Quote:
Originally Posted by Catenary
The platform can be of infinite length, but what matters is where the stops are. Currently, there are no stops on the south side of the platform, around the far end of the loop. My guess is that there never will be, especially considering the (reasonable) pushback on the current walking distances. My general reference is to the constant complaint on twitter that there are "unused stops" at Hurdman, as two of the current stops have two shelters while others have one. These stops have two shelters for a reason - because they're busier. I doubt anyone really cares that there's some unused tactile paving around the far end when they complain about walking distance, as no buses stop there.
Building some extra room for future expansion isn't a bad idea. About 240m of platform is currrently in use, though you can argue that about 20m of that is useless because of the tight corner it's on. Bus operations at Hurdman are very different now that it's a terminal station for all routes, with significantly increased dwell times as a result. Buses wait longer, either holding up other buses or requiring them to leave more space to turn out into the through lane.
Once again, the total length of platform doesn't matter, only the length in use. We also can't compare without considering the number of vehicles passing though and their dwell time. While Blair and Tunney's are temporary, of the three, Hurdman is actually the only one where everyone must transfer as there are no through routes. At Blair, only one stop on the mall side sees regular use, the rest are all within the FPZ. This causes significant congestion both on the platform and the roadway at Blair, and while they have made steps to fix it, it is not optimal and the platforms are still an operational challenge. After changes were made but prior to COVID, buses still often had to wait for others to leave to pull up to the stop, blocking the roadway and causing delay. This is generally not an issue at Hurdman.
The issues at Tunney's were mostly to do with pedestrian flow, and were solved by taking an additional lane on the far side of the loop to create more platform space.
FPZs are consistently rated highly by passengers. They have a number of benefits, including nto having to worry about your transfer expiring before the bus arrives. Most importantly though is the transfer to train - the crush of people leaving the bus can move quickly onto the platform, without requiring a wall of faregates to process the crowd. I agree that there are situations where other options should be considered, such as Carling where the 85 will be forced to detour into the station, but that doesn't mean that the FPZ isn't useful for buses which start or end there. Blair and Hurdman have no through routes which would benefit from avoiding the bus loop, and while Tunney's might that loop is also smaller and will be quicker than the one at LF. Tunney's will continue to have an FPZ, though the stops along the north side of the loop will likely be removed and the parking lane returned to Yarrow Driveway. St. Laurent doesn't have an FPZ, but that is more a limitation of it's existing design.
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With all due respect, I am not following your logic. The original issue, brought up by hwy418, was that OC Transpo’s ‘planners’ set forth some requirements for the Confederation Line that were, at best, questionable. The example used was the NEED for 15 platforms to be available at the new Hurdman Station.
(I don’t know if that was a hard requirement, or not, but that was the example put forth. Despite the dwindling number of bus routes – though not necessarily the total number of buses – that stopped at Hurdman, I can believe that OC Transpo simply stated that they needed to have the same capacity for stops as they had with the old island platform.
For reference, here is the number of bus routes that stopped at Hurdman station in selected years:
Sep. 2010 (pre ‘Optimization’): 80 routes – 46 of which terminate at Hurdman
Sep. 2011 (post ‘Optimization’): 66
Sep. 2017 (pre Confed. Line): 27 – many buses heading to Orleans consolidated
Sep. 2022 (post CoViD-19 drop): 23 routes – 23 of which terminate here
Despite all of the Central Transitway buses and some of the Express/Connexion buses being replaced by the Confederation Line, OC Transpo, apparently, still thought that they needed the same platform capacity as when they had 80 different bus routes stopping at Hurdman.)
Based on that example, hwy418, correctly in my opinion, stated that Hurdman station was specified to be overly huge and thus became inadequate [
as far as customer movements and costs are concerned]. The bracketed portion is my interpretation of hwy418’s remark, added for clarity.
To that, you posed your curious question about how something can be both overly huge and inadequate.
Now your defense of the stated 15 platform requirement seems to have changed. You now declare that it doesn’t matter how great the platform length is (or was specified that it must be) because only a portion of it is being used. As if the design and construction costs were limited to only the portion of the total that we are currently using. Specifying a requirement that is overly huge does have consequences that do matter to many; although, apparently, it should not in your view.
As for your comment that one of the reasons that FPZs are popular is because people don’t have to stress about their Transfer expiring before their bus finally shows up; I think that speaks volumes about the usability of the current system.
Proper time allotment for Transfers (based on our very large city footprint), more direct bus routing between districts (yes, by-passing the need to go out of the way to the train and then back), and, most importantly, RELIABLY FREQUENT bus arrivals, would go a long way to correcting the problems that, as you point out, FPZs can masks. If I miss the first part of a meeting because I wind up waiting an extra 40 minutes because the bus I need to transfer to didn’t show up, it is small consolation that my expired transfer was irrelevant. In fact, if I was forced to pay another fare, I would be more likely to complain long and loud about the transit system to everyone (including the media) who would listen. Maybe OC Transpo (and some passengers) like FPZs because they put a ‘Band-Aid’ on problems that really should have been corrected years ago.
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