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Waterloo Region Transit Developments (ION LRT, new terminal, GRT buses)

Bureaucromancer said:
Thought it worth mentioning that the south terminal re-evaluation is going to the Regional Planning & Public Work Committee on December 5th. Documents should be up around the 28th.

I'll say that as much as my assumption is that this is really about relocating to Ainslie and possibly eliminating the station at Main, I'm actually quite fond of the idea of keeping Main and moving the terminal to Concession.

As far as Dundas / Main goes, I don't actually hate the idea of getting Ion over there... it just needs to be by way of Concession and Main. Mixed traffic would even be fine imo.
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Seems like a crazy set of choices.
- T1 - Go to the bus terminal and have lots of connections and a short one block walk to Main and/or Water Street.
- T2 - Go past the bus terminal by 400m to a used car dealership for some reason??
- T3 - Go past the bus terminal by 350m to an easy connection to Concession Rd. This isn't a bad option because presumably there would still be the GRT bus terminal stop and one additional here in an area with a bit higher density and the Cedar St bridge.
- T4 - Trade downtown Cambridge for a Canadian Tire and a Dollarama??
 
EnviroTO said:
Seems like a crazy set of choices.
- T1 - Go to the bus terminal and have lots of connections and a short one block walk to Main and/or Water Street.
- T2 - Go past the bus terminal by 400m to a used car dealership for some reason??
- T3 - Go past the bus terminal by 350m to an easy connection to Concession Rd. This isn't a bad option because presumably there would still be the GRT bus terminal stop and one additional here in an area with a bit higher density and the Cedar St bridge.
- T4 - Trade downtown Cambridge for a Canadian Tire and a Dollarama??
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It may seem insane to anyone who has any interest in infrastructure but Mayor Liggett has said some pretty absurd things through her time as mayor in relation to development/infrastructure. With regards to moving the end all the way down Dundas (T4) she said this "I have grave concerns. I think that there was an error made many years ago over the decision of where the line should go. Twenty years ago I don’t think it was taken into consideration that our major growth area isn’t downtown, our major growth area is down Dundas Street." In no way does that make sense, the growth is only being directed there because that's some of the last land available for suburban development and there is no way that's going to magically become a high density node. Ultimately the public isn't really going to care about where the line ends (unless its T4), what they care about is the cost and moving the terminus to a different location in Galt isn't going to change the cost by a notable amount in comparison to the overall cost.
 
ZEBuilder said:
It may seem insane to anyone who has any interest in infrastructure but Mayor Liggett has said some pretty absurd things through her time as mayor in relation to development/infrastructure. With regards to moving the end all the way down Dundas (T4) she said this "I have grave concerns. I think that there was an error made many years ago over the decision of where the line should go. Twenty years ago I don’t think it was taken into consideration that our major growth area isn’t downtown, our major growth area is down Dundas Street."
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So my concern with the presenting of three downtown options and one middle of nowhere option, is that the downtown options are not significantly different so in any vote the downtown votes will be diluted and T4 might look like it won. If they present another 10 downtown variations they might make T4 a shoe-in.
 
EnviroTO said:
So my concern with the presenting of three downtown options and one middle of nowhere option, is that the downtown options are not significantly different so in any vote the downtown votes will be diluted and T4 might look like it won. If they present another 10 downtown variations they might make T4 a shoe-in.
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Yeah... that's not at all how this works. There is going to be a recommendation, singular in the report and a vote by council to do something, not some wide open balloting process on a by option basis.
 
Was talking to a chap from KW last night and got around to transit. He stated he moved to KW 20 years ago and the routing of the LRT was a real mistake and costly. He feels the next phase will be worse and costing to more than double what it was to cost, if not more.

Once politics is at the fore front, poor decision are made with taxpayers on the hook for the over price line and operation cost.
 
drum118 said:
Was talking to a chap from KW last night and got around to transit. He stated he moved to KW 20 years ago and the routing of the LRT was a real mistake and costly. He feels the next phase will be worse and costing to more than double what it was to cost, if not more.

Once politics is at the fore front, poor decision are made with taxpayers on the hook for the over price line and operation cost.
Click to expand...

Thankfully that view is not the majority. Sure the LRT was costly but we spend billions of dollars on highway projects what's wrong with doing the same for transit? There are definitely problems with phase 1 that need to be worked out before phase 2 begins operations particularly the freezing rain issue and better signal prioritization leaving stations but overall the system operates surprisingly well.

Phase 2 is magnitudes more complex than phase 1 so it is inevitably going to be more costly. The most complicated part of phase 1 was the King St grade separation, Phase 2 will have to cross the Speed and Grand river's, 3 different rail/rail grade separations have to be constructed, then another bridge over some horrible topography. That alone drives up the cost substantially compared to phase 1. Sure another line in Kitchener (Ottawa St is the future planned corridor for a phase 3) would probably be cheaper but it has some pretty horrendous problems of its own, it would have to interconnect with the existing phase 1 tracks from Mill St to Charles St, it also has to navigate crossing the Expressway in two places, it has to go through 3 different roundabouts (one is 3 lanes), and then cross the Grand River. Regardless of what line gets built next its going to be more costly because there are more engineering challenges involved.

Even if it might make more economic sense to put another line in Kitchener or Waterloo it would be political suicide for every politician since Cambridge already had to pay for phase 1. With regards to routing there really isn't another option to connect the cores of KW together without following the current routing, so unless the routing were to avoid all density there is no way it would make any sense to build it anywhere else.
 
Those grade separations also leave stage 2 as quite a lot higher grade a piece of infrastructure than 1... to the point that I have to agree about stage 1 that we may well at some stage be talking about substantial projects to speed run times through Kitchener (the problem is that every realistic option that isn't just a straight shot tunnel under king breaks some key connectivity).
 
Bureaucromancer said:
Those grade separations also leave stage 2 as quite a lot higher grade a piece of infrastructure than 1... to the point that I have to agree about stage 1 that we may well at some stage be talking about substantial projects to speed run times through Kitchener (the problem is that every realistic option that isn't just a straight shot tunnel under king breaks some key connectivity).
Click to expand...

Any project to increase speeds through Kitchener are years off but there are so many simple fixes that can be done right now to make it that much faster. Some of the reason why it is so slow at various places along the line are honestly peculiar and many of them aren't excessively hard to fix. Leaving Victoria Park Station and City Hall Station the train has to creep ahead 2/3 meters just to sit and wait for the signal to change, if it got to the station and then immediately got priority it would remove all of the excessive waiting at the station for the signal. Then at Charles/Benton, Duke/Francis, Charles/Victoria it rarely has priority so often times it will again sit and wait for the signal which often times is a full light cycle. Then another thing that I can't for the life of me understand is how the max speed of the train through the core is often times slower than that of the car traffic right next to it (it isn't a issue related to curves in the track) if the LRT at least matched speed there would be more time savings.

Then elsewhere along the system there are similarly strange signal priority issues, leaving/entering Borden Station has similar problems as Victoria Park and City Hall, Borden/Courtland and Ottawa/Charles don't have signal priority. In Uptown Waterloo around Allen Station there are the same problems. Then another strange thing that doesn't make sense is the speed the LRT goes entering the Erb/Caroline intersection, the southbound trains will quite literally crawl into the intersection, this crawl happens well before the intersection yet the northbound trains will already be increasing towards max speed as it's crossing the intersection, then in the train corridor between Mill Station and Hayward the southbound train also has a strange crawl where it slows from max speed to a crawl for ~200m before it crosses Hayward yet the northbound train is again going max speed. Then in the Fairway hydro corridor it crawls until after the pedestrian cross over. Then it goes at a reasonable speed.

If they got rid of all the signal priority issues and the strange Erb/Caroline, Hayward and hydro corridor slowdowns they could very realistically increase the speed of system without having to do much major infrastructure changes. Even just increasing the speeds to be identical or slightly higher than traffic would substantially increase the speed of the system.
 
ZEBuilder said:
Any project to increase speeds through Kitchener are years off but there are so many simple fixes that can be done right now to make it that much faster. Some of the reason why it is so slow at various places along the line are honestly peculiar and many of them aren't excessively hard to fix. Leaving Victoria Park Station and City Hall Station the train has to creep ahead 2/3 meters just to sit and wait for the signal to change, if it got to the station and then immediately got priority it would remove all of the excessive waiting at the station for the signal. Then at Charles/Benton, Duke/Francis, Charles/Victoria it rarely has priority so often times it will again sit and wait for the signal which often times is a full light cycle. Then another thing that I can't for the life of me understand is how the max speed of the train through the core is often times slower than that of the car traffic right next to it (it isn't a issue related to curves in the track) if the LRT at least matched speed there would be more time savings.

Then elsewhere along the system there are similarly strange signal priority issues, leaving/entering Borden Station has similar problems as Victoria Park and City Hall, Borden/Courtland and Ottawa/Charles don't have signal priority. In Uptown Waterloo around Allen Station there are the same problems. Then another strange thing that doesn't make sense is the speed the LRT goes entering the Erb/Caroline intersection, the southbound trains will quite literally crawl into the intersection, this crawl happens well before the intersection yet the northbound trains will already be increasing towards max speed as it's crossing the intersection, then in the train corridor between Mill Station and Hayward the southbound train also has a strange crawl where it slows from max speed to a crawl for ~200m before it crosses Hayward yet the northbound train is again going max speed. Then in the Fairway hydro corridor it crawls until after the pedestrian cross over. Then it goes at a reasonable speed.

If they got rid of all the signal priority issues and the strange Erb/Caroline, Hayward and hydro corridor slowdowns they could very realistically increase the speed of system without having to do much major infrastructure changes. Even just increasing the speeds to be identical or slightly higher than traffic would substantially increase the speed of the system.
Click to expand...
I have been working on a technical document outlining the reasons why ion is slow (snippet below) (note this is non-official)
ION SLOW_.png
 
drum118 said:
Was talking to a chap from KW last night and got around to transit. He stated he moved to KW 20 years ago and the routing of the LRT was a real mistake and costly. He feels the next phase will be worse and costing to more than double what it was to cost, if not more.
Click to expand...

I've lived here all my life and am convinced that he's wrong. Reusing hydro and rail corridors was key to keeping phase 1 affordable enough to actually happen. Hate on the route all you want, but any other routing would have cost significantly more and failed to pass the many so-called 'transit referendum' elections that it got through.

My only regret with the phase 1 route was that they couldn't keep it in the rail corridor between Hayward and the hydro corridor, ducking under Block Line and crossing Courtland with straight track at higher speeds, with an Ottawa/Pimisi style station at Block Line. The current route absolutely crawls along beside Courtland between Block Line and Hayward, then tip toes its way through the Hayward s-bends. Rumour has it that CN/CP blocked any use of the space alongside their interchange yard though, so it was simply not to be. :(
 
KevinT said:
I've lived here all my life and am convinced that he's wrong. Reusing hydro and rail corridors was key to keeping phase 1 affordable enough to actually happen. Hate on the route all you want, but any other routing would have cost significantly more and failed to pass the many so-called 'transit referendum' elections that it got through.

My only regret with the phase 1 route was that they couldn't keep it in the rail corridor between Hayward and the hydro corridor, ducking under Block Line and crossing Courtland with straight track at higher speeds, with an Ottawa/Pimisi style station at Block Line. The current route absolutely crawls along beside Courtland between Block Line and Hayward, then tip toes its way through the Hayward s-bends. Rumour has it that CN/CP blocked any use of the space alongside their interchange yard though, so it was simply not to be. :(
Click to expand...
If affordability was a concern when building this line or not (and accepted) then I am a bit confused why some are shocked that affordability is leading to service changes.
 
sixrings said:
If affordability was a concern when building this line or not (and accepted) then I am a bit confused why some are shocked that affordability is leading to service changes.
Click to expand...

The problem when the line was getting built is completely different than it is now. When it was getting built so many things got VE because if it cost anymore than it did it would not have gotten built and we still wouldn't have a LRT line. The service changes that the region wants to do is really a situation of suffering from success, the amount of people using the LRT now compared to when it opened is substantial, in the fall term of 2019 there were still seats available during rush hour, both morning and evening, now 4 years later many trains are shoulder to shoulder. The service changes the Region wants to make allow them to stay within the contract between Keolis/Grandlinq and the Region where there is a set amount of service hours per year. They could always break the contract with Keolis/Grandlinq but they are trying to avoid that since it would inevitably mean a significant increase in cost, ultimately if ridership continues the way it has they're going to break the contract anyways they're just trying to push that off as far as they can while still maintain adequate frequencies.
 
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