Hamilton: General Service Discussion

[ehlow]

Apparently Hamilton considered & rejected ICTS aka Skytrain:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamil...-first-flirtation-with-urban-trains-1.2652259

 

[mdrejhon]

Apparently Hamilton considered & rejected ICTS aka Skytrain:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamil...-first-flirtation-with-urban-trains-1.2652259

Very interesting! I didn't know about this.

 

[drum118]

It maybe the same time frame that Mississauga also refused the offer from Kipling to Sq One

 

[christiesplits]

Does anyone know if the James St. GO Station is still on schedule to be complete for the Pan Ams?

 

[nfitz]

Does anyone know if the James St. GO Station is still on schedule to be complete for the Pan Ams?

CHCH yesterday quoted the Transport Minister as saying “The James St North station in Hamilton will be ready, and in service in time for the Pan Am games. Everything will be operational by the time the games start.". Though CHCH notes it may well be operational, but not finished!

The video includes a view of the construction site.

 

[mdrejhon]

Does anyone know if the James St. GO Station is still on schedule to be complete for the Pan Ams?

Operational, yes.
Fully complete, no.

There's a construction schedule that goes all the way to 2017 for the various elements of JamesNorth station, such as the full 300-car parking garage (which I don't think will be ready for PanAm).

 

[mdrejhon]

SoBi, the bikeshare system that Hamilton has, now has 5,000 members:

http://www.thespec.com/news-story/5709337-hamilton-s-sobi-bike-share-hits-5-000-members/

"More than 5,000 people are now signed up for Hamilton's bike share program."

SoBi bikes released their most recent ridership figures Saturday, and so far Hamilton riders have collectively cycled more than 121,297 kilometres — and the summer's just getting started.

Chelsea Cox, communications manager for SoBi Hamilton, and Peter Topalovic, the city's transportation manager, both agree the numbers are exceeding their expectations...[read more]

 

[mdrejhon]

raisethehammer.org article on Hamilton's Social Bicycles bikeshare system:

http://www.raisethehammer.org/article/2645/what_does_success_look_like_for_hamilton_bike_share

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

Cycle Hamilton, a spin-off of the successful CycleTO advocacy group, has also started up.

 

[aquateam]

raisethehammer.org article on Hamilton's Social Bicycles bikeshare system:

http://www.raisethehammer.org/article/2645/what_does_success_look_like_for_hamilton_bike_share

Great article. Is it bad that I laughed internally a little when I read the heading "Comparing Hamilton to Paris"?

 

[doady]

Hamilton should probably at least consider BRT or LRT along Barton, considering that is the second busiest HSR route. But somehow I don't think that will happen in the forseeable future.

 

[mdrejhon]

Hamilton should probably at least consider BRT or LRT along Barton, considering that is the second busiest HSR route. But somehow I don't think that will happen in the forseeable future.

Barton is considered (by us locals) as being our ugly ducking street. Some nice places have emerged, but it's also a fairly run down street with lots of shuttered storefronts, and have a large number of industrial structures only meters away from the front. BRT would be hard to squeeze onto Barton which is a 4-lane street with streetside parking.

King Street and Main Street looks a lot nicer than Barton, and is wide enough for either BRT or LRT. King/Main is only a few minutes south of Barton.

A good solution is east-west King Street LRT with many more north-south connector bus routes (e.g. spaced at approximate 1-2km east-west intervals, like Wentworth, Sherman, Gage, etc), to bring people to their work. Basically, connecting almost every LRT station on the LRT network, to a north-south bus route.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

So is running LRTs on both King and Main being considered? Wouldn't they compete with each other for ridership?

I suppose that is a radically different approach from the rest of the GTA which sees LRTs as 'main lines'. If both streets in Hamilton got LRTs, it would be more like LRTs replacing and serving local transit in addition to 'long haul' trips. Like an ultra-efficient streetcar networks.

If Hamilton's core rapidly intensifies in the coming decades(and I think once commuting times to Toronto decreases with GO-RER this might happen), maybe this would all be worth the investment.

 

[mdrejhon]

So is running LRTs on both King and Main being considered? Wouldn't they compete with each other for ridership?

Main and King are parallel 1-way urban expressways (designated regional roads) with beautifully synchronized green lights.
5 lanes of 1-way speeding traffic on Main heading east
5 lanes of 1-way speeding traffic on King heading west

This is the atrocious dastardly scenario of putting one outgoing LRT lane on King and one incoming LRT lane on Main.
Parallel Main-King vary from about 100 to 600 meters apart!
Not good if you have to walk 5 minutes to catch a train going in the opposite direction.
1 eastward LRT lane on Main
1 westward LRT lane on King
Yuck. Even as a carowner myself.

That's among the reasons why I wrote an article to put both LRT lanes on King. (Though I will be okay with both LRT lanes on Main) And also why I wrote that I am in favour of converting both Main/King into 2-way streets to calm them down to improve businesses along the street. There's still a number of shuttered storefronts left in Lower City Hamilton (not as many as before) and it seems about a third of these seem to be on certain parts of Main-King, with cars zooming by on these pedestrian-unfriendly bike-unfriendly streets.

Putting "LRT on both Main and King" implies putting one direction on one, and other direction on other. I hate this scenario because it permanently commits these streets to one-way urban expressways.

In theory, it may be more tolerable to keep both Main/King as one-way arteries if there's a quid pro quo such as narrowing the streets (Much wider sidewalks), the addition of Copahagen-style 2-way bike pathways, limiting one-way traffic to just two lanes instead of five. But this expensive "Dual Queens Quay" scenario (luxury treatment to both Main/King) will never fly in car-happy formerly-Detroit-style Hamilton neighborhoods (and would probably price neighborhoods out of the average Hamiltonian anyway).

So the easiest is to lobby the conversion of a 2-way street into a 1-way street, and that is still a longshot. But it's been successfully done. Like they did for the successful James Street. But the door can be left open for Main/King 1-way conversion to 2-way, if we don't install one-way LRTs on separate streets.

If politicians we must, we can keep Main/King as 1-way urban expressways for this generation if we have to -- just please keep both LRT lanes on the same corridor for our children please.

 

[mdrejhon]

The great thing about GPS-tracked SoBi bike-share bikes, is that they generate bike traffic statistics, useful for bike infrastructure planning even for everybody else's bikes.

These bike traffic maps helps urban planners to improve bike routes.

Observe bikes avoid Main/King like the plague:

Figure 1. Hamilton bike heat map created by 700 GPS-tracked bikes in 2015

Observe the big loop in the east. Main-King is inside the dark area of this loop.

People in the east heading towards downtown, people are taking Cannon (dedicated bike lanes north of Main-King) or Delaware/Stinson (residential streets south of Main-King). It's WAY too dangerous to bike on the 1-way urban expressways. Bikes almost don't show up on Main/King on this heatmap.

An LRT will be FAR more successful if we can make Main/King more pedestrian-friendly and bike-friendly, by converting both Main/King to 2-way streets. Hamilton urban planners need to pay close attention to SoBi bike GPS heatmaps going forward. The new urban planning tool, made possible by the newer GPS-tracked bike sharing systems, show definite very-clear bike route preferences by locals.

We're lucky we have this tool -- Toronto's bike share doesn't even have GPS trackers -- every single Hamilton bikeshare bike does! These GPS heatmaps are way more valuable than rubber-tube counters placed in useless locations.