Originally Posted by JohnnyRenton
Thanks to those that welcomed me after my first post. I actually had a lot more to say, and wasn't going to add much more. But in responding to what Joseph said, I ended up writing far more than planned to really back up my points. So maybe grab a coffee if your going to read all the way through...
The most important point to start off with is this. Commuting is the worst. Commuting can make people unhappy and miserable. It is largely wasted time. It is frustrating. It means stop and go traffic, or crowded trains and buses, transfers, and waiting in the cold. It is hours and hours you are not with friends, family, or doing something better with your life.
People make all kinds of calculations in their daily life to maximize their time and money and happiness. When Ottawa had express bus service, people paid the premium fare for it because it reduced commuting time and basically guaranteed them a seat. The cost was worth it. The public supports LRT in Ottawa because, with a new tunnel downtown, the public investment is going to lead to a more efficient and faster transit network. People might move near an LRT station, which has higher housing costs, but reduces the need for a car, and could provide super fast commutes.
To make commuter rail work in Ottawa, to make it something that will actually provide real benefits to people, for it to be a better choice than other modes of transportation, and make people happier, you need to make a serious investment to make that happen. It needs to be fast and modern. There can be no delays. And ideally a not insignificant number of people should be able to get off the train and just walk a bit to work, not having to worry about transferring to another mode of transit.
If you take the Moose plan as is, it guarantees that almost everyone will have to transfer to another mode of transit once they are off the train. It doesn't go to downtown Ottawa. There are no direct connections with major employment nodes. That means extra time, and extra money for OC Transpo or STO fares (because you can be sure they are not going to give free rides to Moose riders unless they have a financial stake in the project).
But lets for a moment assume those factors don't matter. Lets say that Moose, as proposed, is going to be fast enough and frequent enough that it makes all those considerations irrelevant. And lets look at the costs associated with that.
Lets start by looking at some of the numbers of the Moose plan, starting with length of the lines, and then the stations.
You have the two sections that run on VIA rail's lines:
-Ottawa to Smiths Falls is about 70 km.
-Ottawa to Maxville is about 70km.
Then you have the rest of the lines:
-Ottawa to Arnprior is about 50 km (not including the section on VIA track).
-The line to Bristol, from where it breaks off around Bells Corners is about 65 km.
-Ottawa to Wakefield is about 35 km (more specifically this is the length that starts at Tache on the Quebec side, to Wakefield ).
-Ottawa to Montibello is about 80 km, after it breaks off from the line heading to Wakefield.
-The Trillium line and the POW bridge
This means the system will use 140 km of VIA rails line, and 230 km on other trackage, approximately.
Now, lets look at all the stations that will be required:
-Total number of new stations: 28 (25 of which I will just call "straighforward stations", and 3 (Bayview, Greenboro, and UQO/Tache) with integral transit connections
-Total number of stations that would be modified O-Train stations: 2
-Total stations that are existing VIA stations: 5
Now the next step is to take a look at a variety of construction projects associated with commuter rail, and passenger rail, in Canada. The list below is not comprehensive. I have tried to focus as much as possible on the low cost projects, as opposed to some of the more grandiose ones:
-New Brockville VIA Rail station and refurbishment: $7 million
-New Belleville VIA Rail station (with walkway over a set of tracks): $14 million
-The Vass siding, just east of Fallowfield, is $3 million
-The average cost of a new GO Train station is $50-75 million
-A VIA rail project to simply upgrade 56km of line in the Chatham-Kent area, which includes one siding, 18km of jointed to welded-continuous rail, signal upgrades, crossing upgrades, new ties, and safety fence. For this 56km section the cost is $17 million. So when you think about the kind of job needed to bring the lines not belonging to VIA up to standard, this is the minimum sort of project you are looking at
-There is the cost of grade separations in the City of Ottawa. According to a study, in part commissioned by the city, it would cost $430 million to eliminate the remaining at-grade crossings in the city. And this sort of project would almost certainly be needed for most, if not all those crossings, if rail service increases on the line.
-The cost of adding a second track to an existing line is around $2-3 million/km, depending on the project
-The cost expanding the Belfast LRT maintenance centre was $100 million. The cost of the GO maintenance facility in Whitby was $894 million (and yes, that is a price tag just short of $1 billion)
-An AMT maintenance facility in Lachine will cost $120 million
-53 new bilevel coaches, purchased by GO Transit, cost $187 million
-In 2008 27 diesel locomotives purchased by GO Transit cost $143 million
So as you start to see what kind of costs of commuter rail projects have incurred for the various parts required, you can start to put together a picture of what the Moose commuter rail network would cost, for even the most basic versions of it. 25 "straight forward" stations with a single platform, a small building, and no passageway over/under the tracks, would be, and lets be nice and say $125 million if you think its only going to be $5 million each. There are the stations with integral transit connections, that will require over/underpasses and more extensive work. Lets be nice again and say $10 million each, for a total of $30 million. The existing O-Train and VIA rail stations that will need to be renovated, expanded, have a second platform in the cases where a line has to be double tracks. Lets call it $5 million each, for a total of $30 million. So just in station costs alone, there is $185 million, and that is keeping estimates on the absolute lowest end possible. To do anything with any real level of comfort is going to send that cost much, much higher.
Then you have the work to be done to the rail lines. The VIA rail line is already busy, and given that most of it is single tracked, this means there will need to be a substantial amount invested in order to accommodate the increased traffic from Moose. This means there will need to be new sidings, and, there is a good chance that parts of the line through Ottawa (from Barrhaven to Tremblay, and a bit east of Tremblay), will have to be double tracked. It is hard to come up with a "cheap" estimate, but when you consider that you will likely need sidings at, or near a number of the stations (that would be Navan, Vars, Limoges, Casselman, Maxville, and Richmond), you come up with a minimum of 6 sidings, which is $18 million dollars right there. Then there is the sections that will need to be double tracked. That section is about 17km, so at a cost of $3 million per km (which seems reasonable since the costs per km will be a bit higher in an urban area as opposed to rural ones), that is $51 million for that task. A total of $69 million is still very low for the task of increasing the capacity to allow commuter rail to operate as well, but lets just leave it there for now.
That leaves us with 4 more lines. The lines going to Arnprior and Bristol are a brilliant mess the further you get away from the city. Some sections aren't even there anymore. So for the sake of simplicity, we can average out the condition of the line, with it starting out as "okay" in the city limits, and ending up as figuratively, and literally in many cases, non-existent, leaving us with mostly poor quality track to deal with. Looking at the one example from Chatham-Kent, the cost of that project works out to around $0.3 million/km. That project also doesn't include things like brush removal (for lines that have excessive vegetation growth), having to continuously weld almost all the line, not just 1/3 of it, new rail for sections that no longer exist, plus inflation from when the Chatham-Kent project was costed out, versus today. So lets say $0.5 million/km in this case (which is still way to cheap, but again, I am being nice). At 50km and 65km respectively, that works out to $57.5 million
Next we have the line to Wakefield. As many people know this line shut down the stream train several years ago because part of it was washed out. The track is a mess and in a constant flux between being ripped out, and not. Any repairs to the last 20km of the line would basically involve a full rebuild, and the remaining section would need a still not insignificant amount of work. To rehabilitate that line up to any kind of modern, commuter rail standards, would be costly. If we assume that the best parts of the line are in the same shape as the Chatham-Kent project (which they are not, the Wakefield line is slightly worse at best), the cost is easily going to work out to be double that of the Chatham-Kent project on a per km basis. If we are kind and say that it will cost $0.6 million/per km to properly repair, that puts the total for that line at $21 million.
The last line is the one that heads out to Montebello. Now here, there is a bit of a break because this one is still active and not in terrible shape. The line however does have freight using it, so there is traffic to contend with. There are 7 stations after it breaks off from the line heading to Wakefield. Over the length of it, lets be kind and say that it can function with 5 sidings, to facilitate commuter rail and freight traffic management. Lets say that there just need to be some minor signal work, grade crossing upgrades and that there will need to minimal work on track improvements (most likely welding but the rail bed and ties should be okay as is). So we will give that section a bargain basement price of $25 million for $80km of rail line.
There is still one section I didn't mention yet, the one that uses the Trillium line and POW bridge. There is the cost of bringing the POW bridge up to usable standards (estimates seem to range from $30-50 million, so lets meet in the middle and say $40 million, even though the cost is likely to be close to double that). Then there is the section of line on the Quebec side from the bridge approach, to Tache, which would need to be reconstructed, an under/overpass for the recreation trail, and grade crossing upgrades for the line on Tache. So I would say that the low end of the costs is about $50 million for this particular section.
This puts the total cost of rail repair, rebuilding, and upgrading at $222.5 million. And in every single one of those cases, the estimates were based on doing the bare minimum and costing it at the cheapest end of the scale. Realistically, the price tag, even for the bare minimum, is much, much higher.
But wait! There are more expenses yet. There is the need for a maintenance facility. As I mentioned above these are not cheap. And while it doesn't need to be as big as the GO facility in Whitby, it will still be sizable. To says that the investment in that will be around $100 million is a pretty reasonable estimate.
There will also be the need for storage of at least one train at the end of each the lines. In some cases, maybe it will literally be the end of the line, and they can just extend it a bit, while in other cases it will need to be a siding. There are still costs for electrical services, for when trains are plugged in over night, and probably a small washroom facility for conductors and staff (I believe these are required by law). An estimate of $10 million for those, across all six lines, seems reasonable.
Then we have the cost of the trains. It is hard to say how many are needed in total. If there is going to be service on 6 lines, would 3 train sets be sufficient for each line? I wont go through all the calculations I did, but my estimate is that they would need around 20 in total, at a minimum. I know the plan is to purchased used bi-levels and diesel locomotives, so lets see how much new ones cost and work backwards. If a new bi-level is about $3.5 million, and new diesel locomotive is $5.2 million (in 2008), then the cost of a new, 3 car, 1 locomotive set is $15.7 million. Would a used set be half priced? A third? A quarter? that is hard to say. If you buy ones that are too old, then your maintenance costs go through the roof. So lets say that used sets are purchased at half the price of a new ones, to attempt to create a balance between the high capital cost of new ones, and not buying something that will have high maintenance costs. So that is a very conservative $125 million for the equipment (which I think is a totally low, rubbish number, but lets go with it).
Then there are all sorts of miscellaneous costs associated with starting up a commuter rail service from scratch. There is the purchase of a fare system, websites and apps, setting up a customer service desk at the Tremblay station, marketing and advertising, training and hiring of customer service and operations members, etc. There is likely around $5 million in all those costs, though again, that is being very kind.
So total it all up and what do you get? $647.5 million dollars. For a commuter rail system that doesn't actually serve downtown. for investments just to bring up rail infrastructure to a bare minimum. For a plan that sacrifices the Trillium line. For a plan that is priced out to provide stations that are little more then garden sheds. For a plan that uses big, lumbering, diesel locomotives and bi-level coaches.
And the price I attached to it all is probably far too low. If you want nicer stations, like the one on the Moose website, add several million more for each station (perhaps even double the price I used). If you want grade separation of the remaining at grade crossings in Ottawa, add another $430 million (and the safety implications of not doing that are huge). If you want newer, more modern trains that are more likely to attract customers, add more to that price. The cost of upgrading the rail infrastructure is likely double, maybe even triple, what I quoted when you start to dig deeper into what is needed, and the condition of existing track.
So in reality the plan would likely be over $1 billion, and close to $2 billion if you include grade separation.
But even if it is $647 million, someone has to pay for it. Perhaps you can get VIA to pay for anything along their lines. Perhaps you can get the other remaining private rail line owners to pay for those costs. You could even claim you are not paying for a maintenance facility if you just hide the cost a third party operator will charge you for it, in the contract, and chalk that up as a yearly operating cost. But that still leaves several dozen stations, a fleet of trains, associated start up costs, and not to mention all the annual operating costs, which I haven't even mentioned. Even if this project manages to get a lot of freebies, there is still, at least, several hundred million dollars required by Moose for start-up costs.
And what is the plan for that? Is the plan for them to have everything paid by someone else? Small time, local exurb developers are not going to have the kind of capital required to fund a several hundred million dollar project. This project is not techie enough to attract that sort of investment. so who, is going to invest, when it is stated that commuter rail will be a loss leader for real estate. That is going to have to be some monster developments to make up the initial investments and the year to year loses.
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So having said all that, lets go back to what Joseph posted in response to my first post. First, if there was as much time spent attacking those who are "denying" him use of the POW bridge, maybe we would actually have a fully costed plan, and a vision that would make people see some sort of value, any value, in Moose. The whole obsession with the POW bridge is weird. And it seems like most every story about Moose in the last few years hasn't been about a plan that makes people think, its about some sort of legal action.
And if Joseph did win that battle. If he got access to the bridge, and effectively shut down the Trillium line, then what? How long until that line is used again? 6 months? A year? 5 years?
As for the "misdirected funds". Money went to transit agencies that had a plan in place. Interprovincial transportation is largely in the hands of the NCC and what did they propose? Nothing. Not a thing. Ottawa and Gatineau developed plans that their citizens, in one way or another, decided were right for them, and right for the money they would be spending on them. Yes regional planning is important, and needs to be improved. But each city made the right choice with what it pursued. And for those municipalities outside the city, there was nothing stopping them from approaching Ottawa or Gatineau to develop a more regional plan.
And for the final point, comparing Ottawa to Toronto of the 1960s when GO first came into existence, that point is well off. As Allandale said, Ottawa today and the GTA in 1967 isn’t really a great comparison. To start with, in 1961 the population of the City of Toronto alone was 1.82 million, and the Toronto CMA was 1.91 million. By 1971, 4 years after GO opened, the city itself had 2.09 million people, and the Toronto CMA was at 2.62 million. In 1986, 19 years after GO opened, the city had only edged ahead to 2.14 million, but the CMA was at 3.42 million (and what is defined as the GTA was actually 3.73 million people).
The entire NCR, and beyond, is not going to be at 3.73 million people in 19 years. It might hit 2 million, but even that is optimistic. The growth trajectory of Toronto in the 60’s and Ottawa today are quite different. The GTA in 1967 had more people than the NCR and beyond will in 20 years, and probably the next 30 years.
And, as Allandale also mentioned, Toronto was starting GO with government funding, and in a region that was perfectly equipped for commuter rail service. Union Station was at the heart of the city, with subway lines radiating from it, and rail lines from all across the region streaming in. The Lakeshore line was particularly perfect for commuter rail. For a century and a half towns had been settled on the shore of Lake Ontario, grown into cities, and created a perfectly linearly string of commuter stops, on a single line that lead directly into Union Station. It was, and still is, a line that captured a substantial amount of the regions population. If anything, GO should have happened at least a decade earlier.
At the time that GO was starting, Ottawa was heading in a radically different direction. It was evicting rail lines from the urban core of the city, ripping them up from the banks of the Rideau Canal, along with the lines heading into Lebreton. It created a beautiful, but isolated central station away from downtown. It allowed the creation of parkways and the Queensway, giving the auto exclusive domain. It wasn’t until 1983 that the first meagre section of the Transitway was opened. In fact, it won’t be until next spring, when the Confederation line opens, that there will once again be a dedicated rail transit right of way that takes people into, and through the downtown. That is 53 years since Union Station closed there has been no rail transit of any kind, that actually gets into the heart of downtown.
So even if you say that the population numbers are “close enough”, Ottawa today is not starting out in the same, commuter rail ready, spot that Toronto did in the 60’s. Not even close.
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At its best, Moose is simply a plan several decades too early, and several hundred million dollar investors short. At its worse, it is nothing more than a unique variant of the litigious patent trolls you see in the technology sector.
Should there be plans started for commuter rail? Yes. And it should start with bringing passenger rail to the cores of Ottawa and Gatineau again. Could some commuter services be viable in the next few decades? Probably, there are some untapped, even if small scale, opportunities. But what Moose proposes isn't a rational, logical plan for today. Its not even a plan rooted in reality. It is simply an attempt to have governments and private agencies pay for a massive project, so that developers can make some money, in a weird scheme that sucks some of the value from peoples housing, in exchange for a 90 minute commuter to Ottawa.
This plan, as is, is nonsense. And I didn't even dig as deep as I could. There is no way it will ever attract the hundreds of millions, and perhaps even billion or more, in investment, that it needs to get off the ground. The only way this project would have a fighting chance is if it was tech bonkers. Electric trains powered by batteries at quick recharge stations, or hydrogen. Autonomous trains, or vehicles to shuttle people to and from the train stations. A fare system where you can use the NFC capabilities of your phone and not even have to take it out of your pocket to "tap on". Train stations are made in a modular fashion in a hermetically sealed factory that can be expanded by simply trucking out another section and bolting it on. Stations in all new "smart communities" that are built in conjunction with Google and Facebook and Uber.
Then and only then could this project have a small chance of raising the kind of investment capital it needs. The odds might be increased if a single line could be used as a proof of concept to attract larger scale investment in order to go forward with the remaining lines. But because this is all or nothing, because it "needs" to cross the river, even a proof of concept on one of the easier lines is off the table. So the one, tiny, chance, is already a non-starter.
So instead Moose will continue to attract neither public or private money. Instead, it will probably just fade away under a stack of lawyers bills.
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