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Originally Posted by Dado
They are different. For heavy rail (as in freight) the width requirement is 16'. For light rail it's in the 10'-12' range.
Interestingly, the always anti-rail NCC constructed the Carling overpass with 28' of clearance, 4' shy of being double trackable for heavy rail. But it is enough for light rail. Indeed, it's enough for one track to be heavy-compatible and the other for light.
No, the problem was *who* those people we had doing rapid transit planning back then. Calgary's chief transit planner was a Dutchman well-versed in the tramways-—-light railways of northwest Europe (i.e. Straßbahn systems becoming Stadtbahn systems in Germany and the equivalent in the Netherlands) whereas our chief transit planner was a bowtie-wearing Brit with a love buses. We also had the misfortune to hire the same consultants who had proposed a 17 lane trench and collector lane system in the Laurier-Gloucester blocks.
That's the difference. On the face of it, Calgary was actually the more probable place for experimenting with BRT: it was a new concept ("pioneering" as they like to say), Calgary was car-crazy and an oil town, oil being what buses run on and what their running ways are built of. And yet Calgary went with the "old world" solution of light rail, thanks to its Dutch chief transit planner.
Afraid that's just not so. The Transitway was "sold" to the public and their politicians on the notion that it could be converted, but there was never any serious intention to do so on the part of our transit planners, even as late 2007. The idea was rejected outright in the 2003 TMP - not in "not yet, not now but maybe someday" way but in an outright it will never happen way. The Transitway design documents bear this out, as do the attitudes of its designers. Station design, for instance, has absolutely no consideration of rail requirements nor any provision for easy conversion of those stations. To this day, there are persistent rumours that the overpasses (all north/east of Confederation Heights) of the SE Transitway (which is not slated for conversion in current plans) are not suitable for LRT and would require considerable reworking.
They couldn't even bring themselves to convert the SE Transitway south of Confederation Heights (all underpasses, except at Hunt Club) to LRT for the N-S LRT so as to avoid building new overpasses of the railways, so wedded were they to BRT and preserving BRT. The aforementioned bowtie-wearing Brit even showed up to a Transit Committee meeting to argue against LRT in the 2008 TMP and presented a plan for a pair of narrow single lane downtown bus tunnels instead of the pair of lane+shoulder tunnels proposed in the late 1980s.
"Conversion" was a basically a dupe. The fact it's finally happening is more a triumph of politicians over planner-engineers, and the fact that any kind of linear transportation infrastructure has a degree of inherent convertibility.
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Thank you. This is all great information and I fully understand what you are saying. I learn a lot from you, even when we don't agree.
I lived through this period of our city history and I was a regular transit user at the time so I took a great interest. You know I am not an railway expert and I admit it. I have said that before.
I look at what happened as a layman. I believe that is still very relevant. It is just a different perspective. I still believe what I said was quite accurate without getting into the behind the scenes details.
I know that there was a debate at the time of whether we should be adopting a rail solution. I believe those who were pushing a rail solution at that time were mostly rail advocates and that was fair enough.
Yes, we can talk about the people involved but still Calgary's and Edmonton's LRT projects were funded by oil boom money, something that we did not have. You cannot also deny that Edmonton's project was not an overwhelming success and it's underwhelming ridership results delayed expansion for a generation. Edmonton's LRT line opened 3 years before Calgary's.
Even if we had built LRT from day one, we could not have built as an extensive network as we have today and we would still be faced with an expensive tunneling project. We would have built surface rail, which would have the same congestion problem as buses. The transitways also allowed us to delay building difficult sections such as at Westboro and along Woodroffe that would have overwhelmed our budgets. With LRT, we cannot skip those difficult and expensive sections. And we still would have ended up with a hybrid system with rail only reaching part of the way to the suburbs. The end result would have almost certainly been lower ridership. Our city is not built the same way as Calgary where more jobs are focused downtown. I think our geography would not have allowed it without destroying some centretown neighbourhoods.
I know that planners compromised convertibility. Those decisions were not made up front. That came over the years. Without some of those compromises, costs would have certainly escalated. Money that we didn't have. As I pointed out, politics were always involved which is unavoidable.
I fully agree that many did not believe that conversion would ever take place and they made decisions based on that.
But I have always questioned the advisability of doing so. We are spending billions on these conversions and I continue to question whether we are going to get value for money. I am not the only who is skeptical of the end results. I have always said that this money should be spent towards real transit expansion on new routes within the urban part of the city and to new growth areas. Yes, to reintroduce a modernized version of streetcar suburbs where people don't need two cars to live there.
Yes, a tunnel is a necessity. Yes, I know the issue of operating costs of buses but we are also spending a ton on capital costs which is being funded by debt. It all comes from the same taxpayer. But it is also true that real transit expansion will generate more new ridership, and with that new revenue.
Regarding the Southeast Transitway, I live in that part of the city and after years of building ridership from the south to Billings Bridge, Hurdman and onward, it would have been foolish to build track on the route south of Confederation Heights. The clientele market on the Southeast Transitway and the O-Train have always been substantially different. We need to face realities that this would have been unacceptable. This is not about what is operationally the best for trains but what is best for those who use the system.
In the end, we should agree to disagree.
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