General STO News and Rapibus System

[lrt's friend]

At least if it were rail, they could have crossing gates protecting intersections.

These kinds of accidents are inevitable with two roadways right next to each other.

[kmcamp]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

At least if it were rail, they could have crossing gates protecting intersections.

These kinds of accidents are inevitable with two roadways right next to each other.

Maybe they should just petition the provincial government to allow crossing gates for the busway. There's no technological limitation here to having gates come down for a green light on the busway, but I'd imagine there's a legal one

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

What a farce this thing is. Seems like several accidents a month cripple the RapiBus system.

That's not really true. We are multiple people in my family who use the Rapibus corridor pretty much every single weekday, and today I think was the first time in recent memory that an accident caused the system to be dysfunctional.

I wouldn't be against the idea of crossing gates, though.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Acajack

That's not really true. We are multiple people in my family who use the Rapibus corridor pretty much every single weekday, and today I think was the first time in recent memory that an accident caused the system to be dysfunctional.

I wouldn't be against the idea of crossing gates, though.

Several might be overselling it a bit, but two accidents at that very intersection caused major delays over the last few weeks, the other being on January 22. When designing the corridor, they should have included additional grade separation. As far as I know, only the Gréber intersection is segregated.

[Acajack]

Can't find a link but I heard on the radio today that they intend to install enhanced signals at some (or all?) of the Rapibus intersections, including Montclair.

I agree the ones along Maloney can sometimes be a bit confusing due to having to cross two roads, but it still seems to me having a no-right-turn-on-red sign on every post, plus two or three signals just for your lane that have red arrows, should make it clear to people as to what they should be doing or not.

The Montclair intersection where the accident happened yesterday is IMO even less confusing. It's basically just an intersection where two perpendicular roads meet. If you're approaching it from the south as the driver was, the previous intersection was a half km before, and the next one is a couple of hundred metres further along.

I am not trying to unsympathetic as a moment's inattention can happen to anyone, but this was simply a case of someone running a red light. The same as running a red light at any other conventionally-designed intersection.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

Montreal Road and other areas of Ottawa which are being deprived of meaningful transit solutions are denser, and, this is rather important, part of a metropolitan area of 1.3-million and growing.

Kingston, Windsor, and Sudbury are 1/10th to 1/4th the size, less dense (massively so, in Sudbury's case) and the two latter are alternating between periods of low growth and outright stagnation.

I fully support transit solutions for smaller and mid-sized cities and conurbations, but there is no reasonable planning horizon that sees even BRT in either of those three centres, let alone anything heavier.

And yet Fleury and Nussbaum if he was still there will both vote to increase massively Vanier 8and Rockcliffe but no sympathy) taxes to pay for others to get transit. There will be not money left for much else. The only people who might have the guts to vote against will be the conservative suburban councillors who normally are holding back the city.

[Jamaican-Phoenix]

It's almost like they shouldn't have built this thing and should've gone for an O-Train style commuter system on the existing rail right of way or something...

[Horus]

STO released information on upcoming route and schedule changes to come into effect in late August.

Most notably, they've deferred any changing of routes within downtown Ottawa until much further down the line citing the delays in getting the Confed Line operational and expected construction to Albert and Slater following the Confed Line opening.

TL: DR - STO buses will continue to ply along Wellington until at least late 2019.

Also interesting is a substantial increase in the frequency and occurrence of Route 58, service from Aylmer to Tunney's Pasture. This is to offer better and more frequent connection to Confed Line from Gatineau's West End.

[Aylmer]

What's also interesting is that the peak-only lines 44 and 46 in Aylmer will be replaced by the newly all-day 55 running at 10-minute headways during peak in addition to its current 30-minute off-peak service.
The STO seems to be moving away from having two completely separate configurations (peak lines and non-peak-only lines), and towards a consistent base of lines, with added frequencies and routes at peak.

And in other news, the STO will be extending 15-minute service to Aylmer on Sunday, up from the woefully-inadequate half-hourly frequencies.

The STO's network isn't yet good, but it's certainly getting better.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

What a farce this thing is. Seems like several accidents a month cripple the RapiBus system. The bus way has way too many of these bus/rail-road intersections, sometimes combined with an extra-wide boulevard (Maloney) or parking lots (Montcalme) often featuring LED traffic lights that can be seen until you're right under them.


https://www.ledroit.com/actualites/justi...rapibus-9b32e7e7a9dfe19a5b0277ff9699da3f

I really don't get Gatineau's thinking here. I get the Aylmer line. I don't get the Plateau line. It makes much more sense to me to spend that money converting the Rapibus corridor to a grade separated LRT (with a possible connection across the POW). Can't Plateau just be served with buses? Doesn't seem to me as a neighbourhood that really needs LRT.

Does Plateau have that much more ridership than the Rapibus corridor? And I get that they don't want to spend money after "just building" the Rapibus corridor. But at the point at which any conversion of the Rapibus would open it will have probably been at least two decades after the Rapibus first went into service.

[Nowhere]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

I really don't get Gatineau's thinking here. I get the Aylmer line. I don't get the Plateau line. It makes much more sense to me to spend that money converting the Rapibus corridor to a grade separated LRT (with a possible connection across the POW). Can't Plateau just be served with buses? Doesn't seem to me as a neighbourhood that really needs LRT.

Does Plateau have that much more ridership than the Rapibus corridor? And I get that they don't want to spend money after "just building" the Rapibus corridor. But at the point at which any conversion of the Rapibus would open it will have probably been at least two decades after the Rapibus first went into service.

I don't know how to post images, but there's a transit ridership forecast map for 2031 at the bottom of this document. There's indeed very little ridership forecasted for the Plateau. The map shows far more ridership for the Rapibus than either the Aylmer LRT or the Plateau LRT. I don't get the Aylmer line either. The city wants to run the trams along the sidewalk instead of the median. This will make the LRT very accident-prone, which would force the closure of the whole line every time. I guess that a lot of the high-income residents of Aylmer still see buses as something only for the poor.

[Gat-Train]

Originally Posted by Nowhere

The city wants to run the trams along the sidewalk instead of the median. This will make the LRT very accident-prone, which would force the closure of the whole line every time. I guess that a lot of the high-income residents of Aylmer still see buses as something only for the poor.

Yeah, it's really dumb how the bike lane is between the tramway and the road. I would have the tram lane between the cars and bikes, as that makes it safer and more comfortable for cyclists

[J.OT13]

The Plateau area is very dense. Huge proportion of housing is in three storey condo and apartment buildings, the south side of the corridor is big box stores and empty fields with huge potential for redevelopment. A proper town centre is currently under development. The ridership today is very low because of excess parking availability and terrible transit service. With a train providing good service (15 minutes or less), ridership could skyrocket pretty easily.

I'm not a fan of the streetcar model being proposed however. It could work along the wide Plateau Boulevard if done right, but not Aylmer Street or downtown Hull.

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the sketch with trains on each side of the road. Ottawa started its planning with 180 meter long centre platforms. Things change, for better or worse.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

The Plateau area is very dense. Huge proportion of housing is in three storey condo and apartment buildings, the south side of the corridor is big box stores and empty fields with huge potential for redevelopment. A proper town centre is currently under development. The ridership today is very low because of excess parking availability and terrible transit service. With a train providing good service (15 minutes or less), ridership could skyrocket pretty easily.
.

It's quite dense - especially for a newer suburban area. Probably one of the most dense of these such areas in all of Ottawa-Gatineau.

If you look at it on a population density map it's about the same density as all of the older parts of Hull except for the central-most part of the city (Vieux-Hull).

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

I really don't get Gatineau's thinking here. I get the Aylmer line. I don't get the Plateau line. It makes much more sense to me to spend that money converting the Rapibus corridor to a grade separated LRT (with a possible connection across the POW). Can't Plateau just be served with buses? Doesn't seem to me as a neighbourhood that really needs LRT.

Does Plateau have that much more ridership than the Rapibus corridor? And I get that they don't want to spend money after "just building" the Rapibus corridor. But at the point at which any conversion of the Rapibus would open it will have probably been at least two decades after the Rapibus first went into service.

The thing about the Rapibus is that for all the bitching about it and its low-tech character, it actually *works*.

Several members of my household have been using it for several years every single weekday and the service in the corridor is very dependable in terms of frequencies and time to get to destination.

My impression is that it's more reliable than the Transitway was, primarily because STO runs what are effectively "corridor-only" routes, whereas OC Transpo basically didn't have any Transitway routes (at least no main ones) that did not use Albert-Slater, where they were very vulnerable to traffic congestion.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Acajack

The thing about the Rapibus is that for all the bitching about it and its low-tech character, it actually *works*.

Several members of my household have been using it for several years every single weekday and the service in the corridor is very dependable in terms of frequencies and time to get to destination.

My impression is that it's more reliable than the Transitway was, primarily because STO runs what are effectively "corridor-only" routes, whereas OC Transpo basically didn't have any Transitway routes (at least no main ones) that did not use Albert-Slater, where they were very vulnerable to traffic congestion.

Doesn't the routing through the streets of downtown Hull-Ottawa effect reliability?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

Doesn't the routing through the streets of downtown Hull-Ottawa effect reliability?

Not really. Definitely not on the Hull routes. (STO has separate Rapibus routes for Hull and for Ottawa.) I've never heard complaints about delays on the Ottawa routes either (which use Rideau-Wellington).

Even on snowstorm days the Hull routes (those that my family uses) are pretty dependable most of the time.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Not really. Definitely not on the Hull routes. (STO has separate Rapibus routes for Hull and for Ottawa.) I've never heard complaints about delays on the Ottawa routes either (which use Rideau-Wellington).

Even on snowstorm days the Hull routes (those that my family uses) are pretty dependable most of the time.

And any delays due to the Wellington route will be mostly resolved or improved once Line 1 opens and STO buses are re-routed to Albert and Slater. Though the loop-ta-loop around Lyon might be an issue. We shall see.

The one complaint I've heard is that the rush hour window is too small (example, last bus from downtown leaves at 5:30 p.m.) That of course is not a RapiBus problem but a scheduling problem.

I think they could have done more to future-proof the system with further grade separation and/or build rail right off the bat, but it's adequate as is as a transit corridor. Improvements are needed at major intersections, which are being implemented from what I know. I don't think building a bus corridor to Aylmer would be a good idea. The current traffic patterns and lack of space warrants a train ASAP.

[CityTech]

Rapibus is certainly a better implementation of BRT than the Transitway is. For all the talk about how the Transitway was a model for BRT, it is actually one of the worst implementations of it.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

And any delays due to the Wellington route will be mostly resolved or improved once Line 1 opens and STO buses are re-routed to Albert and Slater. Though the loop-ta-loop around Lyon might be an issue. We shall see.

The one complaint I've heard is that the rush hour window is too small (example, last bus from downtown leaves at 5:30 p.m.) That of course is not a RapiBus problem but a scheduling problem.

.

Yeah, I think that could be improved though it's worth mentioning that 5:30 is not the "last bus" from downtown. It's the time for the switch-over from segregated Hull and Ottawa routes to when all of these Rapibus routes run from Ottawa, then Hull, then on the Rapibus corridor.

After 5:30 pm the frequencies on the Ottawa-Hull-Rapibus combined routes are still around 5 minutes between buses.

They then increase progressively through the evening and into the night. I believe late at night they run at 15-minute intervals until around 1 am.