Calgary Public Transit II

[freeweed]

The driver cab is such a tiny amount of space that while it's an interesting idea, it'll never happen. Even the space over the couplings isn't that great. You're talking a 5, maybe 10% MAX capacity increase for a huge loss of flexibility with these cars.

Remember, this isn't heavy rail - all cars are or at least can be powered. You can basically swap anything with anything (I believe there are a few subtle combination restrictions), and have a functioning train. Going to a "locomotive plus freight" setup changes this. We'd have to have a lot more "locomotives" as spares sitting around. Right now any car can do this function. Better to just spend that extra money on a few more general purpose cars, and increase frequency. It would more than make up for whatever miniscule capacity increase we're talking about here.

[MalcolmTucker]

Plus, with longer cars a maintenance issue takes out more square footage. I know this is a reason New York has opted not to order integrated train sets (plus even within their two compatible line families, different lines run different lengths of trains).

[Cage]

Originally Posted by freeweed

The driver cab is such a tiny amount of space that while it's an interesting idea, it'll never happen. Even the space over the couplings isn't that great. You're talking a 5, maybe 10% MAX capacity increase for a huge loss of flexibility with these cars.

Just like perimeter seating vs conventional forward/backward seating.

Just couldn't resist getting my be BWA HA HA HA HA!.

Happy Halloweening everyone.

[Radley77]

I was curious if a loading profile study has ever been performed on some of the LRT lines? There are maybe 5 or so people boarding\exiting the Bridgeland station on a crowded train during peak periods... Is it feasible to skip stations like this to increase frequency and reduce overall passenger travel-times?

[ByeByeBaby]

Is it feasible to skip stations like this to increase frequency and reduce overall passenger travel-times?

At peak periods, I understand that trains are coming in about as fast as they can enter 7th Ave. Skipping Bridgeland would only put the train closer to the one ahead, and it would spend those 10 seconds waiting at 3rd St E.

There may be a hypothetical timing where a train that skips Bridgeland could sneak ahead of another one from Somerset or something, but it would be unlikely, would depend on everything going like clockwork (e.g. no one holding the doors of a departing train), and would piss the hell out of the handful of people who were waiting at Bridgeland, only to see a train fly by.

To really make station skipping feasible, you need passing track so that express trains can pass locals, and that necessitates an additional right-of-way that would be hard to get without taking lanes from the road.

There were station boarding volumes on CT's website a few years ago, but they have been quietly taken down. I'd be interested in seeing them again, if anyone has the old numbers saved or access to new ones. (IIRC, Bridgeland did have pretty terrible ridership.)

[Cage]

Originally Posted by Radley77

I was curious if a loading profile study has ever been performed on some of the LRT lines? There are maybe 5 or so people boarding\exiting the Bridgeland station on a crowded train during peak periods... Is it feasible to skip stations like this to increase frequency and reduce overall passenger travel-times?

No loading profile study that I am aware of. I suspect that we will not see another load profile study until the smart card system is implemented fleet wide. If CT implements smart cards with tap in tap out feature, they would get a tonne of invaluable true origin and destination information (the type of information that airlines pay millions of dollars to acquire, grocery stores are the same with their loyalty cards like Safeway Card).

As for skipping train stations, the idea warrants merit but not for LRT efficiency but rather to help increase overall network capacity and provide for more efficient use of the available capacity. Basic idea is to increase overall capacity by shifting shorter length trips onto frequent bus service in order to dedicate LRT capacity to long-haul services. This can be accomplished by close peak hour peak direction services.

Closing stations during peak use would operate like this:
1. Stations under consideration for peak hour closure: Victoria Park, Bridgeland, Sunnyside, Lions Park.
2. Improve peak period bus service between the catchment area servicing the closed station and downtown (or vice versa for the afternoon commute).
3. After about 3-6 months getting used to the new bus service. Close said station during peak periods (peak hour peak direction) to encourage users to take the bus.
4. Use the additional time gained by the station closure to allow for service reliability and to increase station dwell times.

Overall CT needs to look at network management and less on route management inorder to improve customer experience and peak period services. Network management techniques such as the one described above would accomplish these goals in a least costly manner.

Respectfully submitted.

[mooky]

I personally don't mind perimeter seating, with one caveat. I would prefer benches to buckets. The buckets are small, even for my narrow arse, and when a big person sits next to me, I have to lean either out and give up my back rest, or off to the other side (if another moderately sized person isn't already using their alloted space) ... after a short while, leaning off to one side in a bucket ends up hurting my butt and back as it's putting them at an uncomfortable angle, with a bench, I could shuffle my butt over a couple centimeters to compensate, but with a bucket that's kinda the point of it - "butt goes right here"

[sim]

Originally Posted by Cage

No loading profile study that I am aware of. I suspect that we will not see another load profile study until the smart card system is implemented fleet wide. If CT implements smart cards with tap in tap out feature, they would get a tonne of invaluable true origin and destination information (the type of information that airlines pay millions of dollars to acquire, grocery stores are the same with their loyalty cards like Safeway Card).

As for skipping train stations, the idea warrants merit but not for LRT efficiency but rather to help increase overall network capacity and provide for more efficient use of the available capacity. Basic idea is to increase overall capacity by shifting shorter length trips onto frequent bus service in order to dedicate LRT capacity to long-haul services. This can be accomplished by close peak hour peak direction services.

Closing stations during peak use would operate like this:
1. Stations under consideration for peak hour closure: Victoria Park, Bridgeland, Sunnyside, Lions Park.
2. Improve peak period bus service between the catchment area servicing the closed station and downtown (or vice versa for the afternoon commute).
3. After about 3-6 months getting used to the new bus service. Close said station during peak periods (peak hour peak direction) to encourage users to take the bus.
4. Use the additional time gained by the station closure to allow for service reliability and to increase station dwell times.

Overall CT needs to look at network management and less on route management inorder to improve customer experience and peak period services. Network management techniques such as the one described above would accomplish these goals in a least costly manner.

Respectfully submitted.

I'm not so sure that is necessarily a good idea. Firstly, I can think of only the New York metro as employing skip stop operation (but I think there are a few other cases,) as they can be rather complicated for passengers.

Secondly, from an operations perspective, this would be done for two reasons: To increase the overall speed so that there is the potential for less units operating, and correspondingly less drivers, and to increase customer satisfaction.

In the C train's case, I'm not sure that leaving out a couple stations would accomplish the first goal. I can't say that I know what kind of a terminal time they actually have built into the overall cycle time, but I imagine due to the peak hour variability caused by at grade conflict points and signalization, it is either quite large or it may not even be relevant. Probably some of the other posters actually know this for sure. Hence, I can't forsee much potential for eliminating a consit and driver and thus, saving much on overall operational costs.

While it is always a good thing to decrease travel time, especially in an often non-competitive (regarding travel time) mode such as PT, I'm not sure that further encouraging an already heavily commuter oriented system is a long term strategy worth pursuing.

Lastly, adding those buses would only add to operational costs and require acquiring new ones that would then be rather underutilized all to provide a service that basically already exists (the train) unless I'm understanding your proposal wrong. Buses that interact with rail station areas should serve as feeders and perhaps increase that stations catchment area and not something that should really run in parallel with a trunk line.

My personal feelings on what can be done for those poorly used stations is simply increase their land-use intensity. Encourage TOD and more mixed use and cut some red tape to get there, if not even monetarily incentivize it. The expensive transportation infrastructure is already there. No sense in discouraging its use further, so if it is currently under used, change the reasons for that.

[DarkKeyo]

Originally Posted by Cage

Closing stations during peak use would operate like this:
1. Stations under consideration for peak hour closure: Victoria Park, Bridgeland, Sunnyside, Lions Park.
2. Improve peak period bus service between the catchment area servicing the closed station and downtown (or vice versa for the afternoon commute).
3. After about 3-6 months getting used to the new bus service. Close said station during peak periods (peak hour peak direction) to encourage users to take the bus.
4. Use the additional time gained by the station closure to allow for service reliability and to increase station dwell times.

Respectfully submitted.

No.

1. I assure you that those stations are only used lightly *in comparison* to other stations. They are still used a lot during rush hour. I live at Lions Park, I can attest that this will not work. People, at 5 at the worst of it, get on and off at Sunnyside, SAIT, and Lions park, and are often making trips just between those three stations (which is very awkward when the train is full).

As sim pointed out, encouraging TOD is a good idea, although because of how close they are to downtown and how (in particular Sunnyside and Lions Park) are not really designed to handle very many people to begin with, changes would have to be made to the stations to handle heavier use.

2. The buses (the 9 and 10, really) that currently serve those areas from downtown suffer from the traffic leaving downtown at rush hour, and take three times as long as a 2 station train trip. And all possible routes pass through areas like Kensington, and Victoria Park, where there is no way to improve bus routing.

3. Here, you hose people who live close to downtown in favour of people who live at terminus stations.

4. You will gain no time. Trains, on the assumption that these stations are used less, dwell for less time than at a busy station where more people will hold open the doors, etc. And the trains slow down at stations they don't stop at, anyways.

In summary, and it's unfortunate I typed this much.... you, Cage, and Radley, by looking at shaving off a few minutes here and there as increasing efficiency, and at inconvenience to the customer as not a problem.... I respectfully submit that you are looking at this from the WRONG angle.

I would think a better angle to look at would be "How can we help move people efficiently (*not* decrease travel times) in between all stations".

I invite the rest of you to come up with some angles that are better than what I wrote down. I suppose the problem we are solving, since shaving seconds of of travel time *isn't* one, is that it is often awkward to commute to those near-core stations at the same time as people are commuting to the end of the line.



However, Cage, I will give you this.... The following statement was a perfect end to that previous discussion. That made my day.

Originally Posted by Cage

Just like perimeter seating vs conventional forward/backward seating. .

As an aside, the Real Time signs are testing now.

[freeweed]

Originally Posted by DarkKeyo

As an aside, the Real Time signs are testing now.

According to what I saw last night, August 2011 is "coming in a few weeks".

[mersar]

Originally Posted by freeweed

According to what I saw last night, August 2011 is "coming in a few weeks".

The Realtime information is now live at most stations, the terminus stations are still coming soon as a few random stations aren't working yet (Whitehorn and 1 or two platforms downtown). The rest of the system is up and working and pretty accurate.

[CTrainDude]

Originally Posted by mersar

The Realtime information is now live at most stations, the terminus stations are still coming soon as a few random stations aren't working yet (Whitehorn and 1 or two platforms downtown). The rest of the system is up and working and pretty accurate.

This may answer a few questions:
http://www.calgarytransit.com/html/real_time_faq.html

[freeweed]

Originally Posted by CTrainDude

This may answer a few questions:
http://www.calgarytransit.com/html/real_time_faq.html

Thanks, that really helps fill in the blanks. This caught my attention:

Due to technical issues, the stations at the end of the CTrain lines (terminus stations) are not displaying predicted times for trains yet. These issues will be worked on throughout November. These stations are different that the other ones in that the times appearing on the displays will be the departure times for the next three trains, not the arrival times.

Not sure I understand the logic here. No one cares when a train is LEAVING. We want to know when we can board and get out of the goddamn cold. And when it's really bad, how long we should stand indoors, etc. Also when one train is sitting there nearly packed... should I hop on because the next one is still 5 minutes away, or wait for space because it's only 2 minutes away? Seeing as trains at terminal stations sit for completely random times, departure times are for all practical purposes useless.

Surprised someone wasn't able to figure this out. It should follow the same logic as at any other station, although I can imagine all sorts of idiotic design decisions by people who don't actually ride the train.

Edit: this leads me to believe that at least one person at CT understands that arrival times are what matters here:

The system measures the progression of trains through the system and develops predictions of the next arrival times for each station.

Just bizarre.

[Bassic Lab]

Originally Posted by freeweed

Thanks, that really helps fill in the blanks. This caught my attention:



Not sure I understand the logic here. No one cares when a train is LEAVING. We want to know when we can board and get out of the goddamn cold. And when it's really bad, how long we should stand indoors, etc. Also when one train is sitting there nearly packed... should I hop on because the next one is still 5 minutes away, or wait for space because it's only 2 minutes away? Seeing as trains at terminal stations sit for completely random times, departure times are for all practical purposes useless.

Surprised someone wasn't able to figure this out. It should follow the same logic as at any other station, although I can imagine all sorts of idiotic design decisions by people who don't actually ride the train.

Edit: this leads me to believe that at least one person at CT understands that arrival times are what matters here:



Just bizarre.

I don't have a great deal of experience with terminal stations either way but I'm of the opposite mindset. I want to know when I'm leaving so that I can judge the time to my destination and plan any connections accordingly. I really don't care if a train will be available for me to sit around and wait in for an unknown period of time.

Outside of the terminal stations it really doesn't matter since arrival and departure times are essentially the same.

[AgentGibb]

Originally Posted by freeweed

Not sure I understand the logic here.

Moreover, if they are showing the departure times... isn't that just the schedule? I wonder what "technical issues" could prevent them from posting the next scheduled departures?

Originally Posted by freeweed

No one cares when a train is LEAVING.

I would say that both pieces of information (arrival and departure) would be useful at the terminal stations. That way if there are two trains waiting at the platform and one is packed and the other not, you know easily how long afterward the second one will leave. That way, if you have a few minutes to spare you can make an informed decision to sit on the empty one rather than cram into the full one.

Originally Posted by freeweed

I can imagine all sorts of idiotic design decisions by people who don't actually ride the train.

It should be a requirement for all transit planners and city councilors to take transit to and from work every day, IMHO. If the service isn't good enough for them, how is it good enough for the rest of us?

[freeweed]

Originally Posted by AgentGibb

Moreover, if they are showing the departure times... isn't that just the schedule? I wonder what "technical issues" could prevent them from posting the next scheduled departures?

Bingo, this is exactly why I find it meaningless. I appreciate Bassic Lab's comment, but... that's what schedules are for. And most LRT riders aren't doing transfers. Terminal stations primarily feed commuters going to the downtown core.

I would say that both pieces of information (arrival and departure) would be useful at the terminal stations. That way if there are two trains waiting at the platform and one is packed and the other not, you know easily how long afterward the second one will leave. That way, if you have a few minutes to spare you can make an informed decision to sit on the empty one rather than cram into the full one.

Hmm, hadn't thought of this, it's a good point. Usually when there are 2 trains people in a rush take the full one, those with time to spare go for some space with the hope that it's leaving in a few minutes max.

However, I suspect the decision went like this: hey, it's only practical to have one time on the board (this I actually have no issue with). So let's go with departure times because obviously everyone cares about when they get to work, right?

Meanwhile, the thousands of us coming in from a terminus every day only give a shit about how long we have to stand outside in the cold. Trust me, the vast majority of folks do exactly this - huddle inside the station until the last possible second, then shove each other out of the way when the train finally comes into view. Some expectation of when a train is coming would be nice. And it would also help overcrowding at inbound stations - if people don't think another train is coming for a while (with zero information, how do you know?) they will jam pack the train sitting there. If they know there's another only a couple of minutes away, they'll wait, which leaves space for people to board at Dalhousie, Brentwood, etc. At Crowfoot when the light is right you can see the next train a ways away, and you can observe this behaviour - people wait for it, because being 2 mins late for work is better than being a human sardine.

Convenient based on our discussion yesterday, it was damn cold and windy this morning at Crowfoot. The usual winter behaviour was back in full force, with a mostly full train sitting there and no next train in sight. It was amusing to watch people wrestle with the decision.

It should be a requirement for all transit planners and city councilors to take transit to and from work every day, IMHO. If the service isn't good enough for them, how is it good enough for the rest of us?

Preaching to the converted here. At least make them take it once a week, instead of handing out free parking spots downtown (which is pretty much the polar opposite of our parking/transit strategy - ah, hypocrisy).

[You Need A Thneed]

There's room on the displays for three times, I think they should be able to show both the arrival and departure times. I'm not sure why anyone cares about when the third train from now is coming at most stations.

[freeweed]

Originally Posted by You Need A Thneed

There's room on the displays for three times, I think they should be able to show both the arrival and departure times. I'm not sure why anyone cares about when the third train from now is coming at most stations.

Yeah, this should really only matter on 7th Ave.

[Rusty van Reddick]

Originally Posted by AgentGibb

It should be a requirement for all transit planners and city councilors to take transit to and from work every day, IMHO. If the service isn't good enough for them, how is it good enough for the rest of us?

So you wouldn't allow them to walk or bike?

Also- EVERY DAY? That's just insane.

[J-D]

Originally Posted by AgentGibb

It should be a requirement for all transit planners and city councilors to take transit to and from work every day, IMHO. If the service isn't good enough for them, how is it good enough for the rest of us?

Nothing would ever get done if the transit planners and aldermen were constantly late for work and meetings