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I know my company's expense guidelines would never allow you to make this swap even if it saved money overall. I suspect that is fairly common.

If you get the case load down by a lot, it makes sense that you would open up again. Then yo-yo up and down until better weather/vaccine.

Not necessarily. All depends on local conditions. Intersection and queue jumps, strategic exclusive lanes where there is persistent congestion applied on a CBA could lead to way more of the network being built out than otherwise if there is to be an all out road capacity fight on these corridors...

Part of the spur has been abandoned. Not sure of the status.

I agree, especially since I doubt most of the politicians involved even understand the long term implications. It is funding a wonderful project though.

The only benefit IMO is the trick they pulled: increasing property taxes to pay for a project without the public noticing because the increase is small, and implemented over many decades, and entirely hidden from the public as it increases the tax rate by reducing the tax base available for...

Someone still needs to pay for it in the end. Don’t need a pension investor to impose tax increment financing districts around stations.

Yeah. If your zoning won't allow for the lower end of the missing middle, people will still build something the size of a small walkup and just make it a SFH.

There are two gaps that I can see as to why they haven't been successful to date, but it could turn almost overnight. You can't bring investors in before you have prospectus - that is the gap 1. The second one is regulatory risk. The returns have to be quite good if investors are going to pony...

Remember that the goal is not to constrain the overall project budget, but to constrain the needed public subsidy. If investments are projected to yield fares higher than their lifecycle cost, then it is a good thing. The $8 billion in your example wouldn't be $8 billion from the government. It...

No, that addition to the project involves 15+ km of new ROW, many km of elevated track -- it is more like they added an UP Express (perhaps more like what Blue22 was envisioned as, a bit more barebones!) to the scope, not a 'single station'. Rail capacity in the west is very constrained by the...

Building underground costs a lot more, especially underground stations. $100 million more for the same functionality for each station is something to avoid. Going underground and with longer platforms, and wider trains compounds the problem, since underground stations' costs grow by the square...

Why? At what expense? A line that extends no further past Pape?

It means different rolling stock, different technology (possibly). Optimizing the system to the needs, not building around a legacy standard which imposes arbitrary constraints. What I don’t get is the feeling that Toronto subway standards based on technological constraints of 70 years ago as...

Lol. I guess sometimes have to go through the motions for your constituents even if you know the answer is that underground is far more costly.

If the business case finds the optimum at higher spending, it will be higher. In Alberta where the CIB was brought in by a private proponent for a train to the mountains from downtown Calgary, the CIB scoped IN service from downtown to the international airport for the study. I have full faith...

They tried that and it failed - good ol regulatory taking is just the same as expropriation and demands similar compensation. The government can't get things for free. Set the corridor you want, restrict new development, and set aside a budget allocation for anyone that wants compensation...

Yeah, that isn't happening. There is legal precedent from Alberta that as soon as land is so designated, the land owners can force the government into expropriation proceedings. You can always expropriate later, and put in safety standards that make building too close to the corridor onerous...

PPHHPD can result in that future proofing. You can see that with the Canada Line. They didn't require a PPHPD of 30,000 and so stations weren't designed for that. Put 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 PPHPD ultimate and whatever service level you want on day 1 (PPDPH and frequency at peak), and the...

All those curves ... Late to the game on this one, so forgive me if I am missing details as I only went back a few pages in the thread. It makes me wonder, given the P3 element of the project, and the prospect of more demand and potentially higher fares with higher speed, if there will be at...