The Great Canadian Transit Thread

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

I think the main issue is that it's just the opposite in that rather than "idea people" being high status, there's an increasingly common sentiment nowadays that STEM fields are somehow more concrete and objective while the humanities are somehow frivolous and impractical. I used to lean that way to but I've come to realise there isn't really an objective basis for that.

I dunno... what great advances have anthropology or literature studies given us lately? For that matter I've been kind of disappointed with epidemiology during covid. I think the heroes at the end of this will be the folks who developed vaccines and maybe therapeutics plus the medical professionals. That's not to say that these other fields aren't interesting but I don't think they are as effective at improving the human condition, and I suspect a part of that is simply that their problems aren't posed very clearly (or there are no real problems per se and people study them for to be able to teach, for fun, and for income) and math and computers aren't applied or are hard to apply to those areas.

A lot of people have been complaining about bioethicists lately and their seemingly non-optimal vaccine strategies that clearly cause huge increases in deaths. I saw an interesting comment from a former bioethicist who said he felt that the incentives in that field are misaligned because utilitarian bioethicists just defer to domain-specific technocrats and that's not something you want in your field.

Yes, you can move people around faster, but ultimately what's the point if you're not actually improving people's lives?

Intellectual rigour can extend to those other areas and isn't just a STEM phenomenon. You find lots of examples of it in law for example. My point earlier wasn't about incorporating values beyond travel times, it was that standards seem to be lowered sometimes in pursuit of those goals.

Just as an aside, I don't know if you listen to the Freakonomics radio podcast (it's one of my favourites) but I remember one episode titled where they interviewed someone who studied the perception of time and found that there are factors apart from the actual length of time that affect how people perceive it. I actually found a transcript here. "

I do listen to it sometimes and I think this is all reasonable. But I'd guess that study of the perception of time was validated through quantitative methods. I'm complaining about people who do the equivalent of saying "hey, some guy said we don't always perceive time the same, so let's just stop worrying about it" without actual proof that the trade-off is good. The Seattle viaduct guy made no attempt to demonstrate that the quality of life improvements were greater than the added suffering of commuters.

Another Freakonomics thing that was interesting was the interviews of some of the big US automaker CEOs. There was one who had a pretty coherent vision of her goals; make cars that people want to buy, and that is going to include electric vehicles. There was another who said that his car company is not really just a car company, and we need to think bigger and realize the potential of the data that car companies can collect. Pretty sure he's gone now.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by someone123

I dunno... what great advances have anthropology or literature studies given us lately?

This is precisely the kind of thing that I'm talking about. The humanities aren't viewed as "advances" because they're mostly not something new. They're foundational aspects of what it means to be human and existing within a human society. As foundations, they form the basis for other things that allows them to advance, but that also means that they also don't reach the "heights" of later additions of the structure of civilization and therefore don't seem as outwardly impressive. But technology is as useless to a society that doesn't know how to use it responsibly as height is to a building that lacks a solid foundation. Technology is essentially a set of tools and processes which enable humans to accomplish various things. Humanities is the development of humans themselves and human society. Ironically enough, if you ever take a history of science and technology program, you'll discover that all of the things like physics, chemistry, mathematics, law, and politics that we now think of as separate started as aspects of philosophy.

I would assert that the basis for the importance of the humanities is that our sociality is the main characteristic that allowed humans to advance and become the dominant species. I remember seeing a Ted talker who argued that humans are the only species who can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Some animals, such as insect colonies, can cooperate in large numbers but not flexibly (they're driven by rigid instincts and social structures). Others can cooperate flexibly but only in small groups (other primates, wolf packs, etc.) So our ability to communicate and cooperate to make large scale decisions is the key. However, I would argue that this is not an automatic because for most of the existence of anatomically modern humans (~200k years) we lived only in small groups and did not build advanced civilizations. Therefore, to build and maintain a large scale and successful society requires many elements of the humanities such as politics, communication, philosophy, and sociology. These cultural areas are the things that determine whether or not people, for example, devolve into fragmented groups of religious zealots or instead maintain a strong epistemological foundation and secular institutions.

Originally Posted by someone123

For that matter I've been kind of disappointed with epidemiology during covid. I think the heroes at the end of this will be the folks who developed vaccines and maybe therapeutics plus the medical professionals. That's not to say that these other fields aren't interesting but I don't think they are as effective at improving the human condition, and I suspect a part of that is simply that their problems aren't posed very clearly (or there are no real problems per se and people study them for to be able to teach, for fun, and for income) and math and computers aren't applied or are hard to apply to those areas.

Speaking of which, I'm personally more disappointed in the wider public's response to the pandemic than I am in the response by epidemiologists. With the crazy conspiracy theories, product hoarding, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, etc. it's been a bit of a shit show. These are things I believe could be improved if the wider public had a stronger foundation in the humanities.

Originally Posted by someone123

Intellectual rigour can extend to those other areas and isn't just a STEM phenomenon. You find lots of examples of it in law for example. My point earlier wasn't about incorporating values beyond travel times, it was that standards seem to be lowered sometimes in pursuit of those goals.


I do listen to it sometimes and I think this is all reasonable. But I'd guess that study of the perception of time was validated through quantitative methods. I'm complaining about people who do the equivalent of saying "hey, some guy said we don't always perceive time the same, so let's just stop worrying about it" without actual proof that the trade-off is good. The Seattle viaduct guy made no attempt to demonstrate that the quality of life improvements were greater than the added suffering of commuters.

I think the difficulty in that specific scenario is quantifying total community benefit of removing a highway vs the travel time affects that are often specific to the highway users. Even if you could measure the net change that the highway users experience in life satisfaction as a result of travel time changes, it would be very difficult if not impossible to compare that to the total change in life satisfaction experienced by everyone who interacts with the improved built form of the neighbourhood. You'd need to figure out who all was interacting with the neighbourhood (and who would likely do so in the future), then isolate the effects of that change from other factors. Attempting to do so would likely end up in analysis paralysis. So the temptation is to simply measure something that can be more easily quantified just because of a compulsive need for numbers since numbers are somehow seem more "real" even if the basis for why specific numbers are important isn't solid. But I agree that major decisions should never be made without thorough consideration of the options and if there is a feasible way to numerically quantify these comparisons, that would be great.

[Kilgore Trout]

Originally Posted by someone123

I dunno... what great advances have anthropology or literature studies given us lately?

That's a rather materialistic view of things, isn't it? Whatever you think of critical race theory, for instance, it has had a huge impact on society. And not just in the intellectual sense of colonial historiography, but in policy that affects people's everyday lives.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

This is precisely the kind of thing that I'm talking about. The humanities aren't viewed as "advances" because they're mostly not something new. They're foundational aspects of what it means to be human and existing within a human society. As foundations, they form the basis for other things that allows them to advance, but that also means that they also don't reach the "heights" of later additions of the structure of civilization and therefore don't seem as outwardly impressive.

When I said lately I was talking about the marginal benefit of recent work in the humanities, not the benefits of all of the collective work. So you might think of the difference between Shakespeare (important) vs. what we got out of post-2000 Shakespeare literary studies aimed at uncovering new insights (debatable, probably cost 1,000,000x more than Shakespeare himself ).

I think the difficulty in that specific scenario is quantifying total community benefit of removing a highway vs the travel time affects that are often specific to the highway users. Even if you could measure the net change that the highway users experience in life satisfaction as a result of travel time changes, it would be very difficult if not impossible to compare that to the total change in life satisfaction experienced by everyone who interacts with the improved built form of the neighbourhood. You'd need to figure out who all was interacting with the neighbourhood (and who would likely do so in the future), then isolate the effects of that change from other factors. Attempting to do so would likely end up in analysis paralysis. So the temptation is to simply measure something that can be more easily quantified just because of a compulsive need for numbers since numbers are somehow seem more "real" even if the basis for why specific numbers are important isn't solid. But I agree that major decisions should never be made without thorough consideration of the options and if there is a feasible way to numerically quantify these comparisons, that would be great.

At the end of the day there will always be some subjectivity. But I think we have better outcomes when we try to be rational and coherent. Even if this just means costing out some things and identifying trade-offs. I see some housing stuff that does not even on the face of it seem to make any sense if you think about numbers at all. I think the feelings-based stuff is often easily subverted by political goals, which in the municipal politics and transit realm means wealthy NIMBY homeowners calling the shots.

Public consultations often amounts to people with a median age of about 70 and net worth in the millions telling people they don't want anything to change. And the people who are really harmed by policies usually have no voice at all because they're the ones who don't have time for meetings or can never afford to move to the neighbourhood.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

That's a rather materialistic view of things, isn't it? Whatever you think of critical race theory, for instance, it has had a huge impact on society. And not just in the intellectual sense of colonial historiography, but in policy that affects people's everyday lives.

I wanted to be a bit provocative but compare that to say a functional malaria vaccine which is looking like just one of many biomedical advances coming down the pipeline. And that's about as close as you can get to an unalloyed good. Many advances have extremely high utility.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by someone123

When I said lately I was talking about the marginal benefit of recent work in the humanities, not the benefits of all of the collective work. So you might think of the difference between Shakespeare (important) vs. what we got out of post-2000 Shakespeare literary studies aimed at uncovering new insights (debatable, probably cost 1,000,000x more than Shakespeare himself ).

I would argue that many people who study, analyze, and critique literature (and other artistic products such as music, films, etc.) have a huge impact on their creation, either by being creators themselves, by teaching future creators, or simply influencing thought on the topic. And honestly, I would guess that there are many different works of art that have a greater direct influence on contemporary thought and behaviour than Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare has influenced the whole realm of literature and western culture so it's hard to compare. But art generally is all considered to be within the realm of the humanities.

One thing I find interesting is the theory that story-telling is a hardwired evolutionary feature of humans. There were a couple of episodes of CBC's Ideas that discussed it, and the topic was also raised in a philosophy of art class I took. The belief is that as social animals, story-telling was a way to pass on information about the world more effectively than direct description since it tends to be more vivid and emotive and allows a person to almost simulate an experience without having actually lived it. This would explain why story-telling has been such an enduring part of every human culture, from the most simple hunter-gatherer societies right to the present, and why there are a fairly small number of recurring themes that tend to be universally present. I was able to find a link to it here.

I think it's interesting because it's common to view story-telling mediums such as fictional books and movies as purely entertainment and to therefore consider their creation and study to be somewhat frivolous. But there are countless examples of ways in which art has influenced culture, and I would argue that if a work of art influences the culture in some way that affects people's values and the importance that people assign different things, that could have an equal or greater net affect than a vaccine. I mean, the funding for different fields of scientific research is certainly influenced by culture. And look at the anti-vaxxer movement which is fueled by a variety of cultural attitudes and epistemic approaches. A vaccine doesn't do much good if people don't take it.

I know I sometimes get off on tangent, but yes, I understand what you mean about wanting planning to be more rigorous lol.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by someone123

I've heard a mix of perspectives from interviews of people running transit systems like the NYC subway or London underground. Some are all about traditional transportation service metrics like being on time and travel times, while others bring up ideas relating to our feelings while using transit. I'm not sure if the feeling ones were naturally more inclined to that approach or had simply capitulated long ago and internalized the idea that their system would never run well as judged by conventional standards.

I would think you need a mix to get a good outcome.

We build transit in a pretty utilitarian manner for the most part in Canada. And I find that leads to certain shortfalls sometimes. Like poor wayfinding signage or how stations are laid out and where stairs are placed.

An obvious example of how this can struggle with reality is the Scarborough subway debate. A lot of both transportation engineers and planners saw a cheap and obvious solution to replace the Scarborough RT. A good chunk of Scarborough residents felt they were getting the shaft and demanded a subway extension. The common retort from planners and engineers was that, "It's just one transfer. We can make it easier.". But most of those residents not only saw the transfer as unnecessary but began to view the RT as symbolic of under-investment in their community. A less utilitarian approach, not focused on cost savings might actually have saved their LRT plan by emphasizing that they wouldn't necessarily need to transfer and could stay on the LRT till Yonge if heading downtown. Ultimately, the obsession with cost savings made the whole bureaucratic enterprise look like scheming cheapskates.

[SkahHigh]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

I would think you need a mix to get a good outcome.

We build transit in a pretty utilitarian manner for the most part in Canada. And I find that leads to certain shortfalls sometimes. Like poor wayfinding signage or how stations are laid out and where stairs are placed.

An obvious example of how this can struggle with reality is the Scarborough subway debate. A lot of both transportation engineers and planners saw a cheap and obvious solution to replace the Scarborough RT. A good chunk of Scarborough residents felt they were getting the shaft and demanded a subway extension. The common retort from planners and engineers was that, "It's just one transfer. We can make it easier.". But most of those residents not only saw the transfer as unnecessary but began to view the RT as symbolic of under-investment in their community. A less utilitarian approach, not focused on cost savings might actually have saved their LRT plan by emphasizing that they wouldn't necessarily need to transfer and could stay on the LRT till Yonge if heading downtown. Ultimately, the obsession with cost savings made the whole bureaucratic enterprise look like scheming cheapskates.

As your example shows very well, you can't have an engineers-only building approach to public transit. As impressive as the REM is, there are several flaws that are now being noticed, such as uneasy transfers between modes, weird stations layouts, an ugly viaduct smack in the middle of Lachine Canal... It really is an engineer's wet dream but aspects concerning public acceptability and aesthetics were clearly put aside for functionality or cost-cutting.

Not saying that urban planners must be behind everything as the public consultation process can sometimes be very long for little results, but a balanced approach should be used when building billion dollar, city-changing projects.

[trainshumanist]

Originally Posted by swimmer_spe

So, lets build what Ottawa did and is now converting it all? Maybe we should get away from building BRT and if we need it, build LRT or better and be done with it.

Why do a project twice?

this

[FrAnKs]

Exciting times for Montréal!
They just announced that they will extend the REM eastward
-2 lines
-32km and 23 new stations (A total of 99km with phase 1 of the REM)
-A $ 10 billion investment and 60 000 jobs
-There will be an underground part of 7km
-Largest transit project in the history of Québec

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by FrAnKs

Exciting times for Montréal!
They just announced that they will extend the REM eastward
-2 lines
-32km and 23 new stations (A total of 99km with phase 1 of the REM)
-A $ 10 billion investment and 60 000 jobs
-There will be an underground part of 7km
-Largest transit project in the history of Québec

The project description PDF (english) for people to explore:

https://www.cdpqinfra.com/sites/cdpqinfrad8/files/2020-12/REM_de_lEst_Technical_presentation_0.pdf

[FrAnKs]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

The project description PDF (english) for people to explore:

https://www.cdpqinfra.com/sites/cdpqinfrad8/files/2020-12/REM_de_lEst_Technical_presentation_0.pdf

Thanks! I was about to share it.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

We build transit in a pretty utilitarian manner for the most part in Canada. And I find that leads to certain shortfalls sometimes. Like poor wayfinding signage or how stations are laid out and where stairs are placed.

I think it can be summed up succinctly:

While there are many considerations beyond traditional engineering optimization metrics, a successful project should do a good job at those metrics too. And if we want to introduce wider-ranging fields or perspectives, that is fine, but standards of reasoning should not be lowered to accommodate them.

[Innsertnamehere]

Wait, it's a larger project than REM1?

[GreaterMontréal]

Laval and the South Shore will also have their REM project soon.

[FrAnKs]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Wait, it's a larger project than REM1?

That's phase 2 of the REM, from what I understand.

Have a quick look at this PDF: https://www.cdpqinfra.com/sites/cdpqinfrad8/files/2020-12/REM_de_lEst_Technical_presentation_0.pdf

[FrAnKs]

Originally Posted by GreaterMontréal

Laval and the South Shore will also have their REM project soon.

And there's a Tramway project to Le Sud-Ouest area of Montréal.

[SkahHigh]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Wait, it's a larger project than REM1?

Costlier, but not larger in number of stations or length.

Originally Posted by FrAnKs

That's phase 2 of the REM, from what I understand.

Have a quick look at this PDF: https://www.cdpqinfra.com/sites/cdpqinfrad8/files/2020-12/REM_de_lEst_Technical_presentation_0.pdf

It's a project that's independent from the REM but with a similar technology.

[scryer]

Originally Posted by FrAnKs

That's phase 2 of the REM, from what I understand.

Have a quick look at this PDF: https://www.cdpqinfra.com/sites/cdpqinfrad8/files/2020-12/REM_de_lEst_Technical_presentation_0.pdf

We need images because this is pretty big for Montreal :



I already thought that the REM system was going to push Montreal into having the best Metro system (and even the best transit system taking into account its commuter rail network) in Canada... this Eastern phase 2 will keep Montreal in that top spot for a long time.

What's specifically fascinating to me is that it almost appears that Montreal is completely abandoning extending its heavy metro in favour of developing its automated light metro systems.

Make it happen, Montreal!! Vancouver - let's catch up!

[wave46]

Originally Posted by scryer

What's specifically fascinating to me is that it almost appears that Montreal is completely abandoning extending its heavy metro in favour of developing its automated light metro systems.

Montreal's heavy metro system uses rubber tires, which I believe requires it to be tunneled. Also the STM has requirements for a driver, which the REM will not.

At the distances we're talking about, light rail is more effective anyway.