[Bureaucromancer]

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.

 

[ZEBuilder]

Took the ION from Central Station (downtown Kitchener) up to UWaterloo Monday evening just after 8pm. Counted 30 people on the train.

Even after 9 (9:24 northbound train from Mill) there's still 30+ people on it, tonight I counted 37, and throughout the trip at least 30 people got on and a bunch got off, the 7 is also reasonably packed (at least tonight as the LRT passed). So there's no way all of us on the LRT could fit. Yes it's anecdotal evidence but from 8-9:30 there really isn't a drop in usage, it stays fairly consistent, maybe after 9:30 it drops off but if 7-8pm can justify 8 minute service surely 8-12am doesn't justify 30 minute service, I really don't know where GRT is getting their justification.

Really what should happen is peak service at 8 minutes (rush hour when trains are packed) and 10/15 minute frequencies every other hour. Anything else is useless.

 

[chrisw]

https://pub-regionofwaterloo.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?DocumentId=6231

Revised service option for ION Light Rail Transit
The original 2024 service proposal was intended to maximize capacity and respond to some crowding concerns shared by the public, by matching the demand curve to the service, as follows:

However, the engagement with the community showed strong attachment in maintaining high frequencies in the early morning and the evening (shoulder periods).Taking into consideration this feedback, staff recommend a revised service proposal, starting in June 2024, maintaining the 15mn interval between trains in the shoulder and increasing service in the peak during the summer to a 10mn interval.

The 2024 budget impact associated with this proposal is the same as the proposed LRT service level expansion presented to the Strategic Planning and Budget Committee on October 18, 2023, and as detailed in Appendix A to the 2024 Preliminary Budget book on page 150.

Staff recommend that the proposed service expansion for Light Rail Transit, as outlined in Appendix A to the 2024 Preliminary Budget book on page 150, be amended to reflect “10 minute headways at peak all year” service and to maintain “15 minute headways during shoulder periods all year”. The follow table summarizes the proposed amendment to the service expansion request:

The main risk to this plan is that 10 min during weekday peaks will not fully alleviate crowding, and standing room only is to be expected during peak hours in the central portion of the line.

 

[EnviroTO]

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.

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??

 

[ZEBuilder]

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??

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.

 

[EnviroTO]

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."

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.

 

[Bureaucromancer]

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.

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.

 

[drum118]

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.

 

[ZEBuilder]

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.

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.

 

[Bureaucromancer]

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).

 

[ZEBuilder]

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).

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.

 

[kalis0490]

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.

I have been working on a technical document outlining the reasons why ion is slow (snippet below) (note this is non-official)

 

[KevinT]

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.

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.

 

[Bureaucromancer]

Documents are available now:
Stage 2 ION South Terminus Evaluation Results and Preferred Location
Map of Preferred South Terminal Location
Map of South Terminal Alternative Locations
Terminal Location Alternatives Evaluation Criteria
Terminal Location Evaluation Results
Presentation

They're recommending Ainslie and seem to intend to drop Main.

 

[KevinT]

Thanks for that, ideally sanity will prevail at council.