Quote:
Originally Posted by Kisai
Did you miss this? http://news.nationalpost.com/full-co...ases-emissions
That article put every light-rail supporter on the defensive of their own proposed and existing light rail projects.
The average at-grade system has a significant delay or accident every three days. Poorly designed systems, eg Houston Texas that don't segregate the ROW at all, have the most incidents. But when they do have accidents, what is the answer? "People need to read signs, be less stupid" rather than you know, actually spending the money to design the right thing to begin with. Portlands system is literately falling apart, and is the system that all these other light rail supporters look at as doing the right thing.
Seattle has one every 3-7 days
http://www.soundtransit.org/service-modes/light-rail
Calgary has one every 3 days
https://twitter.com/calgarytransit
Edmonton has a "bus replacement" for LRT every 11 days or so
https://twitter.com/takeETSalert
Which again back to the topic at hand. Build the right thing rather than a half-measure. If some private operator wants to take a go at running a tourist-centric street car, let them lease the ROW and see what happens. But don't put any tax-payer dollars on it, this is a money pit of the worst kind.
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A: Something to note: That was an opinion piece containing nothing but anecdotes. Is it worse than before, sure. Is Cambie street just as fast as before Canada line? For some reason it's not either. It's not the trains fault, but pedestrians. There are a lot more of them in the area and they get a lot more time to cross the road than they used to, so Cambie backs up like crazy now compared to pre-2005. Is that a failure of the Canada line, or actually a success (that it brings so many people to it, sidewalks can barely contain them?).
They were claiming the sky was going to fall before it opened, and it didn't happen. The story complains about people having a 6 minute delay, while claiming people can drive from one side of Edmonton to the other in 15 minutes. Their lives must be so miserable.
A route plan on Google maps from the furthest away northern home in Edmonton (the absolute furthest house north, worst commute) into MacEwan University (which takes you down Princess Elizabeth Ave) takes 18 to 30 minutes in the morning. Stop the presses, what a calamity!
B: A large part of the problem should be temporary. The signalling installed by Thales is all messed up and trains pretty much run at half speed. The trains take longer to cross the streets than they should and are given extra buffer by the gates in case of errors.
Now you can't say that that is a design element of LRT. It is a total fuckup by the contractor Thales, who so happens to work on our network. These errors aren't happening because LRT is implicitly overly complicated (or we would have similar issues as we are even more reliant on Thales), but most likely due to the quality of the contractors and workers available at the time (during the peak of demand for oil patch workers: who do you think is left for lowest bidder contracts in the city when everyone is off making 6 figures?).
They are currently conducting a safety audit and conducting upgrades which should get the trains running at full speed in May and shorten the amount of time the crossing gates are down.
But again, this isn't a common feature of LRT systems, it is a complete screw up by the contractors.
And what's the point of that second link? It's more just biased opinionated rubbish. Am I supposed to be shocked that light rail in Portland needs maintenance? So does Skytrain. So do roads for that matter. Heck, there were Skytrain delays of up to 15 minutes almost every day for months on end because the maintenance requirements are so intensive they stretch into service hours.
Now I just did a quick scan of Edmonton's tweets back to December, searching for Metro and Capitol and bus replacement.
It does not look as frequent 11 days to me. The most recent "bus replacement" was March 17. I guess they are having a remarkable month. Out of all the tweets of bus replacement in 2016, two were due to a traffic accident.
A lot of the closures are due to technical problems (talked about that earlier), medical emergencies, and police incidents; all of which happen here on Skytrain, so not a problem limited to LRT. We also get about 200 track intrusion incidents a month that affect service frequency.
A quick look at Calgary is the same. A lot of medical emergencies, police incidents and mechanical problems. A search for Shuttle Buses (their terminology for a bus bridge) are very infrequent, and are often on weekends because of planned track maintenance. There were about 4 shuttle buses set up because of accidents in 2016 so far.
All that means that either accidents with LRTs in Canada aren't that common, or they are so minor that they are swept aside in a few minutes.
The other difference between these LRT incidents and Skytrain is they are very localized. Most of the system still runs as normal with minimal delays. But because of the speed of Skytrain, any track closure can quickly stall things system wide once trains start to bunch up.
But again, we are comparing 2 different things. In Calgary, they are using light rail as a trunk main line that is supposed to transport vast numbers of people long distances at high speeds. Arbutus streetcar wouldn't be that, and it doesn't need that.
In Portland, the streetcar, that runs almost completely in traffic lanes shared with vehicles has less than an accident per week. In 2 years (2013 + 2014) there were 95 accidents with vehicles. None of the accidents resulted in death, and only 8 needed medical transportation. There were 4 accidents with pedestrians or bikes. 16 accidents with parked/parking cars (because Portland is insane and allows you to park on the other side of the ROW in places). That's on 11.6km of track.
In the same time frame, there were 100 MAX accidents, and 998 bus accidents in Portland (more than 1 per day).
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/i...ollisions.html
Interestingly, in Calgary, since 1981 to October 2015, there have been 70 deaths due to C-Train. Skytrain has killed 75 people from 1986 to May 2015.
I think Skytrain is actually "safer" because a much higher percentage of the deaths are accidents in Calgary, but it blows away the myth that the C-Train is some rampaging out of control death machine murdering innocent pedestrians at whim. Accident or Suicide, their at grade system has been shut down less frequently due to the most tragic reason of all (loss of human life) than Skytrain.