urbanist gestures", of course). There is no indication nor requirement they adhere to the transit portion of this document either.

By extrapolating the CBD commercial space requirement of 2 million square meters to the population (from Stoon's current floorspace of 500,000 square meters, a 1:4 ratio), reveals a population baseline of 800,000. But we know cities of 500,000 – 600,000 can support light rail. How long has it taken for Stoon's population to grow from 197,000 to the current 202,000? 15 years? More? So we'll consider LRT 200 years from now...okay, but how is this relevant to Winnipeg?

Furthermore, the document mentions that this acquired rail right of way would serve "public transit" uses, not necessarily light rail. In fact, this rail ROW would make a great busway for BRT, particularly considering Saskatoon already has 4 BRT-lite routes in service.

If you want to suggest other small cities considering light rail, try Victoria. They are actually in the design phase of a light rail line from Downtown to parts west. By the way, the initial section of this project down Douglas Street will be...wait for it...a busway!

[1ajs]

Originally Posted by nordique

they have lrt in moscow don't they?

edit: my point being that snow/cold weather is a weak excuse for why lrt isn't gonna work here.

note: Winnipeg is allot! colder then Moscow! i have been watching the temps there... were more like a Siberian weather.... i know this cause i got neighbors that moved here from Siberia recently...

[MalcolmTucker]

1, the weather argument is bogus, the only part of Calgary's system that has trouble when there is a cold snap simultaneously with accumulating snow, are the switches, which don't seem to be able to melt snow fast enough to operate automatically (to the point where a manager doesn't have to inspect to prevent derailments). The only switches which had this problem was the in street running switches, and for an extra 100k a switch you can buy one that is designed more for a Russian street car system. (Calgary hadn't had cold related delays in a long time, it probably came from operating near full capacity where any small problem can throw everything off)

2. Light rail costs more because of grade seperation, and in most cases exclusive right of way. You look at systems like Portlands Street Car as light rail without exclusive ROW and they built a 4 mile line for $70 million

3. I wouldn't expect there to be ROW like in Calgary and Edmonton used in Winnipeg. If there is room to install busways, there would be room to install semiexclusive ROW like there is on some Toronto streetcar lines now. I wouldn't expect Winnipegs project as I have heard described being north of $400 million (not including a new maintenance hub)

4. You make back your invest later in a lower operating cost base. Less diesel, less employees, more passengers = more money. To build the current expansion of the LRT, Edmonton borowed millions based on paying it off with the yearly gas tax money from Ottawa. There is not reason Winnipeg couldn't do the same. Calgary went heavily in debt to pay for the LRT too, with a debt load nearing $2 billion in 1990. All you need is one Mayor to start teh ball rolling, and then it will be done, and no one will complain. Just don't build a Cadillac system at first.

[Andy6]

I don't want to push the "weather argument" too far, but Calgary's climate bears little resemblance to Winnipeg's, e.g. Calgary has 48 days with above-zero highs in December-January-February as compared to 9 days in Winnipeg, and 5 days per year with lows below -30 as opposed to 14 in Winnipeg. Average January high in Calgary is -2.8 C; in Winnipeg it's -12.7 C.

Toronto's "semiexclusive ROW" for a few streetcars doesn't really qualify as "rapid" transit. It's barely better than a bus. I don't see that being enough of an improvement to justify spending $400 million to replace a single bus route with streetcars, supposing that were the cost.