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rbt said:
Is LRT actually much more expensive or does it just seem that way because we use underground stations at some locations and include the maintenance yard as part of the cost (rather than as a side-item in a different budget). I'm not sure I've seen a genuine apples to apples comparison in Toronto; they always reuse other facilities for the bus proposals while at the same time TTC needs to expand bus storage capacity ($500M for a new bus maintenance yard isn't cheap).
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The Eglinton East LRT is currently projected to be $3.9 Billion without any underground stations (all of those were cut out when they made it a standalone line). To look at another city, LA is building the East San Fernando Valley Line which will be entirely on street, and cost ~3.7B for 6.7 miles.
 
sixrings said:
For me the bus seems to be significantly less clean than the other transit choices. The vomit comet is the best example of this. My second hate is being stuck in traffic in a bus. Thirdly, and this maybe the worst, I can’t stand bus drivers. They weave in and out of traffic. They come to sudden stops. They like to take off as if it’s their Ferrari. It’s extremely erratic. You have to hang on for dear life. I’m not a fan.
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I currently live in Ottawa, where we have a Fully Grade Separated Transitway and a Fully Grade Separated LRT to compare and contrast. I'll tell you right now, the LRT is not that much nicer to ride on than the transitway bus services (and I mean the LRT on a good day when its running as expected). In fact I'd personally prefer riding on the transitway over the LRT (although a good part of that is due to busses skipping over stations off peak), with the only caveat being that transitway services have bonkers scheduling these days.
 
lead82 said:
I work in the Downtown Markham area and when I drive on highway 7, the few viva buses I do see are almost always empty. This is on weekday rush hours. I suspect it’s a Covid effect of many office and IT workers in the area working remotely.
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As someone who lives in Markham and frequents Highway 7 often, the busses are fairly packed (especially in the afternoon during rush hour). The issue with VIVA Purple is while headways are around 9 minutes for both branches combined during rush hour, the split between Kennedy and Warden causes one branch to be slower than the other, and you'll usually see one bus 1-2 minutes behind the other, then 15-18 minutes for the next one.
 
ARG1 said:
The Eglinton East LRT is currently projected to be $3.9 Billion without any underground stations (all of those were cut out when they made it a standalone line). To look at another city, LA is building the East San Fernando Valley Line which will be entirely on street, and cost ~3.7B for 6.7 miles.
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And yet Metrolinx is doing the 0.8km Adelaide streetcar diversion consisting of a fully rebuilt track base, tracks, and new overhead catenary for $40.2M with a non-competitive tender. So why is the 18.6km Eglinton East LRT more than $934M as that should cover track and overhead at the over-priced non-competitive small-scale equivalent price? An electric substation and maintenance facility are not $2.9B.

I have no idea how much of that EELRT price-tag is inflation, but inflation isn't LRT specific either.
 
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rbt said:
And yet Metrolinx is doing the 0.8km Adelaide streetcar diversion consisting of a fully rebuilt track base, tracks, and new overhead catenary for $40.2M with a non-competitive tender. So why is the 18.6km Eglinton East LRT more than $934M as that should cover track and overhead at the over-priced non-competitive small-scale equivalent price? An electric substation and maintenance facility are not $2.9B.

I have no idea how much of that EELRT price-tag is inflation, but inflation isn't LRT specific either.
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I assume in the case of Eglinton East you have to factor in road realignments, utility relocations, new MSF, new Vehicles, clearing for the new ROW in the roadside segments (Morningside/Ellesmere), rebuilt intersections with new signalling, building proper stations, and I'm probably missing some crucial details. This is in stark contrast with Adelaide where its just adding tracks and pantograph wires to existing roadways.
 
ARG1 said:
I assume in the case of Eglinton East you have to factor in road realignments, utility relocations, new MSF, new Vehicles, clearing for the new ROW in the roadside segments (Morningside/Ellesmere), rebuilt intersections with new signalling, building proper stations, and I'm probably missing some crucial details. This is in stark contrast with Adelaide where its just adding tracks and pantograph wires to existing roadways.
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That's correct, as with most large transit infrastructure projects, a substantial cost also goes to road reconfigurations, and the upfront replacement and relocation of utilities.
 
ARG1 said:
I assume in the case of Eglinton East you have to factor in road realignments, utility relocations, new MSF, new Vehicles, clearing for the new ROW in the roadside segments (Morningside/Ellesmere), rebuilt intersections with new signalling, building proper stations, and I'm probably missing some crucial details.
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Yes, I'm sure everything can be justified. There are some non-trivial station additions too (Kennedy and Sheppard). My point was that most of these expenses you mention, which are the majority of the project budget, apply to BRT of the same calibre/capacity result as the planned LRT.

Which leads back to my initial statement: "Is LRT actually much more expensive [than BRT] ..." or do we just add more side-bits to it?
 
rbt said:
Yes, I'm sure everything can be justified. There are some non-trivial station additions too (Kennedy and Sheppard). My point was that most of these expenses you mention, which are the majority of the project budget, apply to BRT of the same calibre/capacity result as the planned LRT.

Which leads back to my initial statement: "Is LRT actually much more expensive [than BRT] ..." or do we just add more side-bits to it?
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It's because BRT allows you to reuse a ton of existing infrastructure. If its an already busy corridor, you don't need to purchase new busses or build a new Garage (in fact you might be able to save on operations compared to status quo due to needing to run less busses due to less congestion), trickier stations could generally have corners cut (not that I advocate for it, but you wouldn't need to build complicated infrastructure at Kennedy Station compared to just having the bus leave the ROW to turn onto the existing bus loop). This is before I bring up that we are generally pretty efficient at building roadways compared to building and maintaining rail ROWs. If we look at how much highway expansions cost, the 427 extension to Major Mackenzie cost $616M for a little under 6km of highway (or about 100M/km) which includes a large amount of grading work and grade separations needed for a 75m wide ROW. This is considerably cheaper than Eglinton East which is 200M/km or 381M/km (depending on if the 3.9B number is the whole route to Malvern and Sheppard/McCowan, or just phase 1 to UTSC). Fact of the matter is we have both LRT and BRT projects built in this regions whose costs we can directly compare, lest we forget about the Hamilton LRT debacle where the government revealed that $1B was enough to build the B-Line as a BRT, whilst was only able to build the 3 westernmost station as LRT.
 
There's an operating agreement published. Some details from The Star,
Once the Finch LRT does open, its trains are scheduled to operate every 5-7 minutes during peak hours and every 7-10 minutes during off-peak hours.

The Finch LRT is expected to carry 12 million riders per year by 2031, according to the report.
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thestar.com

Finch West LRT document gives a glimpse of when and how it will operate

The new operating agreement for the Finch West LRT gives hints on when the light rail line will open and what its service will look like.
thestar.com thestar.com
 
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