Canadian Transit Thread II

[Xelebes]

This is a continuation of the previous thread. Please proceed.

If someone can put together a summary of the current work being done in Canada for the first page, that would be appreciated.

[Doady]

Sigh. Okay, let me try this again.

Originally Posted by superelevation

God forbid we have nice shelters? Sitting in the rain or snow sucks for any length of time, and buses don't always come to schedule! (And your regular reminder not everyone has a charged phone that they want to take out to check the bus time)

The Spadina Streetcar is brutal, not a model for anything! TTC Should have shelters like this on major routes!

Mississauga Transit provided 1.63 million hours of service annually in 2019, but only 1.49 million in 2023, even though ridership in 2023 is higher than in 2019.

Instead of spending millions of dollars on bus shelters, why not spend those millions of dollars to restore the service back to 1.63 million annual service hours so people spend less time waiting in the shelters in the first place?

Brutal transit service in Mississauga or brutal transit shelters in Toronto. I think it is an easy choice.

[SignalHillHiker]

I'm back in the office this week, for the first time since I went car-free in May, and instead of walking, running, or biking I've decided to give public transit a try.

Here, it's more or less still a social service for the poor, as opposed to an integral part of urban living. I've checked the route planner for a few things before (for example, from my house to the cinema) and it's usually about as fast as walking, rarely if ever faster than biking, so I've not bothered. But, as luck would have it, there's a straight route every 30 minutes from the top of my block to relatively near my office (it's less than a 10-minute walk at the end). So I ordered an mCard and am giving it a try.

It should be faster than walking/biking, and only about 15 minutes longer than driving.

Currently it's $2.50 one-way here, with discounts for students and seniors. When you buy an mCard ($5), you can fill it online in a variety of ways, the main ones being 10 rides for the cost of 9, or $78 for a monthly pass.

[Doady]

Here is fantasy map I made for Toronto years ago. I am surprised when I used a search engine and it is still up. I thought it would have been deleted by now. Obviously, it was from before the work from home thing.

https://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/12/...etwork-map.pdf

[thebasketballgeek]

RIP Québec Tramway. The initial plan appears to have been rejected and “plan b” of the Tramway would cost $8.4 billion…

Yet another case of Light Rail being a ridiculous notion in Canada. Either build heavy rail or invest in BRT.

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by thebasketballgeek

RIP Québec Tramway. The initial plan appears to have been rejected and “plan b” of the Tramway would cost $8.4 billion…

Yet another case of Light Rail being a ridiculous notion in Canada. Either build heavy rail or invest in BRT.

Yeah, it's dead. Apparently the municipality wants to build the tramway itself (French media; English media). Given the fiscal powers of a municipality of 700,000 in Canada, assuming all the risk on a project that may be $10 billion, maybe more, is a very "Frodo, hobbit of the shire, takes on responsibility for safekeeping the Ring" moment.

One reason why Toronto has so much deferred maintenance is that it's completely on the hook for rebuilding the Gardiner Expressway, a city-owned highway. That's a project that's 1/10 the cost in a city 4 times the size.

[Doady]

Articulated buses and BRT aren't a good idea in a snowy city like Quebec. Ottawa learned that the hard way.

[someone123]

BRT in the older parts of Quebec isn't going to be great. Narrow streets, irregular intersections, elevation considerations. $8.4B is not realistic but it seems something's wrong if you can't build a tram in a city of that size with a small underground portion. How is it that Valenciennes has a large modern tramway system and Quebec City plans a tramway for over a decade and ends up building nothing because the projected cost ends up being astronomical?

[theman23]

Originally Posted by someone123

BRT in the older parts of Quebec isn't going to be great. Narrow streets, irregular intersections, elevation considerations. $8.4B is not realistic but it seems something's wrong if you can't build a tram in a city of that size with a small underground portion. How is it that Valenciennes has a large modern tramway system and Quebec City plans a tramway for over a decade and ends up building nothing because the projected cost ends up being astronomical?

You would think with the amount of LRT projects being built recently in North America we would have developed a local construction ecosystem that would start bringing the cost of these things down.

[Nouvellecosse]

So sad to see the project stall. QC may not be that big but large parts are so urban for its size that it I feel like it's exempt from typical size category norms. At times the city actually seems beyond an LRT system but it needs some kind of higher order transit. Maybe not just from a purely ridership perspective but certainly from a city building perspective.

[Kilgore Trout]

Rennes has an urban area of about 750,000 and it has a 28-station light metro. And it's not really more dense than Quebec, just less car-oriented. Here's what some of the areas served by the metro look like:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/mRkyCxgry8JbQAn99
https://maps.app.goo.gl/X9W3kDNRkbvEYNMRA
https://maps.app.goo.gl/VUKBG7UTP1nNHkVt9

[someone123]

It's a bit of a circular argument anyway if you fail to build transit and then the excuse given is that a city is too car-oriented. The question is how car-oriented it would be with the transit.

I think the categorization of Quebec City as large vs. small is arbitrary and our notion of small keeps expanding as other cities grow, but doesn't actually correspond to less ability to build transit. The capacity difference between 1970's Edmonton and 2020's Quebec City for transit comes down to politics and efficiency, not fundamental material/economic constraints.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout

Rennes has an urban area of about 750,000 and it has a 28-station light metro. And it's not really more dense than Quebec, just less car-oriented. Here's what some of the areas served by the metro look like:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/mRkyCxgry8JbQAn99
https://maps.app.goo.gl/X9W3kDNRkbvEYNMRA
https://maps.app.goo.gl/VUKBG7UTP1nNHkVt9

That's remarkable from a NA perspective. According to wiki, "Daily ridership Line A: 155,000, Line B: 120,000 (2022)." For us seeing KWC with an LRT carrying 25k per day seems very impressive (which it is given the NA context). But Rennes is almost unimaginable. Like the city version of a having a superpower.

[niwell]

Along those lines a lot of Scandinavian cities are actually pretty low-density outside of the traditional core areas we normally see. Copenhagen for instance goes from walls of 6 storey walkups to SFHs pretty quickly. Yet are served by far better transit than anywhere in North America. It's absolutely a mindset and delegation of priorities.

Random streets a 5 min walk from higher order transit (even if technically commuter rail):

https://maps.app.goo.gl/VxCAhcypqb4qgHNV6
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rWY7WEHq8cT3iNtw6
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ALuT3NobTMrVpUKm7
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5n2ZLUT5imvxyaxQ6

The last example is about the same distance from the old core of CPH as Parkdale is from Toronto's financial district.


Even a grand Imperial Capital like Berlin has some surprisingly low density areas served by the U-Bahn, much less the S-Bahn.

[WhipperSnapper]

It's definitely a mindset. It's also you can contemplate these things when population growth isn't gobbling up all the attention.

It's not just the upfront costs of population growth which are continuous when population growth remains continuously high. The benefits from population growth are never felt. Every decision in capital expenditure is heavily based on growth and improvement that may increase the quality of life for a stable community are dropped far down the list.

Toronto is a pro transit city. Riders will come if you invest in improving the service where its needed than exclusively improving service to increase ridership

[someone123]

There was a transit and urbanism "recession" in most of North America for most of the postwar period so I think that led to the sense that the only way to move those things forward was to add a lot of population, so much that those things go up in aggregate while they go down per capita (kind of like our economy right now).

In a lot of old parts of Europe there was gradual organic improvement of structures and infrastructure even sometimes without much population growth for long periods (due in part to high death rates). Some small town could remain a small town and get ornate stone houses, grand public buildings, railways, etc.

[Doady]

Transit ridership in Canada is not that different from Europe. Ridership in Canada is actually than in UK. Rennes is an exceptional case, not representative of the typical city of 700k. Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge is not a typical city of 500k either (e.g. London, Victoria, and Halifax all have higher transit ridership than Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge).

[thebasketballgeek]

Originally Posted by Doady

Transit ridership in Canada is not that different from Europe. Ridership in Canada is actually than in UK. Rennes is an exceptional case, not representative of the typical city of 700k. Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge is not a typical city of 500k either (e.g. London, Victoria, and Halifax all have higher transit ridership than Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge).

Not sure about that tbh. If you look at other cities in France Bordeaux and Montpellier both have similar population to Rennes but went the tramway route and now each have 4 tram lines with 135 stations in Bordeaux and 80 in Montpellier. That’s not including the TER regionals for the regions of Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie. Did I mention that all of the cities (including Rennes) are connected to the TGV high speed rail network as well?

Of course ridership numbers are quite a bit higher then their respective Canadian cities, and the only reason they are not blowing them out of the water as expected is because these cities are also much more walkable and bikeable then the majority of mid sized Canadian cities so they aren’t forced to take transit/car trips to grocery schools, run errands, hit up a bar, or even to go to school and work.

That’s just one country in Europe. I heard Germany has even better transit then France for mid-sized cities, and Utrecht in the Netherlands has BRT, light rail, and is part of the Randstad regional rail with decent headways. Then there’s countries like Switzerland which are operating on a completely different level with trains.

Let’s not get it twisted, besides maybe the UK (which makes up for its midsized cities having relatively poor transit by having London) Canada is far behind Europe in rail infrastructure.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by thebasketballgeek

Not sure about that tbh. If you look at other cities in France that are similar population Bordeaux and Montpellier both have similar population as Rennes but went the tramway route and now each have 4 tram lines with 135 stations in Bordeaux and 80 in Montpellier. That’s not including the TER regionals for the regions of Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie. Did I mention that all of the cities (including Rennes) are connected to the TGV high speed rail network as well?

Of course ridership numbers are quite a bit higher then their respective Canadian cities, and the only reason they are not blowing them out of the water as expected is because these cities are also much more walkable and bikeable then the majority of mid sized Canadian cities so they aren’t forced to take transit trips to grocery schools or primary school.

That’s just one country in Europe. I heard Germany has even better transit then France for mid-sized cities, and Utrecht in the Netherlands has BRT, light rail, and is part of the Randstad regional rail with decent headways. Then there’s countries like Switzerland which are operating on a completely different level with trains.

Let’s not get it twisted, besides maybe the UK (which makes up for its midsized cities having relatively poor transit by having London) Canada is far behind Europe in rail infrastructure.

I don't care about rail infrastructure. I'm just talking about ridership. The US cities also have more rail than Canadian cities, but ridership of US cities is 1/10 of Canadian cities. Dallas has the largest modern light rail network in North America, but their system carries as much people as Winnipeg's (approximately 70 million boardings annually in 2019). The only US systems that can match Winnipeg are New York City, San Francisco, and Washington. Winnipeg has higher transit ridership per capita than Chicago with its massive "L" and Metra systems.

There is just no "North American context" when it comes to transit. Canada and US are like two different continents. Canada is much closer to Europe than it is the US. If you compare Canada to UK, the ridership numbers are almost identical. The main difference between Canada and Europe is the rate of cycling and walking.

[WhipperSnapper]

Originally Posted by someone123

There was a transit and urbanism "recession" in most of North America for most of the postwar period so I think that led to the sense that the only way to move those things forward was to add a lot of population, so much that those things go up in aggregate while they go down per capita (kind of like our economy right now).

In a lot of old parts of Europe there was gradual organic improvement of structures and infrastructure even sometimes without much population growth for long periods (due in part to high death rates). Some small town could remain a small town and get ornate stone houses, grand public buildings, railways, etc.

True however, it's debatable what impact that transit recession had on Toronto. The streetcars survived and expansion creating a network of highways did not.