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Finch West Line 6 LRT

crs1026 said:
Objectively this is quite valid, but subjectively the cadence of LRT is part of the customer sell. People relate well to subway because it has a zoom, stop, get moving again cadence. When a subway train creeps, or dwells in stations, you can see peoples' impatience factor grows rapidly, even if the creep only adds a few sconds to the trip time.

My fear with our new LRT lines is that the stops, whether platform stops or traffic related, will set the tone of a liesurely plod that is closer to current streetcar than 'rapid' transit. If so, people will not see LRT as good value. Even worse, if this style of operation gets into the operating culture, you will see schedules padded and timekeeping neglected. The 'need for speed' needs to be cemented in LRT from the design onwards. Objectively, we may be quibbling over 3 or 4 minutes in trip time, but subjectively those minutes matter a great deal.

- Paul
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TransitBart said:
Objectively, three minutes on a 30 minute ride is 10% longer journey time. There and back. Fives days a week for someone who works full time. 30 extra minutes a week. Twenty six hours in a year. A whole extra day of someone's life.

This is not quibbling.
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It quite difficult to build a LRT the suits everyone's needs. If you take the 36 Finch West, you'll know the bus is slow and stops at almost every single stop. Demand is so local on the route (much more local than the surface part of the Crosstown), if you built the stops at 1km spacing, it would only serve 25-40% of the riders. The actually time spent on the LRV is shorter but the walk to the destination is much longer. Experience the 36 and come back to comment everyone.

Majority of the riders won't start at Humber College but somewhere in between. Their time lost would be shorter. The LRT might be slower than typically American LRT lines but it's still a massive improvement over the 36 Finch West bus.

Edllguy said:
Can someone point me to LRT examples in North America (in operation) that is similar to the future Finch West LRT?

Thanks
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Although stops are more spaced out, Phoenix has a LRT system similar to Finch and Crosstown surface sections.
 
crs1026 said:
Objectively this is quite valid, but subjectively the cadence of LRT is part of the customer sell. People relate well to subway because it has a zoom, stop, get moving again cadence. When a subway train creeps, or dwells in stations, you can see peoples' impatience factor grows rapidly, even if the creep only adds a few sconds to the trip time.

My fear with our new LRT lines is that the stops, whether platform stops or traffic related, will set the tone of a liesurely plod that is closer to current streetcar than 'rapid' transit. If so, people will not see LRT as good value. Even worse, if this style of operation gets into the operating culture, you will see schedules padded and timekeeping neglected. The 'need for speed' needs to be cemented in LRT from the design onwards. Objectively, we may be quibbling over 3 or 4 minutes in trip time, but subjectively those minutes matter a great deal.

- Paul
Click to expand...

No transit line is perfect; even subway trains crawl sometimes when the signals are malfunctioning or when a previous trains needs to cross to the other track and divert to the yard.

IMO, the current Finch LRT design strikes a good balance between the stop spacing, operating speed, complexity and cost. It would be difficult to improve the speed substantially without either escalating the cost or introducing very wide stop spacing.

In any case, it is hard to imagine the Finch line being as slow as downtown streetcars, given both the much wider stop spacing on Finch, and the built form (traffic lights on Finch are spaced much wider than on most downtown streets).
 
I missed the Ion open house in Waterloo yesterday, but word from those that were there is that Keolis (the operator) was saying that it will have true priority in the street sections, with no train ever seeing a red light. I can't wait! Hopefully Finch will get the same treatment.
 
Is there a cost break down how much each of the 18 stops will cost?

If the budget for the Finch West LRT is 1.2 or 1.4 billion in today's dollars I wonder how much each stop will cost to make. If you factor in design, road widening, dedicated track bed/rails, materials, signals, public realm items, labour etc. it is costing almost 50-70 million dollars per stop.

I know there is the maintenance and storage facility, the Humber College and Finch West stop which both go underground. Exclude these 3 items and I wonder what is the budget for each stop. And not all stops are the same but I will speculate that there is average budget allocated between the 16 "normal" stops when not including the bigger budget items.

Thanks
 
Edllguy said:
Is there a cost break down how much each of the 18 stops will cost?

If the budget for the Finch West LRT is 1.2 or 1.4 billion in today's dollars I wonder how much each stop will cost to make. If you factor in design, road widening, dedicated track bed/rails, materials, signals, public realm items, labour etc. it is costing almost 50-70 million dollars per stop.

I know there is the maintenance and storage facility, the Humber College and Finch West stop which both go underground. Exclude these 3 items and I wonder what is the budget for each stop. And not all stops are the same but I will speculate that there is average budget allocated between the 16 "normal" stops when not including the bigger budget items.

Thanks
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I would think that surface stops cost very little, probably way less than 10 million per stop. The Humber College and Finch West underground stations should cost a lot more.
 
Rainforest said:
I would think that surface stops cost very little, probably way less than 10 million per stop. The Humber College and Finch West underground stations should cost a lot more.
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Two slabs of cement 12 feet deep and 200 feet long each and a two tiny rain shelters and a two Presto ticket machines cost up to $10.0M?

**gasp** The GO station estimates leave me gasping for air too.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
Can they please just leave the names as the cross streets? Anything other than that on an LRT is just ridiculous. It was bad enough on Eglinton.
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For on-street LRT and streetcar, the street name is fine.

For underground, they should be using hyphenated names either when there is a duplicate, or a significant attraction (i.e. "Bayview - Leaside West" for the stop on the Eglinton line). YUS is one line, so West is needed in the title (i.e. Finch and Finch West). Local may just refer to it as Bayview, since they know what they are talking about. Visitors would have a unique name to look up.
 
TransitBart said:
Two slabs of cement 12 feet deep and 200 feet long each and a two tiny rain shelters and a two Presto ticket machines cost up to $10.0M?

**gasp** The GO station estimates leave me gasping for air too.
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Concrete slabs and bus shelters are cheap. What costs more is the competition to select an architect, the work of the architect, the review of the architect's draft product by an expert review panel, the further review of the design by ML's internal design excellence unit, the selection of a consultant to manage community outreach, the work of the community outreach, the architect's work to revise the design based on comments received, the recycling of the final design through a review process, the production of artwork and renderings at every step of the process, the hiring of an engineer to produce drawings, and then the resolution of differences between the design engineer and the architect leading to more drawings and more artwork. A veritable feast of billable hours for everyone in the food chain.

Oh, and the cost of the Minister's photo op. For a glorified bus shelter.

- Paul

PS: And only then do the people on the Operations side of the business see the design, and go "Oh Sh*t....."
 
TransitBart said:
Two slabs of cement 12 feet deep and 200 feet long each and a two tiny rain shelters and a two Presto ticket machines cost up to $10.0M?

**gasp** The GO station estimates leave me gasping for air too.
Click to expand...

It's pretty hard to build two slabs of cement 12 feet deep and 200 feet long with two tiny rain shelters in the middle of a 4-to-6 lane suburban high-speed roadway with no staging or even advance construction to prepare the roadway for its final form. You know, things like moving hydro poles and street lights, sewers and gas mains, new sidewalks.....

Dan
Toronto, Ont.
 
crs1026 said:
Concrete slabs and bus shelters are cheap. What costs more is the competition to select an architect, the work of the architect, the review of the architect's draft product by an expert review panel, the further review of the design by ML's internal design excellence unit, the selection of a consultant to manage community outreach, the work of the community outreach, the architect's work to revise the design based on comments received, the recycling of the final design through a review process, the production of artwork and renderings at every step of the process, the hiring of an engineer to produce drawings, and then the resolution of differences between the design engineer and the architect leading to more drawings and more artwork. A veritable feast of billable hours for everyone in the food chain.

Oh, and the cost of the Minister's photo op. For a glorified bus shelter.
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Are you kidding? Do some research. The engineering and design costs are a fraction of the construction cost (typically 10%).
 
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