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kalis0490 said:
Not to mention the funded Hamilton LRT, the proposed Ottawa stage 3 LRT, and the Gatineau and Quebec city trams. All of which are at least in the 4 billion range. Just last week Quebec paused work on their tramway after costs were projected to reach $8 billion ! ION's cost of $868 million/19 km in 2014 now seems like a bargain. Its probably better to spend that money on purchasing new buses and training additional operators than on any higher order transit. Alas we now risk falling back into the transit expansion stagnation of the 2000s (at least for trams).
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I hope Ontario doesn’t pay a cent for the Gatineau Tramway.
 
Hi There, we are looking to create a general transportation (including local transit and regional transit) advocacy organization (TriTag) for Waterloo Region (similar to TTCRiders). Hopefully this group can bring awareness to transportation issues facing Waterloo Region. Please DM me on UrbanToronto if you want a link to our group organization chat.
 
I can't remember. What's the latest on the transit hub project? Would be great to have a direct VIA/GO-LRT connection.
 
Screenshot_2024-01-31_110718.jpg
 
innsertnamehere said:
5 minute frequencies before double length trains. Frequency is always better.
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Frequency is always King, but as pointed out above the region may not want to spend on more service. Might actually be easier for Waterloo to order more trains for double-length service with one of the Fed’s electric transit vehicle programs.
 
My understanding is that for the region to order more service they’d have to reopen the contract, and it’s very likely that the overall rate would rise significantly - for a major financial hit. Isn’t that why they were trying to rejig the off-peak schedules?

If that’s the case, ordering extra trains won’t solve the problem. I also don’t even know how much power exists to ask for double-length trains.
 
People may want 5-minute headway which is great, but are there enough drivers on hand today to do this 7 days a week???

Quality of service is necessary to get people to use transit, but the person doing the driving eats up the operation cost to do it to the point where there aren't enough funds to do it.

With transit systems finding it a lot harder these days to find staff, the quality of service is the first to go as well cutting service using what staff they have on hand.

Adding a second car while dealing with staffing issues along with the current headway is the best option than trying to get to that 5-minute headway. I don't know of a system where 5-minute headway is used for single car unit. I know of a lot of systems where 100-foot cars are running as 2–3-unit LRT trains on 10-minute headway in NA and have ridden them.

Depending on funding and drivers on hand, you may get it under 10 minutes to the point and then one day it could be 5-minutes service. At the same time, are there enough cars and spares on hand to handle 5-minute service with 1 or 2 car trains?? Need 20-30% spare ratio.
 
drum118 said:
People may want 5-minute headway which is great, but are there enough drivers on hand today to do this 7 days a week???

Quality of service is necessary to get people to use transit, but the person doing the driving eats up the operation cost to do it to the point where there aren't enough funds to do it.

With transit systems finding it a lot harder these days to find staff, the quality of service is the first to go as well cutting service using what staff they have on hand.

Adding a second car while dealing with staffing issues along with the current headway is the best option than trying to get to that 5-minute headway. I don't know of a system where 5-minute headway is used for single car unit. I know of a lot of systems where 100-foot cars are running as 2–3-unit LRT trains on 10-minute headway in NA and have ridden them.

Depending on funding and drivers on hand, you may get it under 10 minutes to the point and then one day it could be 5-minutes service. At the same time, are there enough cars and spares on hand to handle 5-minute service with 1 or 2 car trains?? Need 20-30% spare ratio.
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Another thing is that the contract that the RoW signed with Grandlinq only mentioned peak headways of around 7.5 minutes, there are currently enough trains for doubles. The region has 15 trains and during peak times there are 5 sitting in the yard so they could certainly run doubles. However increasing frequency would require changing the contract which the Region does not want to currently do. If ridership keeps increasing it's inevitable that there will be an increase in frequency but with the current contract that isn't going to happen.
 
It takes 43 minutes to go from Conestoga to Fairway station [google maps]. There are 15 trains available. if we take 3 trains for spares (roughly 20% spare ratio), roughly speaking:
For 10 min peak frequency: we need 2*(43 m)/10m = 8.6 trains (rounded to 9 trains)
For 7.5 min peak frequency: we need 2*(43 m)/7.5m = 11.4 trains (rounded to 12 trains)
For 5 min peak frequency: we need 2*(43 m)/5m = 17.2 trains (rounded to 18 trains)

You could have 10 frequency with some double unit trains though thats probably not advisable. As we can see here, 7.5 min is the max frequency with 1 unit trains. This makes sense as 7.5 minute frequencies were the original planned launch frequency in 2019 though it never was in place due to the pandemic.

I believe GRT's main concern is with bus availability rather than operator resources - all of the existing buses are used for service with very few spares+ buses for expansion.
 
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