Quote:
Originally Posted by acottawa
I got 100km/h from the website, maybe it is really more. City buses can go faster than that (and do on the highway sections). Setting a speed limit on segments of the transitway has more to do with engineering than the capabilities of the bus.
I will give you acceleration, although acceleration of both buses and trams tends to be based on passenger comfort, safety, etc. rather than design specs (and among production sports cars the tesla's acceleration isn't particularly impressive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_cars_by_acceleration).
I will also give you load time, but my point is that a bus has to load less often because it can skip stops whereas a tram has to stop at every station (unless they're going 4 track the thing).
Have you ever seen any transit system in the world where the trains come at exactly the same time every day? I've been on dozens of systems and never seen that kind reliability. Rail based systems are prone to bunching and a range of delays. Best reliability I've seen is Copenhagen, which is 100% driverless and isn't particularly crowded even in rush hour, neither of which is the case in Ottawa.
I certainly hope LRT is weatherproof, other LRT systems (such as the C-train in Calgary) certainly are not ( http://www.calgarysun.com/2013/11/19/gro...-system-leave-c-train-passengers-steamed). The Alstom Citadis has never been used in a place colder than Gdansk (average Jan temp -1) so any claims of weatherproofness are rather aspirational at this point. Cities as cold as Ottawa tend to build mostly underground (Montreal, Edmonton, Moscow, etc). |
Ever been on the Transitway before? They never skip stops, not even the suburban express routes, because there's always a lineup of buses at the station and they have to line up too and check if people are getting on before driving away. The inbound morning expresses have an 'off-only' rule inside the Greenbelt that means they can skip, but this does not apply in the PM direction. And it certainly does not apply to any of the black routes, which is where the vast majority of the ridership is. (Contrary to what the narrative always tells us, suburban express routes don't make up a very large proportion of OC's ridership at all).
City buses are capable of going up to 120 I believe, but in practice they never exceed 80-90 on the Transitway as that's the speed limit (it's 80, but drivers routinely exceed it and go 90). The Transitway corridor cannot support buses going at 100-110 km/h speeds unless the lanes were made wider and concrete barriers placed between the directions, as per MTO standards. Post-LRT, that's what the speeds will be.
One of the reasons Ottawa is going with LRT technology and not light metro technology is because LRT has a tight turning radius, which means that the Transitway's curves, which currently massively slow down buses, won't slow down the trains. The corridor around Hurdman/Tremblay is actually being realigned to straighten it as part of the conversion.
Calgary's problems are caused by old trains--they're still running many of their original 1970s LRT trains, because they've been constantly pushing train replacement further down the timeline to fund new expansions. Ottawa has always been very proactive at keeping the fleet young, so we can safely assume we won't have that problem.
Also, bunching is an impossible issue on the Confederation Line. The entire line is exclusively grade separated, even the above-ground segments, and the entirety of Phase 2 will also be grade separated according to current plans.
Look at the current O-Train. It's got a hell of a lot more failure points than the Confederation Line will, yet it manages to come at exactly the same time 99% of the time. Those signal problems that cause delays are the exception, not the norm. (I'm a regular commuter on the O-Train, I know). It's probably the most reliable route in the entire OC network, by a long shot.
The immunity of the system to cold temperatures has been built into the Citadis Spirit variant that we ordered. Alstom designed a brand new version of the Citadis, called the Spirit, just for us to meet our business requirements, one of which was immunity to cold, down to at least -35C. So Alstom engineered a train that's good down to -37C. Alstom is a very reliable firm, they have an incredible track record of achieving their goals. I wouldn't worry about their winter performance.
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