The Great Canadian Transit Thread

[J.OT13]

The Kanata North Business Association, of Ottawa's suburban tech hub (24,000 employees), wants to establish an automated vehicle shuttle between the future Moodie O-Train Station (set to open in 2025), National Defence HQ (10,000 employees) and the high-tech business park. This "green line" would cost $9.25 million. A pilot project could be launched next year.

A "blue line", planned for post 2025, would serve Moodie and Eagleson stations. Estimated cost of $25 million.


https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-new...s-as-transit-solution-for-employment-hub

At the moment, such automated vehicles run at the Tunney's Pasture Federal campus.

Ottawa has quite a few companies working on automated vehicles, along with a test track in Nepean.

[MolsonExport]

• Video Link

[Coldrsx]

Another HSR proposal for AB
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EllisDon to Lead Prairie Link High-Speed Rail Partners
Edmonton, AB, July 8, 2021—EllisDon, a world-leading construction services and infrastructure development company, announced today that they have formed a partnership to advance the development of high-speed rail connecting Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary in Alberta, Canada. EllisDon and its team took the initiative to propose the project within the Government of Alberta’s Unsolicited Proposal Guidelines and Framework.

"The notion of high-speed rail — a proven technology around the world — connecting Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary in Alberta is not new, but we believe that its time has come. We have built a team with both the capacity and faith in the future of our province to advance it in a meaningful way for Albertans," said Jeffrey Hansen-Carlson, Director with EllisDon Capital and Project Director for Prairie Link.

Prairie Link has secured a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) from Alberta Transportation laying the foundation for cooperatively advancing project development. With an estimated capital cost of $9 billion, the project will be among the largest and most defining nation-building transportation projects in Alberta's history.

https://www.ellisdon.com/news/ellisdon-to-lead-prairie-link-high-speed-rail-partners/

[Reecemartin]

In a surprising turn of events, a SECOND Canadian intercity rail proposal has been released this week, this time a high-speed line in Alberta. Let's break it down in this video!
https://youtu.be/UjPtylydmIw

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by Reecemartin

In a surprising turn of events, a SECOND Canadian intercity rail proposal has been released this week, this time a high-speed line in Alberta. Let's break it down in this video!
https://youtu.be/UjPtylydmIw

Not surprising for some Albertans

Plenty of different alignment options - fortunately Alberta is great railroad building country, and you can get land impacts really low with an optimized alignment. AAMDC has done a fair amount of work on this.

As for what speed, work has shown that going faster is what enables the project to be free-standing (pays for itself entirely) or nearly free-standing (government assembles the corridor and leases it back, which reduces front end debt load to such an extent that it is far easier to do)

Higher speed leads to higher demand, which more than covers the incremental cost of building higher speed, plus helps to chip away at the base capital costs (enough to entirely cover it in many projections).

They can phase a bit: greenfield (a mostly new corridor) (non electric) saves $900 million (2013 $) in electrification, and in Van Horne's estimates can get you still to 250 kph (with a 2013 update to the JetTrain concept). A project spokesperson was on the radio this morning in Calgary and talking about phasing, and potentially using hydrogen (now, for 320 kph your talking 10MW peak power production, but that can be mitigated somewhat with batteries or capacitors for acceleration enabling a less than 10MW fuel cell (maybe around 6MW if my back of napkin math based on a paper on HSR electricity consumption is close to right). Hydrogen HSR is entirely possible, not even especially hard to do.

[Mr. Blue]

https://globalnews.ca/news/8016045/justin-trudeau-federal-funding-skytrain-surrey-langley/

Surrey-Langley Skytrain moves forward.

[manny_santos]

Megabus is going to add a bus service between Toronto and London in partnership with Badder Bus, but their sole London stop is not going to be anywhere near where people live. It’s going to be at the Flying J gas station south of the 401. There is no LTC bus service there.

That is going to be utterly useless to anyone who doesn’t drive, particularly Western students.

This plan was obviously hatched by a marketing department in another city who knows nothing about the London market. It will be doomed to fail.

[rbt]

Originally Posted by manny_santos

Megabus is going to add a bus service between Toronto and London in partnership with Badder Bus, but their sole London stop is not going to be anywhere near where people live. It’s going to be at the Flying J gas station south of the 401. There is no LTC bus service there.

That's surprising. They should have been able to find a partner for ticket sales and a parking-lot stop near Wellington and Exeter. I guess it's being oriented as a park & ride for commuters?

Route 30 (with big gaps in operating hours) is only 500m away but without sidewalks that would be a nightmare walk in winter.


As a bonus, those twice-daily trips will take over 3 hours.

[manny_santos]

Originally Posted by rbt

That's surprising. They should have been able to find a partner for ticket sales and a parking-lot stop near Wellington and Exeter. I guess it's being oriented as a park & ride for commuters?

Route 30 (with big gaps in operating hours) is only 500m away but without sidewalks that would be a nightmare walk in winter.


As a bonus, those twice-daily trips will take over 3 hours.

White Oaks Mall would have been an ideal location.

[J.OT13]

• Video Link

[someone123]

One aspect of Halifax's transit plan developed around 2020 or so was to gradually shift over to an electric bus fleet. Looks like this is happening now with construction starting on large-scale charging infrastructure in 2022. The plan is for the fleet to be all electric by 2028.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scot...c-buses-hrm-halifax-government-1.6102958

It'll be interesting to see the effect this has on quality of life along the inner city streets that have a lot of buses that currently generate loud noises and emissions. Another problem is truck traffic from the South End container port running through downtown, which is supposed to be partially dealt with by moving some containers by rail over to Fairview Cove. This noise might currently be the biggest annoyance for people living downtown.

[milomilo]

I remember almost getting hit by a trolley bus in Vancouver because it was so quiet. That's my own stupid fault of course for stepping out without looking, but we all do stupid things on occasion. The lack of noise is definitely a benefit, but I wonder if it will result in more people getting hit before people change their behavior.

[MalcolmTucker]

The capital stack seems to be coming together for Calgary Airport—Calgary Downtown—Banff Hydrogen train.

Canada Infrastructure Bank to consider investing in $1-billion Calgary-Banff rail plan

From what I understand this is a $1.5 billion total project, but there are distinct funding and investment buckets.
- the rail itself in the CPR corridor (~$1-1.2 billion investments, meant to be flipped to private investors close to opening day)
- $500 million from Canada Infrastructure Bank
- $500 million from Invest Alberta
- $100 million from capital partners assembled by Liricon
- $100 million from design build operate finance partners

- rail from the CPR corridor to the Calgary Airport with flyovers and airport integrate station ($200-300 million funding)
-$100 million from the Calgary Airport (airport improvement fee)
-$100 million from Transport Canada (National Trade Corridors Fund)

Funding for infrastructure projects that increase the flow of people and goods, or help adapt transportation systems to climate change and new technology.

- rail stations above and beyond functional
-$5 million from City of Cochrane
-$5 million from Liricon (Banff)
-$? million for Calgary (depends on location, likely another private-public partnership)

- hydrogen rail technology assistance
-$? million from Environment Canada
-$? million from Emissions Reduction Alberta
-$? million from partner Calgary International Airport proximate hydrogen producer

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by milomilo

I remember almost getting hit by a trolley bus in Vancouver because it was so quiet. That's my own stupid fault of course for stepping out without looking, but we all do stupid things on occasion. The lack of noise is definitely a benefit, but I wonder if it will result in more people getting hit before people change their behavior.

They have rules on low speed noise to help warn pedestrians.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

The capital stack seems to be coming together for Calgary Airport—Calgary Downtown—Banff Hydrogen train.

Canada Infrastructure Bank to consider investing in $1-billion Calgary-Banff rail plan

This is very cool. Is the Hydrail thing an Alberta special or just because electrification is difficult?

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

This is very cool. Is the Hydrail thing an Alberta special or just because electrification is difficult?

Well electrification definitely would be difficult if sharing with double stack freight trains. So the question is more diesel vs H2. And it definitely seems like it could be a very good promotion for Alberta hydrogen if we can produce it here and show a use case.

Even if it is diesel though, this is really great. I always like to pour cold water on unlikely proposals, but this one has a lot going for it, and is feasible.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

This is very cool. Is the Hydrail thing an Alberta special or just because electrification is difficult?

Originally Posted by milomilo

Well electrification definitely would be difficult if sharing with double stack freight trains. So the question is more diesel vs H2. And it definitely seems like it could be a very good promotion for Alberta hydrogen if we can produce it here and show a use case.

Even if it is diesel though, this is really great. I always like to pour cold water on unlikely proposals, but this one has a lot going for it, and is feasible.

Diesel would be an easy bugaboo to oppose the project in both the Bow Valley/Mountain parks (even if it would be removing auto traffic ) and in Calgary itself, where some people will have the amount of train traffic go up by 500%, and others by 150%. Plus difficulty with electrification.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by milomilo

I remember almost getting hit by a trolley bus in Vancouver because it was so quiet. That's my own stupid fault of course for stepping out without looking, but we all do stupid things on occasion. The lack of noise is definitely a benefit, but I wonder if it will result in more people getting hit before people change their behavior.

Do you remember the minor moral panic about digital cameras and phones and how they didn't make the shutter noise, and maybe noises should be legislated?

I think the noise is an accidentally useful cue with a bad impact and people will adapt. Traffic noise is awful, and safety is more about infrastructure design than people being stupid (IMO "one wrong move and you're dead" type pedestrian areas are not good). Hopefully people will become more aware of this issue and push back more against lawnmowers and leaf blowers, etc.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker

Diesel would be an easy bugaboo to oppose the project in both the Bow Valley/Mountain parks (even if it would be removing auto traffic ) and in Calgary itself, where some people will have the amount of train traffic go up by 500%, and others by 150%. Plus difficulty with electrification.

Good option. I just looked up what ranges are on these Hydrail trains. It's way more than I imagined. Pretty impressive. Heck, if they built it all the way to Edmonton, the trains could theoretically go from Edmonton to Banff via Calgary, and back, before refuelling.

[Truenorth00]

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scot...c-buses-hrm-halifax-government-1.6102958

Halifax is getting 60 electric buses and aiming for an all electric fleet by 2028. This is 7 years ahead of the 2035 target that had set Ottawa as the leader in Canada.