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Originally Posted by Dado
That's just it - the bridges were "needed" to mitigate the trench. The entire trench itself is a monument to the extravagance of BRT. With LRT there would have been no need for a trench. Even a train passing every 2 minutes in each direction can be handled. It would just be an at-grade line that widened the then-existing railbed, an underpass (down and up) at Island Park and simple (but not "cheap") stations. No other bridges, no blasting, no carting away of thousands of cubic metres of rock, no sprawling multi-level stations like Tunney's and Westboro.
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Certainly some bridges are required to ensure access across a trench. My point was that too many of them were built, as Northwestern, Banting, Hinchey and Carruthers are not busy streets and have bridges nearby. Money could have been saved by not building them.
With peak headways of two minutes, you’d be looking at a train every minute on average. I’m sure that would have required a long underpass at Holland and Parkdale, and a below grade station at Tunney’s Pasture. That whole area is really busy during peak periods. Further, I’m not sure whether pressure to have underpasses at Churchill, Lanark and Carleton could have been resisted. In fact, the local community could well have insisted that the entire segment be below grade. Lastly, there would have been the incremental cost of extending the LRT line from Dominion to Lincoln Fields (the existing BRT service uses the Ottawa River Parkway).
I’m also curious as to what the arrangement / alignment would have been through the downtown core. Would Albert Street have been converted to a transit mall?
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Haydon will have neither. He's living in a dream world where busways cost $2.6M/km. The Southwest Transitway through Barrhaven is slated to cost $79M for 3 km - or $26M/km. He's an order of magnitude out, and the Southwest Transitway in Barrhaven is pretty close to ideal: it follows a long-time rail corridor for much of the length so there are few roads to cross nor is there much of a need to trench it or put it in a gully. The rest of the route is in a reserved corridor, so no need to move anything out of the way or go around things. One of the stations will use an underpass for pedestrians (i.e. oversized culvert) rather than a skyway. I think there's all of one road grade separation. Short of building a busway through the Greenbelt, realistically suburban busway doesn't get any better than this - and still it costs 10x what he thinks it costs.
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$2.6M/km is clearly too low for busways. Perhaps, he is basing that number on the cost of bus lanes or HOV lanes, which can be used in some cases by BRT services. Even in that case, the number is at the low end.
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Haydon also thinks that Pittsburgh's LRT system makes a suitable comparison for Ottawa since it also has a BRT system. Well their 40 km LRT system gets all of 26,000 riders per day. Here in Ottawa, the Transitway carries something like 240,000. Meanwhile, out in Calgary, their 45 km LRT system carries upwards of 250,000. The 8 km O-Train carries a third of Pittsburgh's ridership! Demographically, Pittsburgh has a long-term declining population - in other words, it has road and other infrastructure built to handle a larger population. It is a poor comparison to Ottawa for just about anything, yet time and again he cites high LRT costs (along with their somewhat lower but still high BRT costs) as if this somehow proves that LRT costs more and that we in Ottawa should not go for LRT. The figures he cited recently in the Sun ($2.16 BRT and $3.79 LRT) were from 1999 and in US$ (I know this because I found another study from 2000 with a bar chart that had bars at approximately those numbers). More recent numbers are considerably higher for both. Among cities with both LRT and BRT, Pittsburgh seems to be unique in having higher LRT than BRT costs per passenger. Funny that he (and Bonsall) should choose to pick Pittsburgh as a comparison rather than another Canadian city with rapid transit ridership far closer to what we have... the mind just boggles.
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He may be using Pittsburgh because it is the only city in North America to my knowledge with both an LRT system and a busway-based BRT system. I agree that it is a not relevant comparison in this case. If he continues in that direction, he won’t be successful.
I have no problem with using Calgary as the benchmark LRT system since it follows best practices. With regard to BRTs, the TransMilenio system in Bogota has set the bar for best practices and there’s no North American (or Australian) system that comes close to it. Unfortunately, since it is located in a developing country with different cost structures and crowding tolerances, it would be inappropriate to compare its cost performance with that of Calgary.
Still, from an operational perspective, TransMilenio has demonstrated conclusively what a BRT system can achieve if it follows best practices:
- Capacity on par with that of many metro systems. Thus, a similar system in Ottawa with a tunnel would meet combined OC Transpo and STO demand for 2031 and beyond.
- Significant reduction in the incidence of bus jams thanks to average dwell times of 15 to 20 seconds (despite severe overcrowding) and the use of multi-berth stations.
Really, from a users’ perspective, it’s basically the same as a rail system, except that express service can also be included. What is unfortunate is that adopting this model in Ottawa was never considered, even though many of the building blocks are already in place. Instead, a sub-optimal bus option was developed (perhaps as a strawman) and it naturally came up short in terms of capacity. That’s what Haydon should be focussing his criticisms on.
Haydon should also be stressing that a downtown bus tunnel and completion of the Transitway would give the City the following:
- Fast, direct, frequent service from downtown to Orleans (Trim and Millennium), Barrhaven, Kanata and Riverside South, and everything along the way (including the airport, major shopping malls, hospitals, the big universities and Scotiabank Place). The conversion of the O-Train corridor to a busway would allow us to extend this direct service to locations along Carling Avenue.
- The retention of express bus services.
- Seamless integration with the STO and its Rapibus system.
Without a doubt, this would generate significantly higher ridership than the recommended rail plan, which comes up short in all of these areas.
Further, the conversion costs to LRT and the cost of building a rail spur/loop to Hull would be avoided, and disruption during construction would be much less. True, annual operating costs would be higher. However, the system would be much more cost-efficient and reliable than today’s.
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As I said, if Haydon goes to the OMB he'll have neither facts nor common sense on his side. As for being disillusioned with the process, well I'm disillusioned with a process that allowed him and Bonsall to create the Transitway in the first place.
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Haydon just needs to adjust his focus. If he does that, he’ll have a much stronger case with the facts and common sense back on his side.
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