I'm not sure how I missed the point. You mentioned that we shouldn't get locked into dealing with a single vendor, and I pointed that what I am suggesting would not require us to be locked into a single vendor. Please elaborate on the point that I missed so we can work this out.
The point was not the vendor, but the equipment itself. What you are suggesting is that we order a fleet of equipment that would not be compatible with the rest of the equipment that we already have on order.
As for the high floor issue, I've already made a number of posts in this thread about how we deal with that, offering the
Los Angeles Expo Line and other examples as models to follow.
And has been brought up many, many times on this forum (in other threads) before, high-level boarding is a non-starter. The TTC is not interested in going down that road for a bunch of reasons, and frankly I think that they are right with that.
You're right that running buses wouldn't make much sense! I'm glad you agree that these things should be analysed rather than simply choosing a solution (be it subway or low floor LRT) and building without consideration of alternatives.
I've never disgreed with you in that sense. And furthermore....
As for "in the absence of an easy, cost-effective manner of "fixing" it", that is the whole point of my proposal! It's easy, cost effective, and "fixes" the transfer issue! We're not the first place to have had this issue, other people have already solved it for us! I'm excited, why aren't you? We found a potential low cost solution! How exciting!
(OK, I'm getting ahead of myself. This discussion is to figure out whether dual-mode LRT could be an affordable solution. Haven't heard a technical reason why not yet.)
But have you fully analyzed it? What are the cost implications of purchasing a separate set of equipment? Training? Maintenance, not just of the rolling stock, but of the different stop designs? Storage? How much of a problem is changing the EA? How do the land requirements change? How will this change the design for maintenance facilities?
I not going going to lie, I haven't costed it out to a decimal point. But on the surface, to me it doesn't pass the smell test - it looks like a solution begging for a problem, and is going to create more problems in the long run than its worth.
Do dual-power-source, high-floor LRVs exist? Probably. Are they are hard thing to make? Probably not. Could they be sourced from a variety of different manufacturers? More than likely. Does that mean that we should be buying them? I don't see a strong case for them here.
I wouldn't be surprised that they briefly considered it, no. But I would be surprised if a proper analysis was done. But I admit I could have worded things a bit differently by instead saying "This is question that the TTC has never answered".
Again, publicly, fine. But the planning department gets requests like that all the time, and they have to do all sorts of reports to answer these requests. Just because we're only bringing it up now doesn't mean that it hasn't been thought of before.
Dan
Toronto, Ont.
