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When I rode the ION last year it was crawling at the two turns on Hayward and Courtland. Like it was moving so slow I thought we were rolling to a stop.
If the schedule were reduced by 10 minutes per direction (20 min round trip), here are what the headways would be with the existing number of vehicles in service at different times of day:
Yeah I was quite critical of the ION when it first opened because of these slow turns. At the time I didn't understand why they went with that design since, for a little bit more money they could have eliminated the bottleneck. What I came to learn is that the Region of Waterloo was operating on a shoe-string budget when they built ION because unlike Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Peel who had their LRTs paid for in full by daddy Provincial and/or Federal government, the Region of Waterloo only got 2/3rds of the funding from upper government and had to fund the rest themselves. With only 500,000-ish residents between the tri-cities (rural townships didn't pay for ION) there wasn't the kind of tax base available to do everything perfectly, so some compromises were required. A lot of the strange turns on ION were put in to reduce land acquisition costs. The Region of Waterloo wanted to use their own rights-of-way as much as possible, which wasn't too difficult as they own most of the rail spur lines which intersect the city (Iron Horse Trail ROW), but they had to use roads in some areas to link the rights-of-way together. Honestly, for a total construction cost of less than $1 billion, for the area served and the speeds provided, the ION is probably the best value-for-money transit project in the country.
I agree. One of the biggest issues with the TSP system on the streetcar network is that we have a very simplistic way of estimating travel time that is usually wrong, since it would be logistically impractical to separately calibrate a formula for each direction at each intersection at each time of day. But we have boatloads of data we can use to train a machine learning model to predict travel times at each intersection based on data sources such as the time of day, the traffic signal state, time since previous streetcar and of course the observed travel times of previous streetcars.
For an region and municipality taking their first swing at a rail transit project really ever, the way it turned out is miraculous.
A council item to ask staff to produce the report council asked for a year ago?
If you're wondering why Stage 2 of the ION avoids Preston, NIMBYs caused that to happen. The people of Preston don't want any change and the Region doesn't wait around for this nonsense, so they went with Hespeler Rd instead.
Supposedly they're not going direct staff to study the issue but implement it instead:
Metros in other places (Paris, Amsterdam, etc.) have doors actuated by buttons.They want these LRTs to operate and look and feel as little like a streetcar and as much like a subway as possible. Its all about optics. Thats why they painted them grey (no seriously, to match the subway trains stainless steel look. No, I'm serious this is not an opinion, Metrolinx stated this for real. Like its going to fool anyone)
Optics asside, you are right, its better. But everything in politics is about optics.
Ironically, you know what WOULD make them seem more like a subway? Transit priority and driving them faster than 30kmh
I would argue speed limits for LRVs could be, say, 10kph higher than that for regular traffic This may require legislative changes -- but perhaps yet another argument for proper grade separation to escape the tyranny of the HTA. A higher limit for rail transit vehicles makes some sense given that: speed limits are set with the expectation that many drivers will exceed them, at least somewhat (85th percentile etc.), LRVs are on rails with a predictable path, and they are operated by professional drivers.
Someone please confirm this but isn't the speed limit for the line 6 vehicles 60km/h and 50km/h for the line 5 vehicles themselves.
Absolutely not. The top speed of a Flexity is 70 km/h.
The speed limit is 60km/h on both lines, as set by council:
