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Originally Posted by Dado
Northwestern serves Ottawa's largest mosque. Exactly how is it that it would not be at least somewhat busy?
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Carleton with its bridge and traffic light on Scott is right next door. Only one of the two bridges was really needed.
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True, and they take about 15 seconds to clear an intersection. So that's 20-25 seconds depending on allowance for approach in every minute. Considering that many intersections work using 1 minute cycles it would be no worse than those. And that's for a volume of passengers we haven't even seen yet. Depending on train length, we'd be at 3-5 minutes right now (well, that's not quite fair: ridership might also be higher).
No, it could have been at grade there too. It's not *that* busy. There are plenty of crossings in Calgary that are busier than Tunney's Pasture.
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Each cycle needs to serve the north-south traffic as well as the traffic turning northward from Scott. Parkdale is a busy two-lane street that is linked to the Queensway and the Ottawa River Parkway. It along with Holland provide access to one of the largest employment centres in Ottawa and the only other access is from the Ottawa River Parkway.
It is quite true that peak headways to meet today’s demand would higher than two minutes. However, demand is expected to continue to grow in the future and headways would be expected to become shorter over time. Eventually grade separation would become highly desirable, if not a must, at significant cost and disruption.
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The community at large was ignored when it came to choice of technology, so I'm not sure why they'd be listened to on matters of grade separation. Moreover, there were still tracks in place as far west as Ross/Banting as late as 1982 and as far west as McRae in 1970, so it's not like tracks would be unfamiliar to most of the people living there at the time.
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As we can see from the reaction to proposed upgrades and service expansions to the Georgetown rail corridor in Toronto, the presence of tracks (even active ones) does not remove community pressure to have the tracks put below grade. In the Toronto case, the pressure appears to have succeeded.
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That was the original plan for the Transitway iirc. I don't think the current system is what the transit planners wanted for either bus or rail. It's possible - though this is purely speculation - that BRT on the surface was regarded as a temporary measure and therefore no point in dedicating a whole street to it and then undoing it a few years later.
Sparks might also have been the chosen route had rail been chosen. At the time the Rideau Centre complex didn't exist but plans were underway for it, so a light rail routing past the old train station and then through the current Rideau Centre complex grounds would have been possible.
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It’s too bad a transit mall on Albert was not pursued. It could have yielded significant benefits for either bus or rail options (or both). It would have been a challenge to implement at the time, but less so than today.
Sparks would not have been an ideal choice, given that it is located away from the densest downtown streets.
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That's where the number is coming from but he's using it for a busway. I swear he's stuck in the early 80s when the cost of the system was supposed to be $100M for the ~30km network.
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Like I said originally, I agree he needs realistic numbers.
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/99887786%40N00/2468594299/
TransMilenio uses 4-lane cross-sections in the busiest corridors, just like the would-be bus tunnel (really, tunnels) in Ottawa. Once you've done that you have to be prepared to compare it to 4-track rail systems (i.e. two twin-track rail tunnels) with respect to capacity.
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TransMilenio only has four lanes in its busiest sections. For the other sections, only passing lanes at stations are required. A similar system in Ottawa would probably have, at maturity, four lanes from Hurdman to Lebreton. TransMilenio in Bogota is an at-grade system so the fairest comparison (i.e., apples-to-apples) would be with a 4-track at-grade LRT system, not with a metro. I am not aware of any such system, although I guess one could always multiply by two the capacity of the busiest 2-track at-grade LRT line with adjustments for differing crowding tolerances to obtain a comparable figure.
Irrespective, you only need sufficient capacity to serve future demand levels in Ottawa. A TransMilenio system in Ottawa that is grade-separated (at least in its busy central portion) would meet that threshold.
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I note also that pedestrians seem to be allowed to cross the TransMilenio at grade, above, and below:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darilov/2329414198/
"This is our cheap subway system. El Transmilenio"
I guess it's held in as high a regard as the Transitway is here...
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This does not correspond to what I've heard. TransMilenio is well regarded by the local population. Their main beef is that it is over-crowded. However, such complaints are typical of transit systems in developing countries.
I knew you were going to post that picture. It would be interesting to find out what was the cause of the backup. Was it volume related or was it due to something else? Remember, TransMilenio is an at-grade system. Such systems, whether bus or rail based, have to deal with intersections (i.e., cars, people and traffic lights). Was the delay due to a traffic accident at one of the intersections? Was it due to some protest? A window falling off a high-rise hotel? With a tunnel, such a system in Ottawa would be grade-separated in its central portions.
Boarding and alighting on TransMilenio is the same as for a train (i.e., fare collection before boarding, four wide doors across each bus, levelled boarding, etc.) and the drivers are not peppered with questions. So it would not be subject to the biggest sources of delays Ottawa currently faces. Further, dwell times in Ottawa would be less than in Bogota due to much lower levels of crowding.
Rail systems are not immune to delays. When I listen in the morning to Toronto traffic reports on TV, I hear about problems with its rail system and that as a result shuttle bus service is being provided.
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All the buses here are special high-capacity, high-floor buses with opposite-side doors. That would tend to eliminate express buses from using the system unless there are platforms on the right-hand side of the main corridors (which there aren't) or people don't mind boarding buses from the middle of their neighbourhood streets on mini-platforms. Indeed, further research revealed that the system relies on feeder buses (painted green) that bring people to the main corridors where they transfer onto the trunk buses (the red articulated buses), though some of these red articulated buses are what might be termed "trunk expresses" that skip certain stops (there'd be little point in having four lanes if such routes did not exist). At any rate, neighbourhood-to-downtown express buses as we understand them don't exist on the TransMilenio. Other than the bus design and platform arrangements this picture looks disturbingly familiar I'm afraid.
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TransMilenio is described throughout the following document --
http://itdp.pmhclients.com/index.php/microsite/brt_planning_guide_in_english . Part II and Part III are the most relevant (chapters 8 and 11 in particular). The document is a useful read if you want to know more about the problems with BRT systems and how they can be addressed.
Under a similar system here, our regular Transitway routes would be served by high-floor articulated buses with four doors (two in the front and two in the back) on their right side (i.e., the same as today) and use high platforms to ensure levelled boarding. For the expresses, we would have two choices:
- Hub-and-spoke with “trunk expresses” (to use your term) using the same articulated buses as the regular routes.
- Low-floor double-decker buses (two-door, two-staircase model) using low-level platforms.
At least initially, either option would work. Eventually though (say in 20years) the first option, which would still be considerably faster than rail because of the skipping of many stops (probably half of the stops would be skipped), would become more efficient than the second. I would nonetheless seriously consider the second option for the first 20 years given its comfort advantage over articulated buses (or rail cars for that matter) and fewer transfers.
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Ottawa gets bus jams. Brisbane gets bus jams. And Bogotá gets bus jams. It seems to be endemic to BRT. At any rate BRT has taken us as far as it realistically can. It was a somewhat interesting little experiment but now it's time to call it a day and move on to something else, which, mercifully, we finally are.
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See earlier comment about the Bogota bus jam picture.
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Calgary is now thoroughly trouncing us: they're up to 300,000 passengers per day on the CTrain, compared to about 250,000 on the Transitway here in Ottawa. They're also opening up new extensions, new lines and lengthening platforms for longer trains while putting on more feeder buses. At the rate things are going, by the time we get our tunnel they may well pass us for the first time ever in rides per capita as well. Ottawa today has fewer rides per capita than it did in 1977 whereas Calgary has substantially more. Why 1977? Because 1977 was before either city had a rapid transit system and in that year the populations of the two cities were the same, so it makes a good base for comparison. At that time our rides per capita were far higher than theirs. We have squandered nearly three decades on a BRT experiment that has not raised ridership (as opposed to patronage, which has increased) one bit whereas Calgary has increased ridership with LRT while also tackling a much greater increase in population (from 475k in 1977 to over a million now, versus 875k or so here in Ottawa). All the while our transit system now costs more to operate and has led to workday length pressures not found anywhere else in the country - the upshot being a long strike with drivers determined not to cave in. The results are clear and the sooner we get on with putting an end to our dependency on BRT the better off we'll be.
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Calgary is not trouncing us at all. The Census numbers (commuting to work) provide the only consistent set of numbers to compare cities and Ottawa is still ahead of Calgary despite the latter’s advantage in parking costs ($400+ per month downtown) and size of the downtown core.
Further, comparing both cities using 1977 is not appropriate at all. Ottawa is an eastern metro area. Such areas have exhibited a long-term structural decline in transit use, although there have been differences in the timing of these declines. In this sense, what has happened in Ottawa is no different than what has occurred in Toronto, Montreal, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Washington (DC) and Philadelphia, which are all cities with extensive rail systems.
Long transit strikes are not unheard of (e.g., Vancouver had a long bus strike in 2001, although if I remember correctly it was during the spring, not the winter). The reason most are short is because the workers are often quickly legislated back to work. This did not happen in the case of Ottawa for the reasons we all know.
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