Ottawa Rapid Transit Network developments

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by d_jeffrey

You're implying domething that hasn't been proven. Ridership in Canada is high no matter what the means of transportation.

Not exactly true. Transit ridership is pretty low in Quebec City, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Halifax, London, Victoria, K-W, all of which should be big enough to have more viable and extensive transit.

[Acajack]

I am not anti-BRT but one thing that has really helped ridership in Ottawa is having your main employer the feds locating most of its employees in a concentrated area downtown and having them all work fairly standard hours on weekdays. This has nothing to do with BRT or the Transitway per se.

[J.OT13]

The big 6 over a million all have similar ridership.

[lrt's friend]

I will remind everybody what stopped rapid transit development in the 1990s. Mike Harris. He ended provincial funding of capital transit projects that has left us with the haphazard funding model that we have today. Remember, he ordered the filling in of the Eglinton subway which was under construction in Toronto at the time. We could not build a downtown tunnel sooner because of provincial politics.

[lrt's friend]

Here is an interesting comment from the Transportation board.

Dallas is a pretty good argument to take a second look at the light-rail boom. Notwithstanding the hype, it doesn't seem to do much for transit usage in most cities.

Dallas has undergone a large expansion of light rail and the measure of modal share for the first decade of this century showed a 1.5% decline for transit and almost an 8% increase for driving alone. Similar declines were also experienced in Portland and Denver where light rail has also undergone considerable expansion. Usually light rail opening comes with bus route cuts. Why have cities spent so much money on light rail and had such poor results?

[eternallyme]

Did they ever calculate the cost of a BRT tunnel vs. LRT tunnel? Notwithstanding, it would likely need to be 4+ lanes throughout...

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

I will remind everybody what stopped rapid transit development in the 1990s. Mike Harris. He ended provincial funding of capital transit projects that has left us with the haphazard funding model that we have today. Remember, he ordered the filling in of the Eglinton subway which was under construction in Toronto at the time. We could not build a downtown tunnel sooner because of provincial politics.

Freakin' brilliant; "Sorry TO; I know you already invested a couple hundred million in your subway but em... we're cutting you off so fill the hole!"

Not to mention the trouble we would have saved by building at least the downtown tunnel at that time.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by eternallyme

Did they ever calculate the cost of a BRT tunnel vs. LRT tunnel? Notwithstanding, it would likely need to be 4+ lanes throughout...

Before I start, I want to state that I am 100% behind the LRT project as it stands today with phase 1.

LRT tunnel is, as far as I can remember, about 600 million (give or take 100 million). Although a bus tunnel would be significantly more expensive because, as you pointed out yourself, it would need to be 4 lanes, then you have extra ventilation needed because of diesel buses as opposed to electric LRT. And finally, you still need full length platforms for future conversion (add the future cost of conversion).

Although it would be about a billion+ for a BRT tunnel, we would save billions more by not having to convert 30ish km of existing BRT, not having to rebuild every existing stations and not needing any new rail yards.

This solution would increase the system’s capacity (to maybe 14000-16000 phpd as opposed to LRT's 24000-40000 phpd), but only in the mid-term.

That being said, if phase one of LRT is deemed too expensive, or the feds/province back down of their 600 million and we have to re-evaluate what we should do; I would vote to build the BRT tunnel (on the city's dime if we have to).

[eternallyme]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

Before I start, I want to state that I am 100% behind the LRT project as it stands today with phase 1.

LRT tunnel is, as far as I can remember, about 600 million (give or take 100 million). Although a bus tunnel would be significantly more expensive because, as you pointed out yourself, it would need to be 4 lanes, then you have extra ventilation needed because of diesel buses as opposed to electric LRT. And finally, you still need full length platforms for future conversion (add the future cost of conversion).

Although it would be about a billion+ for a BRT tunnel, we would save billions more by not having to convert 30ish km of existing BRT, not having to rebuild every existing stations and not needing any new rail yards.

This solution would increase the system’s capacity (to maybe 14000-16000 phpd as opposed to LRT's 24000-40000 phpd), but only in the mid-term.

That being said, if phase one of LRT is deemed too expensive, or the feds/province back down of their 600 million and we have to re-evaluate what we should do; I would vote to build the BRT tunnel (on the city's dime if we have to).

I agree with you. The tunnel (or an elevated structure, which would create sightline issues) is a must if BRT is to continue. It is beyond capacity now and only going to get worse.

If the tunnel was built immediately for BRT, how much money would be saved in a future LRT (or, if long term capacity dictates, heavy rail/metro) conversion 15 to 25 years from now, not accounting for inflation?

[Dado]

A BRT tunnel will solve absolutely nothing.

The notion that a BRT tunnel would solve anything is based on a gross misinterpretation of what the actual causes of the problems downtown currently are.

The common belief is that it is cross streets with their traffic lights that are causing problems.

This is false. It's a case of seeing a correlation - lots of cross streets and bus jams - and coming to a conclusion on causation without analysis.

The cause of the queues is the fact that average bus dwell times downtown exceed average bus headways. Indeed, the traffic lights actually help rather than hinder matters by forcing a certain level of "discipline" in that they clump buses together in short platoons of 2-4 buses. These buses then arrive at a station together, allowing their combined average headways to be pooled, thus permitting dwell times to exceed the average headway. The fact the system doesn't break down even more than it does can be attributed to platooning and indirectly the role of traffic lights in forcing that platooning.

As it happens, bus queues also form up at Tunney's Pasture westbound in the afternoon. There are no traffic lights to blame there. It is grade separated. There is even a passing lane. And yet it fails. According to people who routinely advocate a bus tunnel like Andy Haydon and John Bonsall, this shouldn't be happening.

Tunney's Pasture fails because lots of passengers board here and they are trying to board buses that are already full, both of which increase dwell times. Every express bus also has to stop to check for passengers, and since the dwell times exceed the headways, arriving buses have no choice but to join the end of the queue. They can't make use of the passing lane since they can't be sure their part of the platform is clear and the drivers also don't want to get into a potentially risky game of leap-frogging and queue-jumping each other; they can only make use of the passing lane when they leave the platform. What is particularly pertinent is that Tunney's Pasture, despite being a relatively high-volume station, still fails at passenger volumes that are a lot lower than what we would get with a reduced number of downtown stations in a tunnel.

Instead of highly visible queues on the surface, we would get much more hidden bus queues underground.

From a passenger perspective, being in a bus tunnel would be like a worse version of St. Laurent Station. Besides the fumes and noise of the ventilation system and buses, it would also get pretty hot. Rail tunnels are not immune to getting hot, either, but buses are far worse since internal combustion engines dump far more heat than electric motors.


If we can't build a rail tunnel, we would be far better off building an exclusive surface light rail line (e.g. down Albert) than building a bus tunnel, since a surface light rail system would not suffer from the queuing problems of a bus tunnel. A surface light rail line would have more capacity than a bus tunnel.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Dado

A BRT tunnel will solve absolutely nothing.

The notion that a BRT tunnel would solve anything is based on a gross misinterpretation of what the actual causes of the problems downtown currently are.

The common belief is that it is cross streets with their traffic lights that are causing problems.

This is false. It's a case of seeing a correlation - lots of cross streets and bus jams - and coming to a conclusion on causation without analysis.

The cause of the queues is the fact that average bus dwell times downtown exceed average bus headways. Indeed, the traffic lights actually help rather than hinder matters by forcing a certain level of "discipline" in that they clump buses together in short platoons of 2-4 buses. These buses then arrive at a station together, allowing their combined average headways to be pooled, thus permitting dwell times to exceed the average headway. The fact the system doesn't break down even more than it does can be attributed to platooning and indirectly the role of traffic lights in forcing that platooning.

As it happens, bus queues also form up at Tunney's Pasture westbound in the afternoon. There are no traffic lights to blame there. It is grade separated. There is even a passing lane. And yet it fails. According to people who routinely advocate a bus tunnel like Andy Haydon and John Bonsall, this shouldn't be happening.

Tunney's Pasture fails because lots of passengers board here and they are trying to board buses that are already full, both of which increase dwell times. Every express bus also has to stop to check for passengers, and since the dwell times exceed the headways, arriving buses have no choice but to join the end of the queue. They can't make use of the passing lane since they can't be sure their part of the platform is clear and the drivers also don't want to get into a potentially risky game of leap-frogging and queue-jumping each other; they can only make use of the passing lane when they leave the platform. What is particularly pertinent is that Tunney's Pasture, despite being a relatively high-volume station, still fails at passenger volumes that are a lot lower than what we would get with a reduced number of downtown stations in a tunnel.

Instead of highly visible queues on the surface, we would get much more hidden bus queues underground.

From a passenger perspective, being in a bus tunnel would be like a worse version of St. Laurent Station. Besides the fumes and noise of the ventilation system and buses, it would also get pretty hot. Rail tunnels are not immune to getting hot, either, but buses are far worse since internal combustion engines dump far more heat than electric motors.


If we can't build a rail tunnel, we would be far better off building an exclusive surface light rail line (e.g. down Albert) than building a bus tunnel, since a surface light rail system would not suffer from the queuing problems of a bus tunnel. A surface light rail line would have more capacity than a bus tunnel.

Another problem is the express bus system. If we were to build a bus tunnel (again, I am a huge advocate of the lrt tunnel), we would have to change the system to hub and spoke, only running the 90 series in articulated buses on the Transitway, solving the problem of people trying to figure out which bus is theirs and better distributing commuters on all buses. I think it would, in the mid-term (as a plan B if lrt ends up being well over the 2.1 billion mark), improve the system.

LRTs on the street are called streetcars which only have slightly more capacity than bus lanes.

[lrt's foe]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Dallas has undergone a large expansion of light rail and the measure of modal share for the first decade of this century showed a 1.5% decline for transit and almost an 8% increase for driving alone. Similar declines were also experienced in Portland and Denver where light rail has also undergone considerable expansion. Usually light rail opening comes with bus route cuts. Why have cities spent so much money on light rail and had such poor results?

Keep on spreading Randall O'Toole's word and the gospel according to the CATO institute. Good man, you're dong a great job sowing the seeds of doubt!

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Here is an interesting comment from the Transportation board.



Dallas has undergone a large expansion of light rail and the measure of modal share for the first decade of this century showed a 1.5% decline for transit and almost an 8% increase for driving alone. Similar declines were also experienced in Portland and Denver where light rail has also undergone considerable expansion. Usually light rail opening comes with bus route cuts. Why have cities spent so much money on light rail and had such poor results?

It might be about US vs. Canada; compare transit ridership (bus and rail within city limits) between Ottawa, 400,000 per weekday for a population of 1,000,000 and Houston, 280,000 for a population of 2,100,000. Same goes for a lot of other rapid transit systems in the US compared to Canada or Ottawa. The current ridership between Tunney's and Blair is about 160,000 for 12.1 km or 7.5 miles.

Heavy rail rapid transit;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_by_ridership

LRT;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_by_ridership

LRT/Trams, scroll down a bit;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_r..._North_America

[Innsertnamehere]

Houston's metro is above 6 million.. there is almost no transit usage there.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Houston's metro is above 6 million.. there is almost no transit usage there.

My point exactly, we need to compare Ottawa with other Canadian cities, not American.

[KHOOLE]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

It might be about US vs. Canada; compare transit ridership (bus and rail within city limits) between Ottawa, 400,000 per weekday for a population of 1,000,000 and Houston, 280,000 for a population of 2,100,000. Same goes for a lot of other rapid transit systems in the US compared to Canada or Ottawa. The current ridership between Tunney's and Blair is about 160,000 for 12.1 km or 7.5 miles.

Heavy rail rapid transit;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_by_ridership

LRT;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_by_ridership

LRT/Trams, scroll down a bit;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_r..._North_America

Is there a difference in the ridership east of the canal compared to the ridership west of the canal? and do we have numbers about station destinations, especially between Mackenzie King and LeBreton stations? What the numbers for the Campus station (UofO)?
Just wondering

[Kitchissippi]

I was in Dallas last month and I took the DART around, OK system, but man, what a horrible city. The downtown core is pretty well dead and lifeless, and makes Ottawa look like a really happening town. Their attitude towards public transit there is that it is mostly for poor people. It was not very rapid either, it took a good part of an hour to get from the northern terminus of the red line to downtown Dallas. In contrast, the freeways in Dallas and Houston have been made so wide and efficient that anyone with money or who values their time would be insane not to drive.

[J.OT13]

KHOOL, I couldn't find anything showing exact ridership of each station, but we do have the following to give us an idea of where the ridership to downtown comes from (per hour);

http://www.google.ca/imgres?um=1&hl=...w=1600&bih=702

Go thru the document for other images showing present/future demands.

[KHOOLE]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

KHOOL, I couldn't find anything showing exact ridership of each station, but we do have the following to give us an idea of where the ridership to downtown comes from (per hour);

http://www.google.ca/imgres?um=1&hl=...w=1600&bih=702

Go thru the document for other images showing present/future demands.

I do not consider anything posted by Nancy Schepers more than four years ago, before the subprime crisis in the US as being relevant!
What are the numbers for now, 2012? and the projected numbers for the next 10 years?
If we do not know where we are, how can we know where we are going?

[waterloowarrior]

check out the tables at the end of this document for projected ridership
http://www.ottawalightrail.ca/media/...ess%20Case.pdf