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  #321  
Old Posted Nov 20, 2008, 1:33 AM
officedweller officedweller is online now
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And spark a competitor to Bombardier?
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  #322  
Old Posted Nov 20, 2008, 3:25 AM
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There aren't that many passenger rail companies. Bombardier (Canada), Siemens (Germany), Alstom (France), Breda (Italy), Skoda (Czech), Stadler (Swiss), one for every other European country basically, and a bunch of Japanese companies.

I think Toronto and Calgary are trying to do something similar to this. The total probably doesn't add up to $25 billion.
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  #323  
Old Posted Nov 21, 2008, 5:00 AM
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I don't think I posted the two maps properly. They go together.

The interurban one was posted properly above: http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&...,1.235962&z=10
The light rail + skytrain one has hardly any views so I don't think I posted it properly: http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&...,0.617981&z=11
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  #324  
Old Posted Nov 21, 2008, 3:32 PM
DKaz DKaz is offline
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Exactly what I was thinking about for the Abbotsford Line! Although I wonder if the line should follow Old Yale Road instead. It could eventually be extended to the residential areas where it would better serve residents, the Auto Mall, then sweep down to the Airport. Keeping on S. Fraser Way would connect it through the industrial area and provide a more direct connection to the Airport...
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  #325  
Old Posted Nov 21, 2008, 6:41 PM
MalcolmTucker MalcolmTucker is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by officedweller View Post
I left that up to the reader on purpose - apparently Calgary has good transit ridership and their CBD is very centralized, making transit easy to plan.
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Originally Posted by CoryHolmes View Post
Have you seen the rest of it, though? When I was there back in '01, it was nothing but urban sprawl as far as the eye could see, with (as you said) has a very small CBD.

Surrey is working hard to shed that 'low-class suburb' tag that it's borne for decades. Growing like Calgary really won't help that. If it really wants to be taken as seriously as Vancouver, then it's going to have to become a true urban/metro area.
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Originally Posted by officedweller View Post
I haven't been to Calgary in years - so I can't really comment on it.
More people in Calgary commute using the LRT here than use the SkyTrain in the lower main land. (Calgary 271,000 vs. SkyTrain 220,000). Not sure how the numbers compare when you add in busses, since I can't find Coast Mountain ridership numbers.

Calgary's CBD is the working home for more than a 1/4 of working Calgarians, and provides a natural focus for service. This did not appear out of a vacume however, and is the result of many years of pro CBD policies. (as a result we have much fewer people living in the core compared to Vancouver, but it is reversing a bit these days). I wouldn't call the CBD small, but concentrated. (Calgary has more leaseable office space than Vancouver, about 25% more)

And yes, sprawl is bad in Calgary, but not any worse than in any other Canadian Metropolitan Area. New suburbs are built with density targets of 12.5 UPA, and all suburbs approved after the early 1980s are at least 6 UPA.

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Originally Posted by fever View Post
There aren't that many passenger rail companies. Bombardier (Canada), Siemens (Germany), Alstom (France), Breda (Italy), Skoda (Czech), Stadler (Swiss), one for every other European country basically, and a bunch of Japanese companies.

I think Toronto and Calgary are trying to do something similar to this. The total probably doesn't add up to $25 billion.
Calgary buys off the shelf from Siemens, built in California. The only way Calgary will buy from anyone else is if it is cheaper, or if they loose access to federal/provincial money if they don't.

Skoda is building a plant in Portland for streetcars. Toronto can't even decide to buy any new cars as of today.

A nail everyone here has hit on the head is how difficult it is to plan transit in Vancouver, due to a current lack of natural hubs. The advantage to this is you can create hubs and fund construction through MTR style land development at these hubs.
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  #326  
Old Posted Nov 21, 2008, 7:35 PM
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One thing I wonder is whether having multiple hubs (a natural consequence of the multiple municipalities) is just diluting ridership to the point where it is too expensive to build rapid transit. Metro Vancouver has, however, done a good job of connecting the hubs with rapid transit (i.e. now that the regional town centres are connected to each other (or will be with the Evergreen Line), we now you have to feed each of those hubs to get them to grow with office space - which could be more challenging).
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  #327  
Old Posted Nov 21, 2008, 10:53 PM
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Originally Posted by kyle_olsen View Post
Not sure how the numbers compare when you add in busses, since I can't find Coast Mountain ridership numbers.
Figures from 2005:
Bus: 674,000
SeaBus: 16,720
WCE: 8,400

The total would be well over 1 million trips a day by now I think...
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  #328  
Old Posted Nov 22, 2008, 5:59 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dk
Exactly what I was thinking about for the Abbotsford Line! Although I wonder if the line should follow Old Yale Road instead. It could eventually be extended to the residential areas where it would better serve residents, the Auto Mall, then sweep down to the Airport. Keeping on S. Fraser Way would connect it through the industrial area and provide a more direct connection to the Airport...
This southern route hits both of the population centres south of the highway, Murrayville/Willoughby and Aldergrove, Abbotsford airport, and the main university campus in Abbotsford. The line in the map follows a mix of what appear to be remnants of old rail rights-of-way and additions to the 1-mile grid either on the grid or at 1/4-mile or 1/8-mile offsets. An alternative northern route might go through Port Kells, Walnut Grove, and Fort Langley, but there's little beyond that.

I'd favour whatever alignment serves most of the population centres while minimizing the cost of the line. I don't know that this alignment is most cost-effective. I don't think grade-separation is necessary in rural parts of the valley, but at the same time it's important to limit grade-crossings at major roads. This alignment stays in farmland whenever it can, and approaches population centres/stations on a tangent. It doesn't parallel major roads

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Originally Posted by ko
Calgary buys off the shelf from Siemens, built in California. The only way Calgary will buy from anyone else is if it is cheaper, or if they loose access to federal/provincial money if they don't.
I think building the line with standard materials in standard dimensions is a good approach. This means more than just standard gauge. Bombardier's bilevel commuter trains and Siemen's LRT trains in Calgary are good examples of standard rolling stock. It shouldn't matter which train is used initially anyway. The point is to have as many options as possible when it comes to picking your suppliers so that costs are kept low and suppliers that don't perform well can be replaced. The way I see this system operating, with relatively infrequent headways, trains are a very minor cost, but the same holds true for the track, stations, signalling, whatever. There's nothing particularly innovative about the technology in this system.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ko
A nail everyone here has hit on the head is how difficult it is to plan transit in Vancouver, due to a current lack of natural hubs. The advantage to this is you can create hubs and fund construction through MTR style land development at these hubs.
Agreed. This is one of the advantages of using existing rights-of-way. Because stations are at the edge of their community, there is generally a swath of greyfield between the centre of the community and the proposed station. The axis between the station and the centre would be a logical focus for development. A criticism of the Abbotsford line as I've drawn it might be that the stations are on the eastern edges of Murraryville, Aldergrove, and Abbotsford (i.e. the wrong side).
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  #329  
Old Posted Nov 22, 2008, 8:22 AM
CLC CLC is offline
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Calgary 271,000 vs. SkyTrain 220,000

just want to know which year the SkyTrain 220,000 figure was from.

Given that EXPO is frequently on crush load during entire daytime nowadays, my guess is Skytrain ridership figure at least 20% more than a few years ago
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  #330  
Old Posted Nov 22, 2008, 8:37 AM
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Originally Posted by CLC View Post
just want to know which year the SkyTrain 220,000 figure was from.

Given that EXPO is frequently on crush load during entire daytime nowadays, my guess is Skytrain ridership figure at least 20% more than a few years ago
I'm wondering about that too. SkyTrain's annual ridership in 2007 is actually higher than c-train (where the 271,100 weekday avg was reported). And according to the same report, SkyTrain has 6,618,500 riders in November 2007, divide that by 30 days, it gives 220,617 daily average including weekends.
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  #331  
Old Posted Nov 22, 2008, 9:43 AM
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The 220,000 ridership for SkyTrain comes from a combination of 2 different documents - one which gives Expo Line figures of 169,467 from 2003 and the other which gives Millennium Line figures of 48,100 from 2005 - resulting in 217,567 or in other words ~220,000. At least I can only assume that is what wikipedia's number is based on since the following are the two easiest sources to find data on through Google (only problem is that they're quite out of date):

2003 E-Line & M-Line:
http://www.skytrain.info/retail/2003...ary_Report.pdf

2005 M-Line:
http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/Pub...enniumline.pdf

I'd assume ridership is now over 250,000 between the two lines, especially since Expo ridership is said to reach 210,000 alone by 2010 (according to wikipedia). If anybody has links to more recent Translink reports for daily ridership I'd love to see them.
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  #332  
Old Posted Nov 22, 2008, 10:49 PM
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Here's a quick way to calculate the daily skytrain ridership, using the 2003 report Raggedy posted, and these numbers:

http://public.metrovancouver.org/abo...p1989-2007.pdf

2003 Annual Ridership: 62,047,997
2007 Annual Ridership: 71, 212, 840

This represents an increase of 14.77057027%

So, taking the weekday ridership number of 204, 989 (from Raggedy's 2003 link) and increase that by the above percentage, which yields a 2007 daily weekday ridership of 235, 267.

Furthermore, if we want to ballpark 2008 figures, we can take the rate of growth, i.e. 14.77/4 %/year, and then multiply it by 5 years, to get the expected 2008 increase over 2003 figures. Multiplying this figure by the 2003 ridership gives a 2008 weekday average of 242, 837.

Of course, there are a number of flaws with these calculation, but it's probably not bad for a rough estimate.
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  #333  
Old Posted Dec 5, 2008, 12:57 AM
The_Henry_Man The_Henry_Man is offline
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Originally Posted by fever View Post
Right. It's a pretty typical commuter rail line. I see increasing the level of service on this line and others as a way of connecting regional centres that are beyond the reach of our metro-like skytrain system. I see interurban/regional rail as a faster, cheaper alternative to skytrain, but it will need to have dedicated track for it to be a reasonable alternative to skytrain. While there are some places where extensive changes would be needed, like adding an elevated guideway and station at Coquitlam Centre, it would still work out to be much less expensive than building skytrain.

For the most part, I've chosen existing rights-of-way that are wide, flat, and straight. Most have freight traffic, especially between Braid and Maple Ridge but also between Willingdon and Braid, and these sections are generally wide enough for parallel tracks to be added. I don't think it would be possible to add dedicated track along Burrard inlet, and removing this 6-hour/day annoyance from our port facilities is probably a good enough reason in itself. The only loser is Port Moody, and it gets skytrain. There are many more winners.

The distance between stations isn't changing, except where the route changes. The trip time between Mission and Waterfront would be about the same as it is today, and it would be faster if it were electrified.

I put the whole system up http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UT...,0.019312&z=16
That's an interesting route you have for the Fraser Valley portion of the WCE Interurban line. I quite like it. But wouldn't it have tremendous problems with property acquisition as it cuts across numerous private properties along its ROW, especially between Langley City and Abbotsford?
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  #334  
Old Posted Dec 5, 2008, 2:55 AM
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Originally Posted by The_Henry_Man View Post
That's an interesting route you have for the Fraser Valley portion of the WCE Interurban line. I quite like it. But wouldn't it have tremendous problems with property acquisition as it cuts across numerous private properties along its ROW, especially between Langley City and Abbotsford?
When I was making the map I was following what looked like an old rail right-of-way between Willoughby and Aldergrove. I looked it up a few days later, and it is actually an old VV&E (Vancouver, Victoria & Eastern) ROW. It hasn't been used since the Depression. That ROW is too loopy between Langley City and Willoughby. The route partially follows some sort of ROW between Langley City and Willoughby, and it follows the 1/2-mile grid on what would be 10th Avenue near Abbotsford airport.

It does cut through a few farms, especially on corners and to avoid the hill (quarry?) west of Abbotsford airport. I've tried to avoid property acquisition wherever possible while still actually serving the communities in the Valley, which wouldn't be possible if it followed the highway. I know it's not easy to see where it follows existing rights-of-way in the satellite map with a giant red line over top.

More info here: http://www.vanc.igs.net/~roughley/gn_fv_3.html
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