Well , there definitely isn't if they need a 50% spare ratio like they seem to need to right now. However I expect next year to be better than this one. It seems like they need actual engineering solutions, which of course takes a while to implement. If they had quick fixes they would have done...
It's actually 5 minutes outside of rush hour here in Ottawa. It's supposed to be a little under 4 in rush hour, but you only get that when you have all the trains. They were actually fairly consistently hitting this before the great train shortage in January. Now we're lucky when it's 5.
OC...
In an original version of the plan, the idea was to allow the.trains to run in triples when ridership demanded it. Now the plan is to stick an additional module in each train. But other systems also run long trains like Seattle.
They babbled about how the Spirit was specifically designed for cold weather too, yet here we are. We should hope REM does better especially because Alstom can apply learnings from Ottawa but we'll see soon enough.
Ottawa is a better parallel for REM learnings, being ATO and mostly above ground with overhead catenary, ignore the lowfloor vs highfloor part for now.The metro being entirely underground is a different beast, and the current Exo rail service isn't really comparable.
The crosstown should also...
At the beginning I would have agreed with the statement, but we're way beyond teething issues and typical problems now. Having less than half the fleet available for months now isn't a normal problem, and the catenary collapsing twice isn't a normal problem.
This launch has been a disaster, but...
I assume you meant Blair, and it's just the repurposed Local stops of the original Blair station. They didn't want to spend money on reconfiguring that section, other than to tear down the old transitway heated shelters. The whole reuse of Blair's original station is really akward, they should...
I do hear people say "bring back the buses, we need a reliable transit system" but I must have been riding a parallel universe OC Transpo system back then because they were anything but reliable. I kept dreaming of the day the trains would start and I could reliably leave my office and get home...
Also note that the REM is using the "proven" metropolis trainset for Montreal. This is the same company that sold us Citadis, saying that they are "proven" with thousands of them worldwide and in snowy climes like Moscow and Stockholm and yet here we are.
That's debatable. The Otrain does actually work as designed... sometimes. The metro line launched with a permanent go slow due to no signalling and caused massive traffic chaos by shutting down a major intersection during rush hour every few minutes while a train crawled past and that went on...
We might yet see that... Let's see how the REM does. The Skytrain doesn't perform well in snowy conditions but that's a rarity in Vancouver, Montreal on the other hand....
The s200s definitely, but the s70s which are the competitors here in the low floor market are long past teething pains and have been winter proven by now in places like Minneapolis.
The experiences up here in Ottawa don't paint a very rosy picture for the Citadis either. I'm sure it's all good news for Siemens and CAF though, the s70 has been going strong for years now in lots of cities, and Boston seems to be doing okay with its new Type 9s.