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Originally Posted by Sir.Humphrey.Appleby
I am sure if there had been a rail system to speak of when the airport was planned, perhaps things would be different. An automated people mover to a hub within the new industrial lands in the Nose Creek valley will be more than sufficient. It would have been pretty ridiculous to reroute the line to Edmonton under the terminal somehow for one or two trains of one or two cars a day.
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You forget that aviation fuel used to be shipped by rail as well. In Ottawa we used to have a rail spur into the airport until it was replaced with a pipeline. You wouldn't have to reroute the line - just make a spur (or better yet a snye) to the terminal and the fuel depot. Heck, at the time it could have been used to help deliver construction supplies.
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We shouldn't beat ourselves up over not having a rail link because we aren't enlightened - I would much rather be in North America's situation with a huge amount of freight still traveling via rail rather than in Europe's where changes in oil prices hit their industry ,which relies to a much larger extent on road, much harder than ours.
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Funny, I live in a major city where virtually no freight arrives by rail. In fact, I think we have more stuff
leaving by rail than arriving - mainly recovered metals. Much of what does arrive is actually destined for places in the immediate hinterland rather than the city itself. Moreover, the national capital is now within four months of permanently losing its sole remaining direct rail link to western Canada. It's impossible to think of a similar situation in any European country where rail freight has been so put upon that the national capital has virtually no rail freight service and where its rail connection to the bulk of the country is about to be cut.
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Originally Posted by UofC.engineer
I would have to disagree with this.. hear me out.
I don't see how hard it would be to build grade separation elements of infrastruture for a BRT line that will one day serve an LRT line.
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You have to build them wider for BRT and you can't build cheaper separate ones for each direction - they have to be built as one bigger more expensive element. You'll also find that you need more grade separations for BRT than for LRT.
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Just pave over the transit sections for BRT. When you want to build an LRT just de-pave it and lay some rail with overhead wires. CHEAP!!!
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Really? Are you going to drain those paved sections? Put in storm sewers? What are you going to do with them when you convert? If your busway is at grade, your layer of asphalt is about 8" thick whereas the combined height of ties and rail is about twice that, which means you're going to have to cut down into your base and possibly sub-base to avoid creating new problems at grade crossings, but that in turn might have consequences on the drainage system. Well the thought in Ottawa now (where it is grade separated) is not to "de-pave" but rather to lay the ballast and tracks directly on top of the asphalt (with just a geotextile between them) because anything else requires reworking the drainage system, but since no one bothered to think about how they would convert before building the Transitway some of the vertical clearances might now become an issue, so we'll probably end up with a few "dips" in the line at some underpasses. What of the poles? Where are you going to put them? Down the middle of your busway? Now you have to reroute the buses sooner to convert - and by this time you presumably have far more buses operating than when you first built the thing so you're just going to create more disruption. Or are you going to make two rows of poles, one down each side, which will let you keep running buses longer, but at greater expense? And then what are you going to do at stations? The platforms will almost certainly be at the wrong height unless you pre-plan carefully. The problems just go on and on and on.
All this of course leads to excuses of why converting to LRT shouldn't take place, which just lets the problem get worse and worse.
When I say don't build the temporary BRT infrastructure in the same physical space as the permanent LRT infrastructure, I mean it. Don't do it. The only circumstances when you want to consider doing this is when you have a clearly though-out plan from the outset of how you're going to convert and you take design decisions to facilitate it. You definitely don't do it because some wild-eyed engineer tells you that it's "CHEAP!!!".
I wrote my Master's project on this (at the UoC) and frankly I'm tempted to contact these aldermen just to let them know what kind of a mess they might be stumbling into - because the BRT consultants sure aren't going to tell them.
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The only reasons I could see the Ottawa Transitway needing a great deal of upgrading is due to weight constraints and width constraints.
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It's not width and weight constraints - it's just about everything else.
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If this is the case then Ottawa needs to hire some new city planners.
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Actually, what we need to do is hire city planners rather than engineers to design our transit system. It's engineers who are responsible for the mess we're in. That's what happens when highway engineers are let loose in transit planning. Let the planners do the planning and then they can hand it over to the engineers for detailed design work.
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