The Great Canadian Transit Thread

[TownGuy]

Cobourg's new VIA Station recently completed. Its fairly imposing.

The old station can be seen to the right of the new one. Not sure what its use will be.










Source: http://www.eliteconstructioninc.com/portfolio/project/via_rail_canada_cobourg#sthash.zMjH54SD.dpbs

Funnily enough just recently a train arrived on a different track than was scheduled, the doors to the rail overpass were locked and no station officials were present due to poor weather. The crew on board the train offered no help or direction on what to do. Passengers decided on their own to cross the tracks to get to their train. Oops.

[Nouvellecosse]

Wow, Coburg must be an awfully busy stop to justify all that!

[Innsertnamehere]

VIA ridership on the corridor has actually been skyrocketing since the upgrades got finished a year or two ago. It's not offsetting cuts from the rest of the system, but ridership grew by something like 11% in 2012.

[1overcosc]

It's not just the upgrades, it's price cuts too. You can now get Ottawa-Toronto for $39 with advance booking for example... and low as $25 when sales happen. You used to NEVER ever get prices that cheap with VIA.

I can definitely attest to first-hand evidence of increased ridership. As somebody who VIA's from Kingston to Ottawa quite regularly, I've noticed that whereas trains outside of peak travel times used to be half empty, now every single one is almost full--and they've added more trips too. Ottawa-Kingston-Toronto-Montreal corridor is now at close to bihourly service.

[1overcosc]

One thing that does annoy me though is that all these little stations with only milk-run train stops (Belleville, Cobourg, etc.) are getting fancy rebuilds while Kingston station, the 5th busiest in the country with 25 trains a day, hasn't gotten squat.

I'd love to see a new station in Kingston, shifted a few hundred metres to the west to be directly underneath Princess Street, that would enable direct transit connections. The current station's isolation from the regular street grid requires Kingston Transit to run special buses to get there, which limits frequency & ridership potential. A station at Princess Street could have a stop on the Kingston Express (the city's BRT-lite) for fast frequent transit to all the city's major nodes.

[mpd618]

Originally Posted by GlassCity

I just don't believe in building rail transit just because people like it more. A transit system can be very effective without any rapid transit at all. Building to attract ridership doesn't make sense because transit is a service, not a business. With high quality bus service and NATURAL development on some corridors eventually a rapid transit system will be needed.

But it all really depends on a person's opinion on the chicken or the egg question of "development or transit first?" This applies to cities too. There is always more than one way to look at things.

To provide some context to Waterloo Region's plan - the project has two purposes: transit and development, and arguably the latter is more important. The region has probably the most aggressive growth management policies of any municipality in Ontario, and it is serious about limiting sprawl - in part because sprawl threatens groundwater recharge areas on which Waterloo Region is dependent for much of its drinking water. The way it has looked at LRT is as a way to guide development towards the central areas and to then be able to handle the transit demand along the region's linear urban corridor.

Right now, most of the Region's growth is already happening within the built-up area, ahead of the provincial Places to Grow mandate, and much of that is happening along the LRT line. Several major developments currently underway explicitly cite proximity to LRT as a big factor, and that was before all the approvals were in.

Portions of the corridor currently have buses every 4 minutes on average all day, and more often and quite packed during peaks. With the Region aiming to drastically increase the amount of population and jobs in its central areas (university district, downtowns, etc.), it needs to be able to handle a large increase in transit demand. Grand River Transit was formed in 2000 from Kitchener Transit and Cambridge Transit, and since then it's averaged somewhere around 6-8% annual ridership growth, so there's precedent for the kind of ridership growth that would soon enough make LRT more than just a nice to have.

Waterloo Region (and KW especially) seems to favour planning for a decade or two out, rather than always being reactive. A favourite local comparison is the KW Expressway, a highway planned during the 1960s for demand of the 1980s, derided at the time by some as unnecessary and expensive (the project was initially to be 100% funded by Kitchener and Waterloo), which opened in the early 1970s, and which is now fundamental to how easy it is to get around KW versus, say, London.

[GlassCity]

Originally Posted by mpd618

To provide some context to Waterloo Region's plan - the project has two purposes: transit and development, and arguably the latter is more important. The region has probably the most aggressive growth management policies of any municipality in Ontario, and it is serious about limiting sprawl - in part because sprawl threatens groundwater recharge areas on which Waterloo Region is dependent for much of its drinking water. The way it has looked at LRT is as a way to guide development towards the central areas and to then be able to handle the transit demand along the region's linear urban corridor.

Right now, most of the Region's growth is already happening within the built-up area, ahead of the provincial Places to Grow mandate, and much of that is happening along the LRT line. Several major developments currently underway explicitly cite proximity to LRT as a big factor, and that was before all the approvals were in.

Portions of the corridor currently have buses every 4 minutes on average all day, and more often and quite packed during peaks. With the Region aiming to drastically increase the amount of population and jobs in its central areas (university district, downtowns, etc.), it needs to be able to handle a large increase in transit demand. Grand River Transit was formed in 2000 from Kitchener Transit and Cambridge Transit, and since then it's averaged somewhere around 6-8% annual ridership growth, so there's precedent for the kind of ridership growth that would soon enough make LRT more than just a nice to have.

Waterloo Region (and KW especially) seems to favour planning for a decade or two out, rather than always being reactive. A favourite local comparison is the KW Expressway, a highway planned during the 1960s for demand of the 1980s, derided at the time by some as unnecessary and expensive (the project was initially to be 100% funded by Kitchener and Waterloo), which opened in the early 1970s, and which is now fundamental to how easy it is to get around KW versus, say, London.

Yeah, the spurring-development argument is a good one, as is the foresight angle, I just don't happen to agree with them.

Building rapid transit in order to provide an area on which to center density just doesn't seem necessary to me. High density areas have developed without rapid transit before. To me it just seems like a way for municipalities to try and attract development money.

As far as foresight goes, I'd rather see a region expand transit all over the place rather than building a rapid transit line in one area. While I'm sure it will be used by lots of people who don't live near it as it will connect to their places of work or entertainment, I think it would be better to be able to get around the region well than have average transit on the periphery and great transit in the core.

Like I said, it really just opinion. I can understand the whole building for the future thing, I just don't really agree with it. There's pros and cons to both approaches.

[mpd618]

Originally Posted by GlassCity

As far as foresight goes, I'd rather see a region expand transit all over the place rather than building a rapid transit line in one area. While I'm sure it will be used by lots of people who don't live near it as it will connect to their places of work or entertainment, I think it would be better to be able to get around the region well than have average transit on the periphery and great transit in the core.

Waterloo Region is doing both - an LRT plus BRT-lite down the 40km central corridor, and completely reworking and upgrading the transit network to form more of a grid around that line. That includes the introduction of new limited-stop routes that so far have included a mostly-parallel corridor and a major new cross-corridor route, along with rationalizations of locally tangled networks.

[GlassCity]

Originally Posted by mpd618

Waterloo Region is doing both - an LRT plus BRT-lite down the 40km central corridor, and completely reworking and upgrading the transit network to form more of a grid around that line. That includes the introduction of new limited-stop routes that so far have included a mostly-parallel corridor and a major new cross-corridor route, along with rationalizations of locally tangled networks.

Yeah, it really depends case to case. There's more than one way to do things, so even if it's not the way I would've gone I'm sure the Waterloo Region will benefit tremendously from this.

[GreaterMontréal]

New logo for the STL, and

''The Société de transport de Laval (STL) intends to establish a network of high-level bus rapid transit (BRT) on its territory by (d'ici) 2022.''

''The STL has set a target of a 40% increase in ridership over the next decade.''


http://journalmetro.com/actualites/montreal/469035/la-stl-veut-implanter-un-reseau-de-bus-rapides/

[Innsertnamehere]

why is there a street named after a now rather despised architect and a european grocery chain?

[GreaterMontréal]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

why is there a street named after a now rather despised architect and a european grocery chain?

Le Corbusier is a commercial boul.

Le Carrefour, in french un carrefour is Croisement de plusieurs voies. Synonyme embranchement Anglais intersection, cross-roads

Le Carrefour Laval is the biggest shopping centre in the region.

[Innsertnamehere]

Originally Posted by TownGuy

50 weekend shut downs. Geez.

its supposed to be every other weekend over the period of 2 years. If they are smart they can accellerate the work when they need to shut down the yonge line for a month or two to rebuild the rail bed around Davisville, which is still original from 1954. (at least that is what they are saying, it is still extremely preliminary, I have a feeling they will have to shut down counter peak services for a couple of months while they rebuild each of the 2 directions of track, with reduced bi-directional off peak service or something)

[Innsertnamehere]

Originally Posted by TownGuy

50 weekend shut downs. Geez.

its supposed to be every other weekend over the period of 2 years. If they are smart they can accellerate the work when they need to shut down the yonge line for a month or two to rebuild the rail bed around Davisville, which is still original from 1954. At least that is what they are saying, it is still extremely preliminary, I have a feeling they will end up implementing one of the yard tracks for service and rebuild each track one at a time, Davisville is actually the only triple track station in Canada. The third platform has never been used for passenger service however, only to allow train operators to get on and off in the mornings.

[caltrane74]

Government website aimed at reducing congestion on Yonge, along side the development of Yonge Relief Subway line.

http://www.regionalrelief.ca/

[Metro-One]

It is time for a real Evergreen Line update. Progress has been moving fast, and it makes me so happy that Metro-Vancouver is building this line as a true metro (grade separated) and not as the LRT once envisioned years ago.

Originally Posted by madog222

Room for the guideway through the forested section in Coquitlam (Pinetree at Guildford way) has been cleared. It should not be too long before we see columns going up on that side, I count only 10-12 more to do along North road.

Some photos taken by me today.





Looks like there is a short pair of steel girders still to come, transitioning to concrete on the top of the next column.

Originally Posted by AverageJoe

Snapped a few shots yesterday of the construction going on in Port Moody. I think this section of the Skytrain system will have some of the most spectacular views when finished.


Where the guideway transitions out of the tunnel under Barnet Hwy (looking west):


The guideway construction had to knock a piece off of the building on the left:


The elevated section through Port Moody east of the tunnel:


Looking east along the at-grade guideway toward Port Moody WCE Station:


Another angle:


From the ground:

Originally Posted by dpogue

Took the 97B today and saw that the gantry has assembled guideway all the way to Burquitlam station.

Photos by me:




Lougheed East station house construction:


Tried to get a photo of the rail and switch DC158 at Lougheed side platform, but there's too much fencing and tarp in the way

[Beedok]

Wish every city had skytrains.

[LeftCoaster]

Great update, thanks.

[caltrane74]

Nice view from those sky trains I bet.

A good choice for that part of the world.

[Metro-One]

Yeah, that is one of the best aspects of skytrain, especially on a sunny summer day.

I also feel that having all these elevated guideways throughout the metro-area helps give it a big city vibe, it is akin to home rail transit is built where I am in Japan.

It is always cool to see trains going by overhead.

Another cool Evergreen Line photo.

Originally Posted by Jebby