Calgary Public Transit II

[mersar]

Originally Posted by Riise

Another advantage is the improvement to the walkability of the trains; it will be much easier to walk along the aisles.

Sadly this actually isn't the case unless the train is pretty empty. Those poles they installed along the middle actually take up quite a bit of room, and if theres people sitting on either side where they are its not a straight walk I noticed yesterday. But probably no worse really then the current trains.

I did notice that a lot more people came in the doors and moved to the middle of the seating area even if they had to stand, not quite as much crowding the doors as on the older LRV's.

[bookermorgan]

Originally Posted by Canadian74

I think in some highly populated Asian cities, rapid transit trains travel at upto 150km/hr.
Calgary Transit doesn't go beyond 70-80km/hr although the new Series 8 trains are capable of over 100km/hr.

So I'm going to get passed by trains along Crowchild? bummer

[mersar]

Nope. Despite the newer LRV's being capable of it, there are posted speed limits and allowing some trains to go faster then others would cause all sorts of scheduling issues (mostly when a faster train catches up to a slower train, which might be possible on some of the longer stretches)

[freeweed]

Originally Posted by bookermorgan

So I'm going to get passed by trains along Crowchild? bummer

This would be a truly awesome thing to have in Calgary.

[Innersoul1]

Originally Posted by Socguy

While I realize that many of you might not care about Edmonton's LRT expansion, they've just posted a rendering of the next stage of the expansion and it's kind of neat to listen to the narrator talk about how the stations were designed with different functions in mind. So, for those of you that are interested, here's the animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z7lxAzpH48&feature=player_embedded

Pretty cool. I would say that a couple of those stations could do to have green roofs especially the McEwan one

[that_twisted_cm]

Caught the new consist today, found it running on Key 3 (starts around 6:00am and ends about 1:00am from Anderson) but about 45 minutes behind.

Smoothest rides ever; a few bugs here and there but once they're gone (and a bit of fabutastic color...honey, that grey is so unbecoming!) these trains will be diamond.

[Sean.Perrin]

Originally Posted by mooky

I'll just leave this here, I thought it was well done when I found it on reddit.

• Video Link

I'm sorry, but this video is stupid. This woman is blaming others for her problems instead of taking responsibility for herself. What a joke. When I was looking at rents it cost the same almost everywhere: around $1000 for a reasonable one bedroom apartment. Some, of course were less and some were more, but if she did any research at all she would see that the cheapest apartments (about 875) were right in the core. Go cry to someone else.

[Riise]

Originally Posted by mersar

Sadly this actually isn't the case unless the train is pretty empty. Those poles they installed along the middle actually take up quite a bit of room, and if theres people sitting on either side where they are its not a straight walk I noticed yesterday. But probably no worse really then the current trains.

At least on the similar-designed metros that I've travelled on, although it is still tight when the car is packed, it is easier to move around. It may not be easy, but simply easier.

Most of my experience has been on the LU's stock and they don't have poles in the aisles. As such, I'll probably have to reserve judgement until I travel on the new SDs myself.

[Ramsayfarian]

Originally Posted by Sean.Perrin

I'm sorry, but this video is stupid. This woman is blaming others for her problems instead of taking responsibility for herself. What a joke. When I was looking at rents it cost the same almost everywhere: around $1000 for a reasonable one bedroom apartment. Some, of course were less and some were more, but if she did any research at all she would see that the cheapest apartments (about 875) were right in the core. Go cry to someone else.

I must of missed the part where she's crying and blaming others. All I saw was her asking for reliable and convenient transit.

[Canadian74]

Originally Posted by Sean.Perrin

I'm sorry, but this video is stupid. This woman is blaming others for her problems instead of taking responsibility for herself. What a joke. When I was looking at rents it cost the same almost everywhere: around $1000 for a reasonable one bedroom apartment. Some, of course were less and some were more, but if she did any research at all she would see that the cheapest apartments (about 875) were right in the core. Go cry to someone else.

+1. The most idiotic video i have seen recently.

[Stang]

Originally Posted by Ramsayfarian

I must of missed the part where she's crying and blaming others. All I saw was her asking for reliable and convenient transit.

I understand her message, but when you live in the deep south, your daughter attends a school 15 km away, and you work downtown, and want (or have to) to use transit exclusively, there are some decision to be made. Her 3 hours commuting each day is not necessarily the fault of Calgary Transit, but rather a cumulative result of her circumstances.

We'd all love to get from A-B faster, cheaper, and more reliably, but we'll always be bound by our circumstances.

[Ramsayfarian]

Originally Posted by Stang

I understand her message, but when you live in the deep south, your daughter attends a school 15 km away, and you work downtown, and want (or have to) to use transit exclusively, there are some decision to be made. Her 3 hours commuting each day is not necessarily the fault of Calgary Transit, but rather a cumulative result of her circumstances.

We'd all love to get from A-B faster, cheaper, and more reliably, but we'll always be bound by our circumstances.

I understand that. I just thought Sean.Perrin's comment was a bit over the top and void of empathy. I've watched the video twice and I've yet to catch the part where she's blaming others for her problems.

[fusili]

I will echo earlier comments that there is nothing Calgary Transit can do to make this commute easier. No transit authority could run a system to help this woman without going into massive debt. The problem is Calgary's development pattern, not Calgary Transit.

[MonctonGoldenFlames]

Originally Posted by Sean.Perrin

I'm sorry, but this video is stupid. This woman is blaming others for her problems instead of taking responsibility for herself. What a joke. When I was looking at rents it cost the same almost everywhere: around $1000 for a reasonable one bedroom apartment. Some, of course were less and some were more, but if she did any research at all she would see that the cheapest apartments (about 875) were right in the core. Go cry to someone else.

she blames nobody. she states the facts of living like she does, plain and simple.

she's probably doing the right thing. living where her rent is cheaper than $875, paying off her student loans while taking care of her daughter the best way she can.

you ignorant asshats that can't put yourself in somebody else's shoes are incredibly ignorant and arrogant.

[freeweed]

Originally Posted by MonctonGoldenFlames

you ignorant asshats that can't put yourself in somebody else's shoes are incredibly ignorant and arrogant.

We can all put ourselves in someone else's shoes. Just because I feel sorry for someone, it doesn't mean that I'm going to feel somehow culpable for their decisions in life.

Again, this video comes down to one thing - what is the point? If it's just pointless whining, fine, that's what half of Youtube is. If it's trying to argue that we should somehow come up with a way to improve Transit service so that this improbable situation could be rectified - well, I'm sorry, but I don't see why my property taxes should triple just to deal with an extreme edge case like this. If she was putting up this video as a positive statement of "hey look, it's possible to overcome adversity, and still live your life to the fullest even if life is hard sometimes and you have to make sacrifices" - I'd be all over that. But that's not the sense I got from watching the video.

Maybe she should have sent it to her parents and asked them why they chose to live in the middle of nowhere (relative to her needs). And yeah, she IS doing the right thing, given her circumstances. But trying to indict society for her convoluted commute (again, what exactly is the point of this video?) is a bit silly. The video appears to be saying that our current city layout doesn't work well for single unemployed parents who come from a far-flung suburban background and who can't or won't send their children to a local school. I don't even know how one is supposed to respond to that. I've never seen a city designed that would handle her situation, she admits fully that even with a car her commute would be crazy (so this really has little or nothing to do with Calgary Transit anyway), and to be honest - her round-trip commute is only an hour longer than mine is, and all I'm doing is going to and from downtown with no other stops. Welcome to living in a big city.

Edit: the more I think about it, my more generous side would like to think that she put this video together as a way to get people talking about much more than just transit. Almost like a troll, except designed to generate meaningful discussion instead. Because while the footage is obviously entirely focused on transit, that sure doesn't seem to be the message of the video itself. Maybe she's just a brilliant conceptual artist.

[UofC.engineer]

Originally Posted by freeweed

Because while the footage is obviously entirely focused on transit, that sure doesn't seem to be the message of the video itself. Maybe she's just a brilliant conceptual artist.

Haha, well it sure stirred up quite a debate

Oh ya, and to Mr.MonctonGoldenFlames, take the tone and language down a couple notches.

[kw5150]

just so everyone knows......the bus system does need to get better. It takes an extreme amount of time to get to some areas. Thankfully, the City is aware of these problems and attempting to accomodate them. The more that people express their issues the better.

I am quite thankful that I do not have to rely on the bus system here. If I do one day, I guess I will just have to deal with it.

Did the video seem a little bit over-sappy? I think so. Does that mean she should be written off? Probably not, although there are worse things to deal with than what she is experiencing.

[Radley77]

I am curious if any people have read similar literature? I am interested in how the City of Calgary could monitor occupancy rates to incentivize the use of 'spare' capacity and make better use of the public transit resource...

Direction dependent prices in public transport: A good idea? The back haul pricing problem for a monopolistic public transport firm

Abstract
Markets for transport are often characterised by unequal demand in both directions: every morning during peak hours the trains are crowded while moving towards the direction of large cities, whereas they may be almost empty in the other direction. In this paper we discuss the implications of these imbalances for price setting of transport firms. From the viewpoint of economic theory, two regimes can be distinguished: one where – owing to price discrimination – the flows are equal, and one where unequal flows are the result. Special attention is paid to the case where the transport firm does not apply price discrimination, as is the case with most railway firms in Europe. We find that in the case of substantial joint costs, the introduction of price discrimination not only leads to an increase of profits, but also to positive effects on consumer surplus. This result differs from the standard result in the literature on industrial economics. The standard result purports that with linear demand functions price discrimination has a negative impact on the welfare of the average consumer and that this negative impact dominates the positive effect on profits of the producer.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/2j5ucg327jqvap6g/

[frinkprof]

^Profits? Sounds like this is dealing with an entirely different animal than public transportation agencies in Canada. They aren't out to make a profit.

Sir Humphrey Appleby brought up a good point in response to your last idea (or set of ideas) on pricing schemes for Calgary Transit: Complication has a cost. I agree and think it applies here too. Any thoughts on that?

[freeweed]

I think it's ludicrous. The implication is that somehow differential pricing will help even out the traffic patterns, when in reality if applied here it would never be anything more than a blatant cash grab.

People on the "busy" side of the commute aren't doing it because it's somehow "cheap". They're doing it because that's where the jobs are compared to the homes. They are the very definition of a captive market. And making the reverse "cheaper" to somehow incentivize riders will just make transit lose more money (it is NOT a profit-earning service).

There's a reason this sort of story talks about profit. The only profit to be had here would be a cash grab against people who will be taking transit regardless, because they have no choice. Until it gets too expensive, and then they hop in their cars, entirely defeating decades of transit planning. This is pretty much the Park n Ride lots in a larger scale, and there's a reason we're doing away with those fees.