The Great Canadian Transit Thread

[GeneralLea]

Originally Posted by Chadillaccc

Honestly yes.

I agree with this whole heartedly. I visit family from time to time, and always take VIA rail to get to the community they reside in. There's genuinely special moment realized when you're sitting in a train, having a meal, or a snack. You can relax, and generally the trains offer more comfort than an airplane, with nice seating and a good amount of room.

[ainvan]

Vancouver to host major North American conference on public transit this year

Public transit planners and industry experts from around the world will be descending on downtown Vancouver this year for the ‘Rail~Volution’ conference on public transit and community development.

Vancouver was selected as the host city for the 2019 conference to learn from the region’s successes and challenges with public transit.

‘Rail~Volution’ notes TransLink has seen significant growth in ridership in recent years and transit-oriented developments around SkyTrain stations, with about 100 active projects within a block of the stations.

Other acknowledgements include the frequent SkyTrain system, which is the world’s longest automated light rail system, and the creation of a frequent transit network with buses arriving at least every 15 minutes throughout the day.

Attendees will also learn about TransLink’s $7-billion expansion plan that includes SkyTrain extensions and bus expansions.

The proportion of ‘active transportation’ trips is also relatively high, with 48% of all trips within the City of Vancouver being made on public transit and by walking and cycling. Recent data from the American Public Transit Association indicates Metro Vancouver is experiencing the highest growth in transit ridership in North America.

The conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency from September 8 to 11, 2019.

Daily Hive

[ainvan]

SkyTrain reached a record high on-time reliability performance in 2018: report

After experiencing a dip in on-time reliability performance earlier in the decade, TransLink is reporting that the Expo Line and Millennium Line systems saw an on-time performance (OTP) of 96.38% in 2018 — the highest performance level on record for SkyTrain.

This is up from the on-time performance of 95.32% in 2017, according to a new report that will be reviewed by TransLink’s board of directors this Friday.

The OTP also exceeded the minimum target of 95.4% for almost every month in 2018. OTP is defined as being within three minutes of the train’s scheduled arrival.

Contrast this with the OTPs of a few other train networks elsewhere in the world; San Francisco BART’s OTP was 85% in 2018, Montreal Metro’s OTP was 97% in 2017, Calgary’s C-Train LRT’s OTP was 86% in fall 2017, Washington DC’s Metro’s OTP was 87% in the first two quarters of the current fiscal year, and New York City’s subway’s best OTP was 70.3% in October 2018, which was the best figure for NYC’s subway system in over two years.

Daily Hive

[ainvan]

Translink's 10-year plan


Source

[ClaytonA]

Ontario government confirmed their portion of Ottawa Stage 2 LRT funding last Friday;

https://news.ontario.ca/opo/en/2019/03/ontario-government-announces-investment-in-ottawa-lrt.html

... The Trillium Line south extension is scheduled for completion in 2022, and the Confederation Line east and west extensions are scheduled for completion in 2024 and 2025, respectively. ...

... and who knows (is this government going to run balanced budgets? costs them nothing to say this): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ford-phase-3-lrt-1.5069022

[haljackey]

Looks like 3/5 components of London's proposed BRT system may actually be saved.

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/coun...o-put-brakes-on-london-transit-decisions

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/brt-london-transit-1.5070330

...For this city I will take this as a win. We can always revisit the other routes in the future as well.

[Ottawaresident]

Originally Posted by haljackey

Looks like 3/5 components of London's proposed BRT system may actually be saved.

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/coun...o-put-brakes-on-london-transit-decisions

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/brt-london-transit-1.5070330

...For this city I will take this as a win. We can always revisit the other routes in the future as well.

Does anyone have any maps of the London BRT plans?


Unrelated,
Does anyone have Ottawa LRT Stage 2 station renderings?

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by Ottawaresident

Unrelated,
Does anyone have Ottawa LRT Stage 2 station renderings?

https://www.stage2lrt.ca/resources-2/

[CityTech]

He did say "let's wait until Phase 2 is finished before thinking about Phase 3". Phase 2 is not going to be finished until 2025. Long way off.

Honestly, waiting for Phase 3 is a good bet. The city should absolutely do the planning work to get it on the books in the next few years but funding and construction can wait. Phase 1 isn't even finished construction.

It's remarkable how quickly Ottawa is building out what is essentially a light metro. From basically nothing today to something like 60km six years from now. I credit this to the political capital of mayor Jim Watson, who has extremely high approval ratings and is able to get council to do more or less whatever he wants, allowing transit planning to proceed at a fast pace more or less free of political drama.

There are some consequences, though. Ottawa is cheaping out to get such an extensive network so quickly. In many areas the tracks are in the cheapest place to put them rather than the best positioned to serve the area, and Line 2 is not much more than glorified commuter rail.

[Reecemartin]

Queen Station Focus in Waterloo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-yF_3rt33o

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by haljackey

Looks like 3/5 components of London's proposed BRT system may actually be saved.

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/coun...o-put-brakes-on-london-transit-decisions

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/brt-london-transit-1.5070330

...For this city I will take this as a win. We can always revisit the other routes in the future as well.

Are the routes saved ones where the EA had projected actual travel time savings? Even my green party voting relatives in London were against the plans, as the travel timed saved was horrendously low for the investment (the number I heard from them was an average 2 minutes).



London is really in a bind, no good, affordable options really, but too small of a city to make a jump to the next level.

[haljackey]

Originally Posted by Ottawaresident

Does anyone have any maps of the London BRT plans?

Here's the map now:


The north leg would have been the best utilized route, but also the most controversial. It was voted down in a landslide.

[ssiguy]

The north leg would have run thru tony North London and they didn't want the BRT. It would have hurt Richmond Row, the city's highend shopping/resturant/entertainment street and frankly Richmond is a pretty thin road to begin with. I don't think the western route to Oxford & Wonderland made any sense so no lose there.

Western can also take a fare share of the blame. They didn't want LRT thru the campus and yet put a limit of only 10 BRT vehicles thru campus which is only service each way of a maximum of buses every 12 minutes.............far worse than the service that runs now along Richmond and completely inadequate during rush hour.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Ottawaresident

Does anyone have Ottawa LRT Stage 2 station renderings?

If you go through the City's Stage 2 website, it will take you forever to find the right document. I recommend O-Train Fans.

https://www.otrainfans.ca/

Go to "The Stations" on the top red bar to see both Stage 1 pics and Stage 2 renderings. Stage 2 stations are value-engineered versions of Stage 1 designs. Still nice, but somewhat disappointing.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

The north leg would have run thru tony North London and they didn't want the BRT. It would have hurt Richmond Row, the city's highend shopping/resturant/entertainment street and frankly Richmond is a pretty thin road to begin with. I don't think the western route to Oxford & Wonderland made any sense so no lose there.

Western can also take a fare share of the blame. They didn't want LRT thru the campus and yet put a limit of only 10 BRT vehicles thru campus which is only service each way of a maximum of buses every 12 minutes.............far worse than the service that runs now along Richmond and completely inadequate during rush hour.

Yeah, squeezing in a dedicated ROW on a 30,000 car street isn't the easiest, especially when the businesses want street parking too!


As for transit through campuses - unless the planners come to campus with a woonerf type vision, or underground, every proposal is going to be viewed as splitting a campus in two like Carleton in Ottawa. UCalgary similarly rejected a line on the surface through the centre of campus in the 80s. UAlberta did the same.



Western has a particular concern with the bridge on campus - would either LRT or BRT have replaced the bridge? My understanding is the university owns the bridge, and it can't support more than one bus on it at a time - which could have led to the frequency being set at what it was.

[ssiguy]

Richmond is a very busy street, the only street going from downtown to Western or Masonville {the city's largest and busiest shopping centre}, and is very thin. It's 4 lanes but with no room to spare. The street doesn't even have room for bus bulges and yet they wanted to put a BRT lane down the middle. It would have taken away a lane in each direction from the crucial roadway which as noted carries 30,000 vehicles a day. It is also a major chock point for it's busy intersection with Oxford and crosses the dreaded Richmond rail corridor at grade which often brings the city to a grinding halt.

This is why the Richmond portion was initially called to be a tunnel as Richmond and especially at Oxford is already congested enough as it is with no room for widening. When the tunnel was taken out of the equation as it would have required the destruction of several historic buildings and ruined much of the streetscape of very pleasant Richmond, the Richmond BRT was effectively dead.

Unlike Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg, or KW, London has no wide roadways or undeveloped land near the centre of the city.........it has a very solid, continuous built urban form but with thin roadways. It has helped make the city very pleasant and walkable but conversely has resulted in extruciating traffic and no corridors to effectively run a BRT except Wellington. Fanshawe can get done as it will be using east/west one-way streets and after leaving Old East goes into mostly industrial lands before getting to Fanshawe College. I am very pleased that the downtown loop is going ahead.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

Richmond is a very busy street, the only street going from downtown to Western or Masonville {the city's largest and busiest shopping centre}, and is very thin. It's 4 lanes but with no room to spare. The street doesn't even have room for bus bulges and yet they wanted to put a BRT lane down the middle. It would have taken away a lane in each direction from the crucial roadway which as noted carries 30,000 vehicles a day. It is also a major chock point for it's busy intersection with Oxford and crosses the dreaded Richmond rail corridor at grade which often brings the city to a grinding halt.

This is why the Richmond portion was initially called to be a tunnel as Richmond and especially at Oxford is already congested enough as it is with no room for widening. When the tunnel was taken out of the equation as it would have required the destruction of several historic buildings and ruined much of the streetscape of very pleasant Richmond, the Richmond BRT was effectively dead.

Unlike Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg, or KW, London has no wide roadways or undeveloped land near the centre of the city.........it has a very solid, continuous built urban form but with thin roadways. It has helped make the city very pleasant and walkable but conversely has resulted in extruciating traffic and no corridors to effectively run a BRT except Wellington. Fanshawe can get done as it will be using east/west one-way streets and after leaving Old East goes into mostly industrial lands before getting to Fanshawe College. I am very pleased that the downtown loop is going ahead.

Ottawa doesn't have wide roads either. That is why LRT is following old rail lines, and expressways for most of the distance, and why there was no choice but a subway through downtown.

[CityTech]

Deferring that northern leg is not necessarily a bad thing. That Richmond St section is really going to have to be underground and underground is much easier to do with trains than with buses, so it would make sense to plan to build LRT on that section instead with a subway tunnel on Richmond. This is obviously far too expensive of an investment in a city like London at this time, but in the future it will probably be necessary.

[haljackey]

London BRT

The decision to scrap the north and west routes was finalized yesterday. London's BRT system will only go south, east, and loop around the downtown core.


https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-bus-rapid-transit-1.5073014


https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/brt-questions-about-a-london-bargain-lost


Only reason the south and east legs got approved is because we needed some shovel-ready project to qualify for provincial and federal funding, and politicans liked them more because they provided better transit connections to the main industrial nodes of the city (which are in the east and south of the 401).

[osmo]

The London mess is typical of Ontario transit planning. Not chasing ridership and demand but simply playing politics, the BRT will suffer and become an hindrence to go grow the system to where demand is viable (Hospital and Western).