Haadhi

The most common argument from anti free transit people is tradeoffs, more service is money better spent than free fares. But this argument only makes sense from a local level. When looking at the provincial, or especially the federal level. This tradeoff doesn't even exist.

To be honest in an ideal world the benefits of fare free transit outweigh the negatives. If provinces or ideally the feds wanted it, they could do it. I think the biggest argument against it, which is why I'm skeptical is that someone else could come in and cause chaos by cancelling funding.

Hopefully this is just schedule padding for the initial phase. If there is a speed issue it'll certainly be because of the lack of doors since we're using streetcars as metro vehicles.

The flexities are terrible for a metro service, hopefully the dwell times aren't too bad and they run the trains faster to make up for it when the line is fully open

the "subway" portion of the line seems to be padded a lot and the surface section seems too fast, I'd be surprised if they can consistently get from Science Centre to Kennedy in 21 minutes without the TSP changes

literally 0 reason to do this. The feds can finance any housing project they want on their own. It is a good way to make some money for banks though

at the very least transit platforms on new higher order lines should be heated

It also helps that the CBD station is the easiest to access for the GTHA region via transit

Not really sure why they wouldn't use the parc subdivision and then tunnel from there to get to downtown Montreal. Going under the river is just unnecessary risk

32km/h is definitely too fast especially since we love to build multi use paths. Is 250w powerful enough for a pedal assist cargo bike though?

snow clearing has been horrible this week

also you don't need to do math to see if the pass is even worth it

technically Finch has most of these except for signal priority. That and the operating practices (drivers must not go above 30km/h) are really holding the line back

aerial photo of finch avenue with an LRT train running down the middle, near jane and finch. there are 7 lanes of car traffic (3 on the left side, 4 on the right side)

Q: how can we make the street below safer for people outside of cars?

toronto transportation services: 💡 force the LRT to operate 20 km/h slower than the adjacent traffic! vision zero! 🥰

I had no idea it was CBTC enforced, the only place something like this really makes sense is for the curve under Hwy 27 so drivers can go faster approaching the tunnel. But they're driving slow in the trench anyways

one of the worst parts of NA transportation planning is the obsession with super wide "complete streets"

The only thing that comes from private financing is the operator having a full monopoly of the route and the government having to give the consortium somewhere between $50-$150 billion over 50 years.

The private financing of ALTO is one of the worst parts of the project. Canada can actually finance the project much easier because we have our own currency unlike Spain which uses the Euro. There's 0 reason we need to rely on private funding to build the line. 1/2

90% of the building is just a comically long ramp to the concourse

If Canada had sane construction costs for a tramway like ~40 million CAD per km, 80 billion would get you around 2,000km of median tramway. But if the Finch W Tramway project is anything to go by 80 billion might get you only around 300km maybe a bit less. If you did Crosstown LRT costs...

38-40 minutes in travel time is about what you would expect for a fully grade separated line using these vehicles. The contract aiming for 45 minutes off peak and 49 minutes peak is quite ambitious given the infrastructure, and it seems they realized how hard that is in practice in RSD testing. 3/3

And good luck having consistent signal priority with 3 minute service and super long signal phases because we didn't build mid block crossings. The claim of 34km/h in tunnels is also unrealistic with that stop spacing, only VAL/rubber tire metros tend to achieve that in practice. 2/3

What this shows is that Metrolinx wasn't very good at estimating travel times. 25km/h average speed on surface segments is very unrealistic, you probably couldn't even achieve that if trains were guaranteed greens at every single light. 1/3

It seems that this "2023" document, is just some ancient crosstown info that was added to this document for some reason

wider ROWs do have a bit of an advantage of having the ability to separate the road into multiple phased crossings and have stop infrastructure. It would be so much easier to improve the streetcars if the ROW on most of the core routes were just a few meters wider

The secret sauce of Zurich's transit priority at intersections: two-stage crossings, variable length cycles made of stages that can change their length and order adaptively, and narrow lanes and intersections resulting in very short clearing times

Josh Matlow posted this today and this isn't the discourse we need to get these lines moving quickly. Matlow is wasting time trying to get funding for something that already exists

far side stops are generally better for faster operations but you need functional signal priority to make that happen

Confederation GO has something very similar. 90% of the station building is just a mega ramp to bring people to the concourse

I think us transit advocates need to shift the conversation from whether or not we have TSP more towards what makes TSP effective or ineffective