Ottawa Rapid Transit Network developments

[adam-machiavelli]

Dear residents of Crystal Beach,

If you oppose this project because it benefits others too much then you are a bunch of greedy f--kers.

Sincerely,
Enlightened Urbanite.

[Ciemny]

"McConnachie added that with concrete numbers he felt the community could make a better informed decision about whether a potentially noisy and disruptive corridor is necessary or whether it could be handled with route changes."

SO we are supposed to leave a giant gap in the transitway. Awesome, lets place these buses on carling.....right by Crystal Beach.

i think these people should have NO say in this, its a nescessary part of the network.

[rocketphish]

While I understand that the residents of Crystal Beach don't want to have a transit corridor running through their backyards, I think that they may be overblowing things a bit. In the end they will actually have a pretty substantial buffer between them and the transitway. At least they won't be losing their land like the poor folks along Alenmede Crescent did.

Crystal Beach corridor:




Alenmede Crescent corridor:

[eternallyme]

Would an alignment shift be a good idea for the Transitway, putting it onto the south side of Highway 417 through the area? That would require it to cross the 417 twice, but would also create an immaculate opportunity for TOD in the Moodie/417/416 junction area.

[rocketphish]

Ottawa's more successful twin

By Phil Jenkins, The Ottawa Citizen, June 30, 2009


There are many similarities between our town and Curitiba, Brazil.

And we can learn a lot from this efficient and green city

There is no endeavour more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream. When a city accepts as its mandate its quality of life; when it respects the people who live in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for future generations, the people share responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the only way to achieve that collective dream.

Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil

Ottawa certainly has a lot of things on its to-do list just now. Dig a tunnel under downtown; ruin Lansdowne Park; build a Native Heritage Centre by 2013; put another bridge across the river; ruin Le Breton Flats; build a new central library; for mercy's sake put in more bike lanes; ruin the rural/urban interface; go greener; replace the broken convention centre.

Did I miss anything?

I recall when I was at Vincent Massey elementary school there was a boy, and his name was Kenny. Kenny was a model child, and we were told we could do a lot worse than be more like Kenny. (No doubt Kenny was in turn modelled on his parents, and they on theirs, and so on. Kenny had gene power.)

I tried hard to Kennify myself, and probably failed.

Later, when I wanted to become a writer, I read the better, successful ones, in the belief that they were clearly ahead of me in the game and had something to teach me. That worked a little better.

Well, getting back to Ottawa's to-do list, there is a city in Brazil, in the southernmost state of Paraná, by the name of Curitiba.

If you are an urban planner, you will have heard of Curitiba, and you may even have been there to visit it. A lot of urban planners make the trip, because the Brazilian city is a model one, particularly with regards to its rapid transit system, its downtown historic preservation, its greenspace, its recycling programs and its civic management.

Curitiba's solutions to the problems that all cities face -- how to get people to where they work, how to break the addiction to cars, how to give people spaces where they can think subjectively about life and get away from the clock, what to do with the garbage -- are all innovative, and most importantly they work. The root of the solution, actually, is that for 40 years their mayors have all been town planners.

Imagine that.

As they have progressed (or not) from village to town to city, Ottawa and Curitiba have shared some similarities in their chronology.

Both became capitals in the mid-1800s, we of our country and they of their state.

As far as their transport histories go, they experienced the same escalation; trains, bicycles and cars. (Potted history for Ottawa: The Bytown and Prescott railway sent the first steam engine into Ottawa, precariously, in 1854. In 1882, 10 men on bicycles called Premiers, which had 60-inch front wheels with no gears, chains or brakes, took a short ride down Bank Street. The first car with a combustion engine under the hood putt-putted around Ottawa in 1901.)

Then, in the 1940s or thereabouts, both cities, experiencing growth pains particularly to do with traffic, called in a French planner to sort things out. Ours was called Jacques Gréber, theirs Alfred Agache. Where things diverge is in the 1960s.

In 1964, when Charlotte Whitton was in her last year as mayor in the big office in Ottawa, mayor Ivo Arzua of Curitiba asked for proposals as to how to manage the city's growth, most especially in regard to what to do with all those once and future cars. Both Ottawa and Curitiba then boasted a population of around half a million and rapidly counting.

The best answer Arzua got came from a pack of young planners at the local university, headed by a man with an appropriate surname called Jaime Lerner. Lerner et al's proposal was adopted as the Curitiba master plan in 1968.

As job one, Lerner set up an urban planning department, which they didn't have, and his team pinned a wish list to the planning board which included: keeping urban sprawl to a minimum, getting cars out of downtown, fending off the developers itching to condo-ize and strip mall Curitiba's historic district, and most of all give the Curitibans an offer of accessible and affordable public transit that they could not refuse.

They also proposed fashioning main linear transit arteries from the existing road grid, thus making direct, high-speed routes in and out of the city.

The team then did something that, when we reflect on Ottawa's municipal talent for procrastination and deferral and gentility in dealing with developers, makes one tip one's hard hat to them. They not only talked the talk, they drove the drive.

As a symbolic first gesture, and there were more to follow, they created Brazil's first pedestrian-only street in 1970. (Ottawa had opened Canada's first no-car street four years earlier). The next move was to create a road design, the Sistema Trinário, which sandwiched a two-lane street restricted to buses and local car traffic between wide, fast-flowing one-way throughways.

So, while Ottawa was using a piecemeal approach, a Queensway here, a train station way out there, Curitiba got busy lassoing the mustang cars and taming them. In its place they put a donkey, in fact a herd of donkeys, in a rapid transit system centred on the bus, and it is that system, probably the most efficient in the world, that we'll look at next week.

Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa writer.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/fp/Ottawa+more+successful+twin/1742535/story.html

[rocketphish]

Some transit ideas from Brazil
Curitiba avoids tunnelling by using what it has above ground

By Phil Jenkins, Citizen Special, July 6, 2009


Forgive me for raising the ugly spectre of last winter's bus strike, but, as Joni Mitchell reminded us, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

OC Transpo is what we have in this city to get you and me across or downtown, and it comes in a two-tier system -- rapid transit or fighting it out among the traffic. Indubitably, taking the bus beats trudging for two hours along an icy sidewalk, but as a system, like all systems, it could work better.

As a device for getting us out of our car seats and onto a bus bench, the efficiency of the bus system breaks down not in the engine, but in our heads. The mental roadblock is there in the form of a class barrier, as well as a matter of convenience. Taking the bus, for some, is a sign of economic weakness, of dropping a couple of rungs down the ladder to rub shoulders with those below them. "You won't see us on the bus" is a maxim in the self-image of many of those who prefer to drive themselves downtown. Give them a stigma-free system.

In the previous column, we were introduced to the city of Curitiba, in southern Brazil, an urban conurbation that has a good head on its shoulders and has worked into its daily fabric several neat, modern-living ideas. It is a city that has enjoyed a string of mayors who are also innovative urban planners, and in this and future columns we can and will look to it as fuel for thought about our own backyard. The way Curitibanos view their native, highly evolved bus system is almost as a default; because it works so well, why on earth would you drive your car all alone at a crawl for an hour, pay the price of a good holiday a year to leave it sitting stagnant in a parking lot, then crawl home, all the while cutting a slice off the natural life of the planet?

Consider this: As far back as the early 1990s, Curitiba's Bus Rapid Transit system, or BRT, hacked about 30 million trips off the annual car-commuter tally, thus preventing the burning of 30 million litres of gas out the back end of cars. (The average tanker truck carries 20,000 litres, so that's a line of 1,500 trucks.) Fully a third of the people making those daily trips were converts from vehicular travel, and three-quarters of Curitiba's commuters take advantage of the BRT. By switching to the bus, the residents have given themselves the gift of one of the lowest rates of ambient air pollution in South America, and they have to spend, on average, a mere 10th of their hard-earned pay on travel. You may want to do the personal math on that one.

How did they do it? Starting in the early 1970s, they took advantage of a radial system of wide highways already in place, the equivalent of our Carling, Bronson and Montreal roads, and gave them dedicated rapid-transit lanes. These radial arcs are lined with healthy, treed sidewalks and small retail and residential mix, with residential two or three blocks back, thus providing a potential bus-user base. They decided early on not to go with any exorbitantly expensive subways and underground messing about. Rather, they spent the money above ground, capitalizing on what they already had.

Then -- and this was a smart move, indeed -- they fitted out the suburbs with collector buses, little ones that scoot about picking up commuters in the morning and evening, and ferrying them to the feeder stations, which are attractive and sport news stands, Internet cafés, hot-drink stands, cheap public telephones and the like. From there, triple-articulated buses that can carry almost 300 people in comfort whisk workers to work. Along the way, people board and alight at clear-sided tubes, where they have already paid at a turnstile and from which they step off and on via extra wide doors directly to the bus, via an extending ramp. Buses drain and fill as they pull up in their car-free lanes in a matter of seconds. The system even sports business-class-style buses, expensive and better upholstered with little tables and a clientele of laptop pounders and cellphone bellowers, much to the relief of the regular bus users. The further virtues of the system are many, and if you want to ride deeper into it, a quick Google of "Curitiba bus system" will explain them, not to mention their park system.

In all, Curitibanos enjoy 10 different bus companies, handling different facets of the big bus picture, and each one makes a profit. The population has continued to grow -- it is now twice the size of ours -- but the BRT system has not been abandoned, and has proved elastic enough to cope. It has been finely thought through, even as far as using the retired buses to carry citizens for free to parks on weekends, and as mobile schools and clinics. The payoff in civic health, both mental and physical, has been big and wide; the daily commute is not one big smile, there are annoyances, but neither is it a congested, soul-sapping grind.

Of course, we already have our square peg, and fitting it neatly into a Curitiba-style round hole is not going to happen; but there might well be some elements of theirs that could be modified -- with a couple of bangs and few extra screws -- to fit ours.

The notion of suburban doorstep collector buses surely is worth a go, if nothing else. Just a thought, before the big dig starts.

Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa freelance writer.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/columni...082/story.html

[lrt's friend]

http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/curitibas-brt/

I good video on Curitibas BRT system. Warning, you have download a big file. Pre-boarding fare collection, use of double articulated buses, and raised platforms allowing level boarding are features that make their BRT superior to ours. With the issues with articulated buses during winter, one has to wonder whether double articulated buses would be useable in our climate. We do seem to have an advantage with our right of way being fully segregated outside of downtown. It appears that their BRT runs down the centre of boulevards and buses have to stop at traffic signals. Only now are they working on signal priority.

Here is a video on Bogata's TransMilenio http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/...ransit-bogota/ . Here there are many of the same features as Curitibas plus free feeder buses and substantial bicycle integration into the BRT network.

[p_xavier]

There is an interesting study by the city of Toronto concerning the Eglinton LRT and the suggestion to use one boring tunnel instead of two. Here are Steve Munro's comments on the subject:

http://www.toronto.ca/involved/proje...ards_part3.pdf

Panel 62 shows an alternative construction with a single large tunnel 13m in diameter. This technique has certain advantages:

A single tunnel is cheaper to build than two small ones.
For street sections where space between building foundations is at a premium, there may not be enough space for twin tunnels plus the clearance needed between them for structural stability (the “column” of earth separating them).

As shown on the display, stations can be accommodated within the tunnel itself and do not require separate construction except for the vertical access paths. One disadvantage is that the lower platform is further under the street than would be the case with a common centre platform.
Lengthening a station would not require additional pre-construction provisions.

This tunnelling method has been used for part of the new Line 9 in Barcelona, and is proposed for an extension of the Washington DC system.

This technique is very interesting for Ottawa, because it would basically give unlimited amount of stations in the core without any disruptive digging.

[MalcolmTucker]

^ you still need big holes to move enough people out of your huge stations to support the projected volumes of people and trains. To get the desired platform width for the required volumes you might still need expanded stations beyond the tunnel width.

[lrt's friend]

Why would this be cheaper? I have heard arguments that smaller tunnels are cheaper because less material has to be disposed of.

I already think our current plan has stations too deep. Would this make them even deeper?

[p_xavier]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Why would this be cheaper? I have heard arguments that smaller tunnels are cheaper because less material has to be disposed of.

I already think our current plan has stations too deep. Would this make them even deeper?

It would be about the same depth. It would make more material to be excavated that's for sure. I would like to see the entire rationale behind this.

[MalcolmTucker]

^ single tunnel can mean no concourse level, which usually will save money. With the deep tunnel, the access plan is really what gets ya. With a shallow station you can have most people taking the stairs.

[Dado]

Originally Posted by Suzie

I find it hard to believe that the cost is $172 per train-hour. That works out to $57 per car-hour.

Why is this so hard to believe? Where are your costs? If we assume a $40/hour labour cost then the per car-hour cost on this 3-car train is $44. Is this unreasonable? CTrain cars use 3.5 kwh per kilometre, so over the period of an hour at the average speed of 30 km/h they'll travel 30 km (duh) and use 105 kwh. At a price of $0.12/kwh that works out to $12.60, leaving over $30/hour for maintenance and anything else. There may be some extra costs for loss of power in the distribution network but there is also regenerative breaking as well, so a total electrical cost in the teens is reasonable.

A better question is why does this kind of basic sanity checking seemingly not occur? How is it even remotely possible that with the electric power costs of a CTrain car being only in the teens that the overall cost of operating it could be a full order of magnitude greater?

[Franky]

Originally Posted by Dado

Why is this so hard to believe? Where are your costs? If we assume a $40/hour labour cost then the per car-hour cost on this 3-car train is $44. Is this unreasonable? CTrain cars use 3.5 kwh per kilometre, so over the period of an hour at the average speed of 30 km/h they'll travel 30 km (duh) and use 105 kwh. At a price of $0.12/kwh that works out to $12.60, leaving over $30/hour for maintenance and anything else. There may be some extra costs for loss of power in the distribution network but there is also regenerative breaking as well, so a total electrical cost in the teens is reasonable.

A better question is why does this kind of basic sanity checking seemingly not occur? How is it even remotely possible that with the electric power costs of a CTrain car being only in the teens that the overall cost of operating it could be a full order of magnitude greater?

Looking at the data from Ctransit, I would have come up with numbers below $172 per LRV (but more than $172 per train), but I can't figure out how Delcan and no engineer that has worked on this project has found this mistake and corrected it. It's HUGE.

[Suzie]

Originally Posted by Dado

Why is this so hard to believe? Where are your costs? If we assume a $40/hour labour cost then the per car-hour cost on this 3-car train is $44. Is this unreasonable? CTrain cars use 3.5 kwh per kilometre, so over the period of an hour at the average speed of 30 km/h they'll travel 30 km (duh) and use 105 kwh. At a price of $0.12/kwh that works out to $12.60, leaving over $30/hour for maintenance and anything else. There may be some extra costs for loss of power in the distribution network but there is also regenerative breaking as well, so a total electrical cost in the teens is reasonable.

How is it even remotely possible that with the electric power costs of a CTrain car being only in the teens that the overall cost of operating it could be a full order of magnitude greater?

My rationale can be found in the rest of my original paragraph (i.e., comparison with Vancouver’s Skytrain). Using the methodology you used in your post, the Skytrain should come out lower in costs per car-hour since it is automated and has smaller vehicles.

d_jeffrey pointed me to the Peer Review report, which highlighted the fact the Skytrain may be hampered by higher operating costs related to elevated stations and guideways. While the Peer Review report itself was quite sketchy on details, it did point the reader to studies on the Canada Line and the Evergreen Line.

There is quite a bit of information in the Phase 2 of the Northeast Sector Rapid Transit Alternatives Study (i.e., the Evergreen Line) that was completed in 2004 (see page 7-7 of http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/Pub...1/Attach2.pdf). Although it was led by IBI Group, Delcan participated in this study. Among other things, the study calculated annual operating costs for Skytrain, LRT and Guided Light Transit (i.e., a form of gold-platted BRT) based on a number of parameters – amount of train-hours, amount of vehicle-kilometres, the number of stations and the amount of kilometres of guideway. There was also a fixed annual amount. It does indeed suggest that the Skytrain has much higher costs for stations -- $750,000 per station per year for Skytrain versus $150,000 per station per year for an at-grade LRT. For guideway costs, the difference was quite small ($200,000 per km versus $150,000 per km). I guess you need to have a rail network that requires a lot of train-hours and vehicle-kilometres to overcome the station cost disadvantage. I don’t think the LRT cost parameters came from Calgary since if you run the numbers you get a total that is about $10M higher than the actual figure for Calgary for annual operating costs.

It’s too bad the operating costs estimates in the MRC/Delcan report were not calculated using the same methodology as the Phase 2 of the Northeast Sector Rapid Transit Alternatives Study. I don’t think it would have involved a lot more additional work (although an update and review of the cost parameters would have been required) and the estimates would have been a lot more defensible.

Still, using Appleby’s estimates of the cost per hour of various train lengths in Calgary, it appears that the MRC/Delcan estimates for Ottawa were not that far off after all, at least based on my calculations. Depending on the frequencies, the estimated annual savings were only slightly higher or slightly lower than the MRC/Delcan estimate. Mistakes were made, some of which hurt the LRT option while others negatively impacted the bus option. The mistakes tended to cancel each other out.

A better question is why does this kind of basic sanity checking seemingly not occur?

The same lack of due diligence allowed to the MRC/Delcan report to claim that the LRT option would garner significantly more ridership than the bus option, even though it would be slower, less frequent and have more transfers. The results should have shown the reverse.

[Suzie]

Originally Posted by Sir.Humphrey.Appleby

It depends if you care about riders in your model. I know my transportation economics teacher said while user time on the system (including waiting time) may be valuable for somethings like determining ridership of non-captive riders, assigning monetary value to user time is a fools game since you can change the value to favour your preferred outcome. (and why bother, when in our gut we all know wait times north of 15 minutes are unacceptable)

I would hope that the analysis of various transit options would take into account the impacts on transit users like me. For example, there is a significant difference between 5-minute headways and 15-minute headways. There is also a significant difference between a no-transfer trip, a one-transfer trip and a two-transfer trip.

True, parameters used to calculate user benefits can be manipulated, misused or just plain wrong, thus giving us biased estimates. However, that can happen with just about everything, including ridership estimates, capital costs and operating costs. The best way to address this is to require the authors of studies to be as open as possible about how the results were obtained and have them provide supporting evidence to defend them. Their work should also be subject to due diligence from a third-party with the required expertise and no stake in the project whatsoever.

Saving $44 million a year in operational cost is nothing to sneeze at, since we have to remember the payoff is only being applied to 1/3 of the capital cost. For 30 years of payoff you end up with just north of $1.3 billion - so if Ottawa could secure $2.6 billion from other levels of government it would make sense to spend $3.9 billion. (spending anything less than that is still a gain from the city's eyes, but of course the extra money should go to further expansion to further reduce operating costs, instead of increased feeder bus service)

I agree that $44 million a year is a sizeable amount of money and that from the narrow perspective of the City it would be very attractive, especially if it assumed that the federal government and the province would cover two-thirds of of the cost of capital projects.

[Suzie]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

It is quite inefficient to drag extra cars from Blair to Baseline and back when the crunch is really between LeBreton and Hurdman. Imagine running a 4-car train 2/3 empty from Baseline just so there is room for 1/3 more people at Lincoln Fields. Finally the train gets filled at LeBreton and then empties through downtown and at Hurdman. Now you are running a nearly empty 4-car train all the way out to Blair where you pick up 3/4 of a load and head back downtown. At Hurdman you lose 1/3 of your passengers but pick up 2 cars worth to take your full train into the core to empty. Then you take your 1/4 full train west to all but empty it at LeBreton and Tunneys Pasture before going all the way to Baseline in your empty train. And this is scheduled to happen every 3 minutes during rush-hour. (Just to note, the off-peak frequency will probably be more like 7 minutes, evenings probably 10 minutes and sundays maybe 15 minutes. There might be 30 minute service over night, but I don't know about that since there would need to be a bus at each end to get people to the suburbs, i.e., three operators will need to work. It is possible the new over night service will disappear or be completely done by bus.)

Hi Richard,
Regarding the frequencies that you outlined above in a post from a few weeks ago, are they your best guesses or are they based on information/hints from the City? I'm curious.

Will the 3 minute frequency be met? Yes, probably, but only through downtown during rush-hour. East of Hurdman, there will be some trains missing due to the interlining of the O-Train and any other trains short turned at Hurdman. West, there will be trains missing due to the O-Train interlining and any short turned trains. (There might even be thoughts of short turning trains at Tunneys, but I haven't heard about that yet. There would obviously not be any need to short turn a train at Bayview.) West/south of Lincoln Fields there would be fewer trains since half the people will be transfering to buses to go to Kanata.

Am I correct to assume that for someone using Westboro Station the peak headways are likely to be in the 6-minute range?

[lrt's friend]

The day LRT opens on the Tunney's-Blair route, there will be 50,000 potential critics. If people notice no improvement in service or heaven forbid, slower service, you can count on some very vocal complaints about how billions of our tax money was spent. Typically, when a lot of money is spent on rapid transit, better service is delivered and that is usually faster and more frequent service. If we cannot achieve at least faster service, there could be some serious political reprocussions and this could delay implementation of future phases of LRT. City Council and the mayor have built up some pretty high expectations for LRT and they better deliver on it.

On the subject of overnight trains, I would expect that this will not occur. Overnight service will be provided by buses. Most urban rail systems have a window with no service allowing time for routine maintenance of the rail infrastructure.

[Richard Eade]

Originally Posted by Suzie

Hi Richard,
Regarding the frequencies that you outlined above in a post from a few weeks ago, are they your best guesses or are they based on information/hints from the City? I'm curious.
...
Am I correct to assume that for someone using Westboro Station the peak headways are likely to be in the 6-minute range?

Sorry, Suzie, I have a bad habit of using more authorative speech than I should. These are my current best guesses at the headways. From what I have gotten talking to the OC Transpo planners, it is still way too early for them to be making up shcedules. They would require a lot more information - like the actual route of the line - before they could decide on service levels.

These numbers come from listening to Staff and Consultants nattering about how many people the new system will need to carry if the projections* are met. Although they have not, as far as I remember, gone out on a limb and stated as many numbers as I have.

* Actually the 'projections' are modeled numbers based on arbitrary values, such as modal share, and population.

As you interestingly point out with your two choices of quotes, there are lots of unknowns. For example, in the first quote I talk about running long trains to the ends of the lines; and in the second about short-turning trains.

The three minute, rush-hour headway on the west-east line is a number which has been around for a long time, so I can't take any credit for that one. I am guessing that a 7 minute headway through the downtown core is not unreasonable for mid-day and early evening times, using shorter trains, if possible. This number would stretch to 10 minutes later in the evening. Mostly these figures come from talk of what might be considered as 'reasonable' wait times for people. I have seen some survey numbers which say that people are willing to wait up to 10 minutes. (Unfortunately, some Staff have read that as '10 minutes average wait time', or 20 minute headways.) Personally, I don't think that anything longer than 10 minutes is reasonable for a trunk service. Currently the 95 offers 5 minute service through the core off-peak so I took a stab at 7 minute for the train. This is more spread out than the bus, but not as bad as evening times.

For Sundays, I guessed at 15 minute headways because the 95 ranges from 10 to 15 service on Sundays and, again, I think that people don't like to wait. I can't count the number of times I have heard that our bus service isn't too bad except on Sunday. I expect that that is mainly because of the longer wait times - including at transfer points. If the main trunk line is too slow, then the service will be considered undesirable by those who have a choice of other transit modes.

All of the above headway guesses were for trains through the core; yes, the wait times will probably be longer farther out, past any terminus or branch points. In the case of Westboro, it is possible that every second or third train will be short turned at Tunneys. This would require more design work to be done for the Tunneys area since there would need to be a siding, perhaps between the two tracks west of the central platform. It may make sense, economically, to short-turn trains from the east at Tunneys if there are more people coming into the core and Tunneys from the east than there are from Kanata and Barrhaven. It might be, that with the expansions in Stittsville/Kanata that those trains will continue to Lincoln Fields before they are turned so any train that gets past Bayview will pass Westboro. This will depend on future numbers.

Also, since the O-Train line will be interlined with the west-east line, probably one out of every three or four trains from the east will branch south at Bayview. This will be determined by the required minimum headway on the O-Train line. For example, if the minimum O-Train headway during rush-hour is 9 minutes, then every third train through the core will not continue west of Bayview. You could look forward to 3-min spacing, 3-min spacing, 6-min spacing, 3-min spacing, 3-min spacing, 6-min spacing, etc if there were no trains turned at Tunneys. If every third train turned at Tunneys, then you would have 3-min, 6-min, 6-min, 3-min, 6-min, 6-min, etc.

On the other-hand, it might be possible to squeeze the O-Trains into 3-minute west-east spacing, providing 90-second spacing around that train through the core.

Using Google Earth and my best guesses for the proposed station positions, I put the distances as:
LeBreton - DT-west: 900m,
DT-west - DT-east: 590m,
DT-east - Rideau: 550m,
Rideau - Campus: 1225m.

With an acceleration and deceleration rate of 1.34m/s/s and a top speed of 80K/h (22.22m/s) then I get transit times of:
LeBreton - DT-west: 58s,
DT-west - DT-east: 44s,
DT-east - Rideau: 42s,
Rideau - Campus: 72s.

If a train leaves LeBreton, and spends 20 seconds at each station, it will be just leaving the Rideau Station as the next train leaves LeBreton. There should be lots of room for another train to be slipped in between those trains. Theoretically, we should be able to run trains about a minute apart but if we eventually move to 2 minute headways on the west-east line, then there may be spaces to the west for safety sake.

Of course, this brings up a point about station dwell times: Above I used 20 seconds; Montreal apparently tries to design stations for an 8-15 second dwell; Vancouver, I think runs 20-30 seconds; and Toronto is spending millions to almost duplicate platforms at its busiest stations because it can get stuck with dwell times of almost 90 seconds! Yes, Toronto's dwell time is about the same as their headway time!

I worry that having primarily two stations, DT-west and Rideau, take the downtown load will result in very long station dwell times; this is what is killing Toronto's system. You would think that a three minute headway would allow lots of leaway for long station dwell times, and it does, but what about the future; if we need to drop to two minute headways can we? What about 90-second headways?

[Richard Eade]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

The day LRT opens on the Tunney's-Blair route, there will be 50,000 potential critics. If people notice no improvement in service or heaven forbid, slower service, you can count on some very vocal complaints about how billions of our tax money was spent. Typically, when a lot of money is spent on rapid transit, better service is delivered and that is usually faster and more frequent service. If we cannot achieve at least faster service, there could be some serious political reprocussions and this could delay implementation of future phases of LRT. City Council and the mayor have built up some pretty high expectations for LRT and they better deliver on it.

On the subject of overnight trains, I would expect that this will not occur. Overnight service will be provided by buses. Most urban rail systems have a window with no service allowing time for routine maintenance of the rail infrastructure.

I agree completely. I worry about the future system, as it is planned.

If we get an automated system, then there would be a possibility of running night-time trains. However, with the system running only from Blair to Baseline, it is of limited value since there would still be buses needed at both ends to get to the suburbs. Currently the 95 allows people to get from Orleans to Fallowfield (almost Barrhaven), but it probably would be much less useful if it didn't cross the Greenbelt.

In short (which, as you might have noticed, is not my strong suit) I agree that it would make more sense to continue running a 95-like bus service over night. It just irks me though to be spending billions on a train that will need cede to a bus to give proper service at night.

If only we could get automated trains that went from Barrhaven to Orleans, and Kanata to Riverside South, and that provided good coverage of the downtown core, and opportunities to increase transit usage. Alas, that is not in the cards for Ottawa.