afransen
Senior Member
I just wonder why we put so little emphasis on speed, even for feeder lines such as this. Per Metrolinx, the line will have an end-to-end travel time of 38 minutes, or 17 kph. That's equivalent to pretty casual cycling speed.
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- Thread starter W. K. Lis
- Start date
T3G
Senior Member
Can you be more specific with your allusions to American style LRT? What specific parts of the US do you have in mind when you write something like this? The stereotype of American LRT projects strikes me very much as being extremely overbuilt, running large, empty vehicles on routes that are more tourist novelty than useful mode of transit. What we are seeing with projects like Finch West, with the exception of the lack of transit priority, is much more in line with what they have in many large European cities.
Owing to the sterotype above, I'm not sure it is very difficult, in Toronto which has a much higher share of transit ridership than most American cities, to move as many people per day as most entire American LRT networks. But the fact of the matter is, tunneling is supremely expensive. This city fails to understand that money is a finite resource - you cannot just dig a great big hole in the ground everytime a line becomes too much for a bus to handle - and then we wonder why our transit expansion is so poor. Seriously, with the money that we are burning away on the SSE, how many LRT lines could have been built? And then repeat that question for the inevitable cost overruns that we will encounter on this road.
INTz
Active Member
Some great photos of the construction progress in the November CLC update.
Rainforest
Senior Member
Perhaps they mis-estimated the travel time, or took the number from an earlier report covering the whole length Yonge - Humber College (17 km).
In another study back in the early days of Transit City, the estimated speed was 22 kph for 400-m average stop spacing. The average stop spacing on Finch West will be ~650 m, the speed should be better than 22 kph.
Assuming 22 kph, the travel time should be about (11 km x 60) / 22 kph = 30 min.
yoshirocks702
Active Member
I noticed when driving through that these new bike lanes aren't at the same level as the sidewalk like on highway 7 (it's hard to tell from the picture), and in the presentation they describe the bike lanes as having "mountable" curbs so it looks like cars can easily drive into the bike lane. Would this count as grade seperated or did we get short changed here?
Finch bike lane from the November CLC
Highway 7 east of pine valley via google maps
Finch bike lane from the November CLC
Highway 7 east of pine valley via google maps
TRONto
Active Member
From my experience, they are both mountable. There needs to be physical separation so that the cars are unable to park in the bike lane. Both "types" of lanes are an easy stopover for an Uber driver to park in.
afransen
Senior Member
afransen
Senior Member
Perhaps. But they state the 38 minute travel time and 11 km length in this document:
TRONto
Active Member
The construction costs for Finch/Hurontario are a bit over $100M/km.
From UT: "In April, Infrastructure Ontario (IO) and Metrolinx had selected a consortium, Mosaic Transit Group, as their preferred proponent for the project. This week, Mosaic reached commercial and financial close to design, build, finance and maintain the 11-kilometre LRT. The $2.5 billion contract includes $1.2 billion of construction costs. The Toronto Transit Commission will operate the line for Metrolinx."
From Railwayage: "The Mobilinx consortium, consisting of Hitachi Rail, Astaldi Canada Enterprises Inc., Salini-Impregilo S.p.A., John Laing Investments Limited, Transdev North America, Inc. and Amico Concessions Inc. and Bot Engineering & Construction Ltd., has signed a C$4.6 billion DBFOM (design, build, finance, operate and maintain) contract with Infrastructure Ontario and Metrolinx for the Hurontario LRT. The contract value includes approximately C$2.1 billion in total capital construction costs."
afransen
Senior Member
I'm frankly kind of baffled by how these project costs are presented. Is the capital cost really the all-in up-front cost? Ie, is that ~$100M per km comparable to the $700M/km for SSE? I notice that Hurontario has a similar $250M/km all-in cost, plus another billion dollars of operating costs over the contract.
Steve X
Senior Member
Would you pay up front if you hired someone to mow your lawn for the next 4 years? Then expect they don't run away? How does a regular person know how big is the contract if all the cost is not presented in one dollar figure in present value?
We can expect them getting a certain down payment of the capital cost so they'll hire and train people, get the necessary subcontractors and equipment if they need to do the job. Then they'll get a payment on a predetermine period or when certain milestones are met. This will all depend on the contract. The capital cost would be a estimate based on what is needed to be done discounted to present value of a certain year, usually around the year of the funding announcement. So we would see that they paid them more than $1.2b total if we got to see all the payments by the time they finished. That's simply inflation.
We can also expect the maintenance being paid throughout the 30 years as work is being performed. We also won't know how much more they would get paid cause of COVID measures as they probably billed ML extra for something out of their control. A contingency fund for the project would cover for things like those.
Rainforest
Senior Member
Yes, I read that document.
Merely pointing out that the speed calculated from their stated travel time doesn't match the speed from other estimates.
Which one is correct? Only one way to find out; wait until it starts running and measure the actual travel time.
Railrunner
Active Member
Hmm I wonder what the plan would be to link Finch West with Finch. I know some people see no purpose but I will say that the 36 is always been ridiculously busy and Finch is wide enough to accommodate an LRT and it's only 6 km. It would pay dividends as a Northern crosstown. as currently we are building a Northern extension on Line 1 and the Spadina section Line 1 already goes north of the 407!
Steve X
Senior Member
If anyone have read through that pdf, it contradicts itself. On answer 46, it states something different:
Personally I think a train can finish a trip in 28-30 minutes in lightly travel times unless there is extensive traffic light dwells. 38 minutes if it was packed and needed to wait for people to shuffle around. We'll see how well this works with the limited transit priority it is suppose to get.
It takes 22 min to drive the route without traffic accord to Google maps, the LRT has no traffic issues. There are 18 stops with an average of 30 sec per stop, that adds 9 mins (that's pretty excessive, subways stop for like 10-15 seconds or less for lightly used stops. That adds to 31 min. So 38 minutes would likely be close to the worst case scenario without any transit priority.
crs1026
Superstar
I’m just pleased to see that the contractor is expediting the restoration of the paved street and sidewalk…. as opposed to Eglinton, where the tracks were laid but it took forever for the street to be put back together.
- Paul
- Paul