Quote:
Originally Posted by Nite
The research has been done and it's well publicized, we know the reasons already but fail to take actions. one of these i mentioned before is standardizations, instead every project in Canada is an entirely new beast and everything has to be designed again from scratch. In China, cities have 9 plans plans/designs they can pick from and that is all that needed to be done, everything else follows the standard plan from that point forward.
for example Clagry could choose LRT level 2 and everything from the manufacturer, building materials, contractors, station design, is already done.
So much time and money is saved doing it this way
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I've heard that issue raised before and it was even discussed in an episode of RM transit. While I think it's applicable in many instances, for the most part it isn't that useful to Canada. China has so many cities in every size range that "only" having 9 plans to choose from really narrows things down from the dozens or hundreds of designs all those cities would otherwise need. But for us, we barely even have 9 cities large enough for urban rail to begin with. So if there were 9 designs it wouldn't narrow things down much. Yet if there were only say, two designs, that wouldn't be enough options to work well with the different sizes and needs of our cities. It comes down to the fact that standardization works well with markets of scale, but you need markets of a certain scale for it to apply.
Of course, we could just adopt all the designs and standards from another country. But the US - which is usually the go-to for such things - doesn't have such standardization itself even though it's probably large enough. So we'd be stuck adopting Chinese standards if it were to work, and that would be somewhat awkward from a political and economic perspective.
That said, there are definitely places with lower infrastructure costs that don't use the Chinese version of standardization. Spain is often cited as one of the Western countries with the lowest rail construction costs and highest rates of metro construction. The Madrid Metro for instance has a longer total route length than metro systems of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver plus the Ottawa O-train combined. And the cities of Spain don't seem to be standardized with other cities.
It seems like a lot of the problem is the stop-start cycles. We don't build continuously and instead let the pressure build up until we're forced to built something to deal with demand. Then once it's finished, we just stop... sometimes for decades. So some of the people and companies in that industry basically leave or shut down operations and have to start everything back up again from scratch for the next project. Having to start everything from a complete stop is more difficult then continuing at a steady pace. Like in physics how static friction needs more force to overcome than sliding friction. People need to be recruited, hired, and trained from scratch, experts need to be brought in from elsewhere, new construction faculties created, and so forth.
And another issue I haven't heard discussed but could also be contributing is the crowding out effect. We've been in a construction boom for well over a decade meaning that the construction industry in most regions is already going full tilt. Highrises and metro systems seem like very different things so there will be some people and companies that are not cross compatible and therefore may leave when there's no metro construction. But there's also going to be areas of overlap such as the production and transport of concrete and the need for construction workers, inspectors, and structural engineers. But competition for labour, materials, and other things in limited supply also tends to increase prices.
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. Apparently the projected number of users for the station were pretty low on opening day but are expected to grow in the future. I did read in an article (that I can’t find now) that they will do some kind of “prep work” for the Center Street Station as they are tunnelling.
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