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Posted Oct 16, 2009, 1:06 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 12,811
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dado
Oh... well that wasn't an O-Train extension, now was it? It was an O-Train replacement. But it makes no sense to replace it, especially at a cost of several hundred million dollars. It's doing what it needs to do, which is to bypass downtown Ottawa on the west side and were it to be extended to Gatineau it could replace the shuttle buses from LeBreton, freeing them up for duties elsewhere. It's the cleanest bit of transit infrastructure we have, so while electrification would clean it up a bit more, there are far bigger and filthier smoke clouds to get rid of first. Perhaps some people like David Gladstone are a bit too obsessed with the O-Train and claiming it can do things it can't, but people here seem to be equally obsessed with a curious hatred of it and a desire to get rid of it for no reason. I don't get it. LRT's Friend's apparent love of the winding #99 when I'm sure most people in south of the airport would sooner have an O-Train extension is just an example of that, as are odd statements about "Budd cars in the bush". It's also somewhat odd to have been in favour of N-S LRT and to now be opposed to surface LRT downtown. Anyway, at least we've still got $800M+ in hand to spend on something useful. That we haven't done anything with that money goes to show the same lack of thought at work that went in to coming up with the project in the first place.
The O-Train replacement plan, to remind everyone, had the following great long list of flaws: - stopped downtown at the UoO; the consultants refused to extend it to Hurdman. This ensured it would deadhead through downtown, the most congested part of the whole transit system
- would not address the biggest actual problem in the transit network - the downtown congestion (related to above)
- it would get stuck in the bus jams, giving it no reliability
- it would have replaced the 105-115 lbs/yd rail on the line (which had just been laid in 2003) with 130 lbs/yd rail. Yes, we were going to replace lighter-duty branchline heavy rail with even heavier rail used for heavily-used mainlines. Calgary Transit uses 100 lbs/yd rail.
- called for the unnecessary shutdown of our only rail transit service for three years, even though they were ordered not to shut it down. The CPR managed to keep the line open when they built the tunnel and cutting in the first place (it used to go over the Canal by a bridge and was at grade where the current cutting is), but managing to widen what they did is apparently beyond us half a century later. No railway contractor in his right mind would tear out tracks if asked to widen a cutting, yet that's what our BRT consultants would have had us do as the first step so as to facilitate sending lots of dump trucks on Preston. The failure to regard the existing track as a construction asset is clear proof that the powers-that-be had no appreciation for how to build a railway. Of course dumping the entire project into one great big consortium bid didn't help matters either. Separate specialized contractors should have been charged with doing the different sections. Widening a railway rock cut and rebuilding downtown streets for rail are quite different activities, after all.
- would build an unnecessary second tunnel under Dow's Lake and would have raised the floor of the existing one. That tunnel takes less than 60 seconds to pass through at the *average* speed of 40 km/h, and just less than 45 seconds at 50 km/h. I realize some people have an irrational hatred of single tracks, but that does not change the fact that they are functional, economical and that the capacity provided by a second tunnel was never going to be needed anyway. Urbandale's transportation expert said as much, but, again, given the lack of knowledge about railways here in Ottawa such expertise falls on deaf ears. That's not too surprising when we have Andy Haydon prattling on about how light rail supposedly uses a different gauge track than heavy rail.
- unnecessary second bridge over the Rideau, combined with an unnecessary dismantling of the existing one to put in a lighter weight structure. Same as previous, the capacity provided was not required, and replacing the existing bridge was just plain bizarre.
- roller coaster overpass (5% gradient up then down) of the VIA tracks and the SE Transitway right next to Confederation Station, and on a curve to boot (lots of brake, wheel and rail wear). What is a grade-separation required for here? The SW Transitway crosses the same line at grade, and it's got buses driving around randomly rather than signal-controlled trains. This is just another example of the grade-separate-it-for-the-hell-of-it mentality that pervades in BRT-obsessed Ottawa. Waiting a few extra seconds for a VIA train to go by is not going to matter a fig when the trains are going to get stuck in a bus jam downtown.
- another roller coaster overpass of the freight line at Walkley Yard right next to Greenboro Station (more brake, wheel and rail wear). Right now, barely any trains use this crossing, so the chance of delay is minimal. But even supposing it was a problem, the solution is to go under like the SE Transitway does, not over. True, that would have led to a grade-crossing with the Transitway itself - but so what? They were going to do that in Barrhaven anyway as well as all the way though downtown (remember the bus jams?). But that also leads to the next point:
- all of the works south of the VIA crossing were unnecessary anyway. The adjacent portion of the SE Transitway should have just been converted (or even widened between stations). This would have saved vast sums of money and would have avoided the need to build yet another new bridge over Hunt Club - recall that a spur track to the NRC had to be maintained and to this end a completely new combined light and heavy rail bridge would have been built over Hunt Club to the west of the current bridge, which would have carried the northbound light rail track, the southbound going onto the new bridge. This is when a perfectly usable Transitway bridge already exists next to it. The spur track would have been built to the west of the current track, filling in swamps and wetlands containing the Blandings Turtle. There is a service road to the east of the track (in line, as it happens, with the Transitway overpass of Hunt Club) but this wasn't quite wide enough to accommodate two tracks and two sideloaded platforms at Lester (a centre-loaded platform would have worked though), so naturally wetlands had to be filled-in instead. Oh yes, I know Council deleted Lester Station at the last minute - but the plans weren't about to change because of a minor detail like that. After all, we can't make it difficult to convert to or share with BRT later.
- the maintenance facility was to be at Bowesville Road on a greenfield site miles from a heavy rail connection (unless that spur was to be extended further south still) rather than putting it somewhere sane like Walkley Yard. And the reason for not putting it at Walkley was... yes, that's right... remember that roller coaster overpass? Well there'd be no easy way to access that sucker without spending even more money! Had they planned to go under the rail line, or use the Transitway, well, that would have been different, but that's not what they decided to do for some reason. I wonder why.
- down in Riverside South, the alignment takes a bit of a winding route while managing to miss out most of the designated employment areas.
- then it crosses the Rideau River to go to Barrhaven where it subsidizes a road bridge and when the buses heading north will beat it to downtown anyway. This section, btw, was to be single track initially due to a last minute cost-cutting exercise. Apparently single track isn't so bad after all - the funny thing being that passing sidings would have been required due to the fact it was too much trackage for only one train to occupy there-and-back in one go at the desired frequencies. The mind boggles at the inconsistency of it all.
On top of all that, it wasn't going to do much to increase ridership (a conversion of the Transitway will easily net more) and it was all packaged in an overly secretive contract.
And that's what you get when you let BRT consultants design a railway. We're not talking about one or two minor flaws here and there - we're talking about a great long litany of significant flaws with lots of money attached to most of them, in the order of $100-200M. All public attempts, and by numerous groups, to get the most egregious faults - the downtown - fixed were met with a brick wall of being "too expensive" (which is rich considering the waste elsewhere on the line). The N-S LRT would have been a great big expensive failure and it would have been the last LRT we would get in a generation. The public at large would be decrying how stupid it was to put these trains in with buses, shaking their heads at yet another dumb Council decision. Once it was in place most people would quickly realize, if they didn't know already, that it wasn't going to benefit them (and, indeed, would have curtailed express routes even faster). People in Riverside South would be complaining that all the seats were already full once it left Barrhaven. This project would have tainted the entire concept of LRT. The Andy Haydons and John Bonsalls of the world would have been out in force telling us what a waste of money LRT was and would be really pushing their bus tunnels, with support from the BRT consultants. Instead, virtually everyone knows that the gig is up for BRT downtown while there is no great feeling against LRT at the moment. It was a project with a dubious premise to begin with which was then riddled with so many flaws that it should never have seen the light of day never mind Council chambers. So anyone who was partially responsible for stopping the N-S LRT project should get an award for averting the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars, even if doing so cost tens of millions.
With the $880M or so that was committed, imagine what we could have got instead of an overpriced replacement line. Right now we're contemplating LRT from Blair to Tunney's via a tunnel downtown. Well with $880M we could have had that but via the surface downtown and still had some money to spare. That would have been a worthwhile investment in LRT. No more bus jams, no more high-cost BRT downtown (at least $20M annual savings just there), no more particulate emissions, a reduction in noise and a real increase in capacity. We would have had an unimaginable increase in the City's image from a much-improved downtown environment compared to what would look like trams stuck in traffic. Today, with a successful transitway conversion behind us, we'd be looking to extend LRT westwards to Lincoln Fields and beyond and probably southwards to South Keys and beyond via the SE Transitway. |
These are same old tiresome arguments. My point is that if you have $880 M, you better invest in real new service, otherwise, you have little hope of attracting new ridership. All this business of putting trains down the transitway is simply moving existing ridership from buses onto trains at big expense. Where is the new ridership going to come from? Perhaps, from population growth. The whole point of investing tons of money into rapid transit, is to try to attract new markets to transit. This kind of approach will fail.
Furthermore, the 99 bus route goes directly from Riverside South to downtown. An O-Train extension terminates miles from Riverside South and then bypasses downtown. Although the current O-Train serves a niche transit rider market of mostly Carleton University students and staff, the point of extending rapid transit to Riverside South is to address the main need of providing service to downtown. The extra points along the way are a bonus.
Regarding the so called fiasco in Barrhaven, this extension was at minimal cost and was designed for expansion to double track service when needed in the future. The fact that you could take a bus from Barrhaven Town Centre, the very end of the line, faster to downtown by a few minutes, really is overemphasized, when it was the very end of the line and there are other destinations along the route where significantly faster service would be provided. Furthermore, many Barrhaven residents would have had walk-on rail service. Of course, by your logic, it is more desireable to make everybody drive to the rail station at some remote location. The only alternative under serious discussion will not provide rail service to Barrhaven or Orleans or Kanata probably in my lifetime.
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Where is the plan for the baseline BRT? It's not in the TMP is it?
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