News   Mar 28, 2024
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Waterloo Region Transit Developments (ION LRT, new terminal, GRT buses)

I am happy for KWC residents. But I really don't get what's all that unique about ION beyond KWC just being smaller than average in North America for LRT. Elsewhere, it would be perfectly normal for a city of half a million to have an LRT. The real test will be to show they have the ridership to justify the ~$900 million spent. Because if the ridership isn't spectacular there will be lots of communities asking if they should bother with LRT until they have a million residents. And it's definitely debatable. $900 million spent on BRT and tons of new buses would also have done a lot.

Ottawa is unique for showing the scalability of transit. I think Ottawa has sort of shown the path to building transit for small and medium cities. Deploy BRT relatively easily and quickly and reserve the corridors early. Build grade separations where possible cheaply. And then convert to rail when ridership and/or limitations warrant it. Successful conversion to LRT for half the rapid transit network after Stage 2 would be a huge validation of their strategy. In a decade and a half they will have built 56 km of grade separated rail transit. That would be an accomplishment anywhere. Even beyond the low standards of Canada and the US.

Compared to Europe Ion isn't so special, but in North America it's a rare bird. I'm hoping it spawns more rail development, and that higher order transit isn't just for big cities. Actually Ottawa is I think the smallest city in North America with a fully grade seperated system, so it too proves something.
 
The real test will be to show they have the ridership to justify the ~$900 million spent. Because if the ridership isn't spectacular there will be lots of communities asking if they should bother with LRT until they have a million residents. And it's definitely debatable. $900 million spent on BRT and tons of new buses would also have done a lot.

This seems a bit pessimistically specific. Nine hundred million round these parts seems okay when considering it's for a 20km route. So less than $50M/km, and the King corridor already had decent ridership to begin with. Now compare that with something like Davis Drive BRT in York Region. $300M, paid by the province, and it's less than 3km long. That's $100M/km, and it carries a thousand people per day. That's a joke. No grade separations either, just a low level BRT. So which one seems more likely to draw jealousy from other communities, the BRT or the LRT? The answer is obvious. And plus ION was scaled back with the south section chopped to bus levels.

Ottawa I think should've built LRT from the start. The level of BRT they planned was so high-scale that switching it to run trains from the outset would have been the right move imo. It's the nation's capital. Edmonton and Calgary had already achieved it years prior. The popularity of Ottawa's BRT, and its eventual conversion, certainly showed LRT was merited and wouldn't have been a risky investment had it been built.
 
Davis Drive is a completely comical waste of cash, I don't think many are denying that.

Davis was so wildly expensive however as it had huge property requirements, and was a full rebuild of the corridor - retaining walls, full utilities, etc, along with top tier public realm elements. It's nowhere near the same type of project that Ion is..

Ion is a bare bones LRT infrastructure system that more closely resembles a streetcar than a total rapid transit system. It has minimal to no public realm improvements, featuring basic concrete sidewalks, essentially 0 soft landscaping to the rebuilt streets, etc.

The Ion system is completely fine for KWC - they went for an expensive LRT system for a project that won't exactly have crazy high demand at first. It'll do fine by US standards for ridership, but really won't be a high use system. The good news is that most growth in KWC seems to be very LRT friendly these days, ridership should only grow.
 
I'm sure it will have more ridership than you think as it doesn't just augment route 7 and replace a portion of the 200 iXpress bus, it replaces an entire bus terminal: The current system is hub and spoke with many routes having to milk run it all the way to the downtown terminal and back, this shifts it to ribs and spine. A lot of routes will connect more directly to the ION spine than they ever did to the terminal hub, with those which remain a single transfer being quicker. If they get the frequencies and connection timings right, even those with an extra transfer shouldn't take much longer overall. (Fingers crossed.)

In other news, trains are running all the way to Fairway again this morning. Whatever hurdle had them crossing over to turn back at Mill these past few weeks has evidently been cleared. Huzzah!
 
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Compared to Europe Ion isn't so special, but in North America it's a rare bird.

I really dont agree with this.

There are many USA cities with LRT with the population of Kitchener/Waterloo.

Cleveland has a population of 325,000 and they have a subway!

Newark NJ has 285,154

Cincinnati 301,301

Jersey City 270,753

Buffalo 258,612

All have streetcars/Light rail
 
I really dont agree with this.

There are many USA cities with LRT with the population of Kitchener/Waterloo.

Cleveland has a population of 325,000 and they have a subway!

Newark NJ has 285,154

Cincinnati 301,301

Jersey City 270,753

Buffalo 258,612

All have streetcars/Light rail
By those metrics Waterloo has an LRT with a population of 113,000.

You want to go by metro area for these sort of things, in which it's more like the following:

Cleveland: 2.077 million

Newark: 20.3 million

Cincinnati: 2.11 million

Jersey City: 20.3 million

Buffalo: 1.13 million


Waterloo: 526,000.
 
I am happy for KWC residents. But I really don't get what's all that unique about ION beyond KWC just being smaller than average in North America for LRT. Elsewhere, it would be perfectly normal for a city of half a million to have an LRT. The real test will be to show they have the ridership to justify the ~$900 million spent. Because if the ridership isn't spectacular there will be lots of communities asking if they should bother with LRT until they have a million residents. And it's definitely debatable. $900 million spent on BRT and tons of new buses would also have done a lot.

Ottawa is unique for showing the scalability of transit. I think Ottawa has sort of shown the path to building transit for small and medium cities. Deploy BRT relatively easily and quickly and reserve the corridors early. Build grade separations where possible cheaply. And then convert to rail when ridership and/or limitations warrant it. Successful conversion to LRT for half the rapid transit network after Stage 2 would be a huge validation of their strategy. In a decade and a half they will have built 56 km of grade separated rail transit. That would be an accomplishment anywhere. Even beyond the low standards of Canada and the US.
iON didn't even get full provincial funding, rather 300 million. KW had to fork over a billion dollars to pay for the thing themselves (which includes operation & maintenance costs over for 30 years). A 300M grant is nothing for the province.
Davis Drive is a completely comical waste of cash, I don't think many are denying that.

Davis was so wildly expensive however as it had huge property requirements, and was a full rebuild of the corridor - retaining walls, full utilities, etc, along with top tier public realm elements. It's nowhere near the same type of project that Ion is..

Ion is a bare bones LRT infrastructure system that more closely resembles a streetcar than a total rapid transit system. It has minimal to no public realm improvements, featuring basic concrete sidewalks, essentially 0 soft landscaping to the rebuilt streets, etc.

The Ion system is completely fine for KWC - they went for an expensive LRT system for a project that won't exactly have crazy high demand at first. It'll do fine by US standards for ridership, but really won't be a high use system. The good news is that most growth in KWC seems to be very LRT friendly these days, ridership should only grow.
I don't think you actually understand the scale of work that was required here either. Sure, it's bare bones, but I guarantee that it has more grade separation than Hurontario, Finch, and Hamilton will have. Half the line has to integrate with class I freight, lots of underground infrastructure had to be relocated, 1 rail grade separation had to be built, a freeway bridge had to be rebuilt, new lighting had to be installed everywhere, and a hydro corridor had to be buried. Sure, property acquisitions weren't as big of an expenditure, but there was still a huge amount that was involved with this project. We're just lucky enough in KW to have a shortline railroad that ran from Uptown Waterloo through the universities and exit very close to the Waterloo Bus terminal.

The basic concrete sidewalks thing is a lie and if you go pretty much anywhere along the corridor you'll see tessellated concrete, streetscape improvements (including new and replanted trees), and (within hopefully a few months), about a half dozen pieces of public art. There was no real need to add soft landscaping because both major urban cores (Uptown Waterloo and Downtown Kitchener) had previously been completely redone themselves before the project began. It's also worth noting that a good portion of this line runs along freight short-lines, meaning that the walkability of the surrounding area is mediocre at best.

Out of curiosity, what defines "high use"? Must we demand 10K PPHPD ridership for all light rail lines in the country, especially when light rail tends to begin to have problems at around 4-5K PPHPD? For a frequency of 7.5 minutes, this system will have a capacity of 1.5K PPHPD, it was never meant to be a huge transportation corridor, it was meant to prevent future overcrowding of the King St Bus Routes, restructure/simplify the bus network (which is extremely confusing here because of the road network and generally bad placement of bus terminals), serve as an anchor for tech worker transportation (of which, Metrolinx isn't really helping out), and spur development. Of these tasks, it will or has performed all these tasks quite well.

Had the vehicles not had teething problems and the region not gotten lazy with the project, the line would be running now and would probably be the greatest transit engineering success story in the last 20 years in Ontario. It's pretty much on budget, it's performing its intended tasks, it will not be under built or overbuilt, and most importantly, it was (comparatively) cheap. They engineered this thing well to ensure that it would serve its community well.
I really dont agree with this.

There are many USA cities with LRT with the population of Kitchener/Waterloo.

Cleveland has a population of 325,000 and they have a subway!

Newark NJ has 285,154

Cincinnati 301,301

Jersey City 270,753

Buffalo 258,612

All have streetcars/Light rail
Every city mentioned is a rustbelt city with a population today that is significantly lower than what it was 30+ years ago (when each of these systems were built with the exception of Cincinnati), plus they also have larger metro areas. The KW LRT is only serving 350K -ish people because it only serves KW (and not Cambridge), and more importantly, it's a new system built at a time of growth for the city, and really early on in the city's growth.

Waterloo does not have a population of 565K, it has a population of 115K, Kitchener has a population of 240K. Just because the region (which includes Cambridge, Elmira, New Hamburg, Breslau, St. Jacobs, and a bunch of other townships) has a population of 565K does not mean the city itself served by the LRT does. A better argument could be made that the Universities bring in close to 50K students which could be added on, but still, 400K is much lower than what these cities had in their heyday.
 
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iON didn't even get full provincial funding, rather 300 million. KW had to fork over a billion dollars to pay for the thing themselves (which includes operation & maintenance costs over for 30 years). A 300M grant is nothing for the province.

I don't think you actually understand the scale of work that was required here either. Sure, it's bare bones, but I guarantee that it has more grade separation than Hurontario, Finch, and Hamilton will have. Half the line has to integrate with class I freight, lots of underground infrastructure had to be relocated, 1 rail grade separation had to be built, a freeway bridge had to be rebuilt, new lighting had to be installed everywhere, and a hydro corridor had to be buried. Sure, property acquisitions weren't as big of an expenditure, but there was still a huge amount that was involved with this project. We're just lucky enough in KW to have a shortline railroad that ran from Uptown Waterloo through the universities and exit very close to the Waterloo Bus terminal.

The basic concrete sidewalks thing is a lie and if you go pretty much anywhere along the corridor you'll see tessellated concrete, streetscape improvements (including new and replanted trees), and (within hopefully a few months), about a half dozen pieces of public art. There was no real need to add soft landscaping because both major urban cores (Uptown Waterloo and Downtown Kitchener) had previously been completely redone themselves before the project began. It's also worth noting that a good portion of this line runs along freight short-lines, meaning that the walkability of the surrounding area is mediocre at best.

Out of curiosity, what defines "high use"? Must we demand 10K PPHPD ridership for all light rail lines in the country, especially when light rail tends to begin to have problems at around 4-5K PPHPD? For a frequency of 7.5 minutes, this system will have a capacity of 1.5K PPHPD, it was never meant to be a huge transportation corridor, it was meant to prevent future overcrowding of the King St Bus Routes, restructure/simplify the bus network (which is extremely confusing here because of the road network and generally bad placement of bus terminals), serve as an anchor for tech worker transportation (of which, Metrolinx isn't really helping out), and spur development. Of these tasks, it will or has performed all these tasks quite well.

Had the vehicles not had teething problems and the region not gotten lazy with the project, the line would be running now and would probably be the greatest transit engineering success story in the last 20 years in Ontario. It's pretty much on budget, it's performing its intended tasks, it will not be under built or overbuilt, and most importantly, it was (comparatively) cheap. They engineered this thing well to ensure that it would serve its community well.

Every city mentioned is a rustbelt city with a population today that is significantly lower than what it was 30+ years ago (when each of these systems were built with the exception of Cincinnati), plus they also have larger metro areas. The KW LRT is only serving 350K -ish people because it only serves KW (and not Cambridge), and more importantly, it's a new system built at a time of growth for the city, and really early on in the city's growth.

Waterloo does not have a population of 565K, it has a population of 115K, Kitchener has a population of 240K. Just because the region (which includes Cambridge, Elmira, New Hamburg, Breslau, St. Jacobs, and a bunch of other townships) has a population of 565K does not mean the city itself served by the LRT does. A better argument could be made that the Universities bring in close to 50K students which could be added on, but still, 400K is much lower than what these cities had in their heyday.


No, I'm sorry, the gap in public realm investment between the two is massive.

A great example of this is how the two projects handled a retaining wall adjacent to a large existing building.

Waterloo used a standard "off the shelf" retaining wall done essentially as cheaply as possible:

kitchener.JPG


Newmarket saw a terraced, treed, and brick clad system that is probably well over double the cost:

davis.JPG


Waterloo may have planted a few trees here and there, but Newmarket features extensive plantings both in median and along the sidewalk, features expensive paver systems across the entire length of the project, features $1 million+ stations with extravagant shelter structures, etc.

Kitchener used an existing rail right of way for a bit of it's route, which is actually cheaper than being on street. Way cheaper. No road reconstruction costs, just ballast, rail, and electrification. It's grade separated by virtue of being an old rail right of way, there were 0 new road to LRT grade separations created as a part of the project.

I'm not saying Waterloo's approach was any better or worse.. just very different. I'm sure Waterloo will be a success, I'm certainly going to make a trip out to take a test ride this summer. It's just a bare bones system - they spent as little as possible to get a rail transit system, which given the ridership, is probably the best approach. Davis was a gigantic dumpster fire of wasted money - waterloo was a spartan efficiency machine.
 
For the virtual tourist, the Google Maps views of KW have all been updated now with completed ION construction. Stations, crossovers, and the OMSF can all be examined in 3 cm resolution (best guess) aerial images.
 
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Yeah I think it's safe to say that the ION will open before the Confederation line in Ottawa
 
Yeah I think it's safe to say that the ION will open before the Confederation line in Ottawa

Doesn't seem like it will be by much though, but it will be June at least before passengers ride in Ottawa. They've been running a 6 day dry run full service test here, but they need a flawless 12 day run after before they can hand over.

Edit: I'm not sure what it's like in KW, but it's both exciting and yet quite annoying to watch the trains trundle by every few minutes all day long while stuck in a bus in traffic.
 
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I'm not sure what it's like in KW, but it's both exciting and yet quite annoying to watch the trains trundle by every few minutes all day long while stuck in a bus in traffic.

The line here in KW's not that busy yet. I hate to say it but my money's on Ottawa if they're already doing dry runs. We still have signal heads bagged and crossover switches being thrown manually out here. Unless that changes tomorrow I don't see much hope of beating Ottawa.
 
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