High Speed Rail: London - Kitchener-Waterloo - Pearson Airport - Toronto

[mdrejhon]

Nice layering - nearly subway-style frequency on express Shinkansens, hourly on semiexpress Shinkansens, and half-hourly milk run Shinkansens.

thats a gold standard of commuter and express rail. There really is no equal in the world when it comes to rail travel

From the graph, they're already hopping onto Shinkansens to do the equivalent of visiting family Ottawa spontaneously after work from Toronto. It'd take me less time than my Hamilton-Toronto commute.

Maybe 2067? #Canada200

 

[ssiguy2]

Londoners were clearly promised London to Union times within 70 minutes so how they reach that goal is QP's issue and if they can do it with these new stops then fine but if not then will have to start cutting stops or bring in a faster and more expensive technology to do the job.

I can certainly see QP wanting to connect the KW tech sector with Pearson and Toronto but remember this is a route that is suppose to offer HSR to SWO and London is the undisputed capitol of SWO.

 

[TOareaFan]

Londoners were clearly promised London to Union times within 70 minutes so how they reach that goal is QP's issue and if they can do it with these new stops then fine but if not then will have to start cutting stops or bring in a faster and more expensive technology to do the job.

I can certainly see QP wanting to connect the KW tech sector with Pearson and Toronto but remember this is a route that is suppose to offer HSR to SWO and London is the undisputed capitol of SWO.

So, let's say, if the travel time from London to Toronto ended up being 75 minutes but a stop was created to serve a city of (by that time) ~700k of people that could now view London as a place to visit/work/study/spend....that would be a bad thing for London and should be fought because the promise was 70 minutes? (it was actually 71 minutes but who's counting).

 

[kEiThZ]

I unfortunately have to be more neutral on this proposal than I was when I was just a curious student and amateur transport planner, but (prior to my current employment) I've speculated in my very first posts in this forum about what travel times might be possible at various design speeds and what service patterns might be plausible.

As for the published Special Advisor's Final Report, once you note that the BCR decreases as the design speed increases and as the length (and especially the distance from Toronto) increases, you might guess what additional column and line I would have expected to see in the table below:
View attachment 112706
Source: High Speed Rail in Ontario - Special Advisor for High Speed Rail: Final Report (p. 46)

To be honest, I'm a little worried that the BCR is so low with the exception of the Toronto-London 200 kph (and barely), that the project will probably never get built. And I am getting more pessimistic with each day. While I appreciate the the whole BCA approach, the problem now is that every single transport infrastructure is now seen entirely through the ridership lens with an insistence of full financial sustainability. This is detrimental to inter-city rail projects. Especially when you'll have always Toronto rail fans screaming about the DRL (and probably a bunch of things after that). Every comments section I have come across bears this out, with people comparing this project to the UPE and saying it'll be a boondoggle. And Toronto transitfans piling on insisting nothing should come before the DRL.

The problem is that rail projects cannot and should not be seen in isolation. And the BCA did exactly that. When you get a Toronto-London line that connects to VIA HFR with Ottawa and Montreal to the East, the usefulness (and ridership) should go up dramatically. But taken in isolation, it could be the Sheppard Subway of inter-city rail.

 

[MisterF]

Malton is in Mississauga.

Really????

Brampton has no service to it in the first place or a need for it.

I guess a downtown on the mainline doesn't cut it????

Municipal boundaries are irrelevant to HSR. The HSR station that serves the west end of the GTA is Malton/Pearson, which is barely 10 km from downtown Brampton. Hourly or better commuter trains will serve downtown Brampton and will be a vast improvement over service that exists today. Brampton will be served just fine.

 

[TOareaFan]

Municipal boundaries are irrelevant to HSR. The HSR station that serves the west end of the GTA is Malton/Pearson, which is barely 10 km from downtown Brampton. Hourly or better commuter trains will serve downtown Brampton and will be a vast improvement over service that exists today. Brampton will be served just fine.

We really need to stop worrying about "serving X or Y" and think of the success of the line.

Put yourself in Brampton and your target is school or work in KW or London, I arbitrarily picked an address of 14 David Street....google says it is 5 minutes from Brampton GO.

Google also says it is a 1 hour and 55 minute drive to UWO.

....your choice is going to be get to Brampton station from your house 5 minutes....assume a 15 minute wait then take a 16 minute train ride eastward....to Malton....then wait lets say an average of 15 minutes...to then take the train westbound back through the original station again....let's say the HSR does that same trip in 8 minutes.....you have just spent 59 minutes getting back to your original starting point.

So if the HSR takes 56 minutes to get to London (seems reasonable if it is 70 minutes from Union) you are now at London station at the same time you would have been at Western by car.

It seems people are looking at this line only as "how fast can we get out of those cities and get to Toronto".....and not considering "how do we fully connect our city to the populations in the region and bring people/business/$$$ to our town....not just express it out of our town".

As i have said before....yes, as a resident of Brampton i think it is crazy that we are being bypassed by this line....but (also stated before) I would feel it equally bizarre if I was a business/community leader in KW or London to know the trains coming in their direction were bypassing so many potential customers.

 

[ssiguy2]

I understand what you are saying but then if the idea is just to connect communities, then the VIA London/Union train via KW already does that. Those people from Brampton have a station nearby Malton by GO rail and local buses and Guelph has connections to KW via GO.............they have viable means to get to their nearest HSR station. This is also true of people in Acton and Georgetown. If Brampton and Huelph get stations then why shouldn't they stop at Etobicoke North, Weston, Eglinton, and Bloor West to boot as they have hundreds of thousands of people as well.

They should get stations for the same reason Guelph and Brampton shouldn't...........they have excellent rail and/or buses to their nearest HSR station so they don't individually need stations and same goes for EN riders, Westonians, or Bloor West residents. They could very easily coordinated GO rail timetables to meet the HSR stations close to arrival/departure so transfers are easy and quick.

 

[ssiguy2]

KeithZ makes a good point of interconnecting HSR is needed to make the system truly a success. Although I don't agree with it being a Sheppard subway #2, I see the analogy.

For SWO the logical extension is to Windsor and onward to Detroit to hook-up with Amtrak. SWO portion can however esily go ahead without the Tor/Ott/Mon HSR line as the amount of travellers from SWO east of Toronto is very small as any Londoners or Windsorites going to Ottawa or Montreal nearly always fly.

 

[crs1026]

It makes sense to be strategic and maximise the potential system attributes rather than plan the line as a standalone. But we have to recognize that few people will have the Toronto-KW-London service "at their doorstep" at either end of their journey. We have to design it so the connections at each end work optimally for the greatest number of potential travellers.

Pearson is a no-brainer, certainly.

If Brampton is to be served, is the center the best location? one could make the case for Mount Pleasant instead, as it is going to become a transit hub eventually and offers good access for both Brampton and Halton Hills via car or bus. It's a reasonable place to transfer to RER also. Arguably, the east side of Brampton is served by Pearson and it makes more sense to space out the stops.

So long as Brampton can't get its head around the future of the Hurontario-Queen zone as an urbanised hub, my personal reaction is, screw 'em, let the through trains blow on by. Buy yes, look for how to serve Brampton, just don't assume Bramptonians want or need to head towards Queen and Main.

- Paul

 

[steveintoronto]

So long as Brampton can't get its head around the future of the Hurontario-Queen zone as an urbanised hub, my personal reaction is, screw 'em, let the through trains blow on by.

They sure marginalized themselves on that one. It is pretty difficult to take their claims of importance seriously when they kick a gift horse in the mouth like the Hurontario LRT, fully funded by the Province. If that had looped at Brampton Station (or a new one adjacent), it would have raised a flag-pole for a centre of importance. Instead they pizzed on it.

 

[Urban Sky]

If with all these added stops, Londoners can still get from downtown to Union in 70 minutes as clearly promised then fine but if not then stops should be cut until it is.

I invite you to take a closer look to the Shnikansen timetable I posted: the presence of additional stations along a HSR line does not slow down express HSR services, while they only add 3 minutes per stop to the milkrun HSR service (yes, it really is only 3 minutes once you look at services which don't get overtaken by faster trains at stations en-route).

I understand what you are saying but then if the idea is just to connect communities, then the VIA London/Union train via KW already does that. Those people from Brampton have a station nearby Malton by GO rail and local buses and Guelph has connections to KW via GO.............they have viable means to get to their nearest HSR station. This is also true of people in Acton and Georgetown. If Brampton and Huelph get stations then why shouldn't they stop at Etobicoke North, Weston, Eglinton, and Bloor West to boot as they have hundreds of thousands of people as well.

You don't seem to understand the economics of HSR: The decisive factor for HSR is that you maximize the population served by lining up many major population centres, which can ideally be served within 30-180 minutes from the core of the dominating metropolitan areas (thus a distance of roughly 80-480 km, assuming an average speed of 160 km/h). I'm of course less talking about Brampton than about stubbornly ignoring Kitchener-Waterloo, even though it has a slightly larger (!) population than London.

For SWO the logical extension is to Windsor and onward to Detroit to hook-up with Amtrak.

Unless I read the BCR figures from the Ontario study (shown in my last post) incorrectly, the extension from London to Windsor would cost 4-6 Dollar for every Dollar derived as benefit...

 

[cplchanb]

I invite you to take a closer look to the Shnikansen timetable I posted: the presence of additional stations along a HSR line does not slow down express HSR services, while they only add 3 minutes per stop to the milkrun HSR service (yes, it really is only 3 minutes once you look at services which don't get overtaken by faster trains at stations en-route).

thing is though although I highly regard the shinkansen as the platium standard for HSR operations, realistically our operations would be MUCH slower. We are lax on our timetable scheduling adherences and our service frequencies will be much
lower than even the Kodama service on the Tokaido Shinkansen. When I took the corridor service, trains were stopping for at least 5 min at the stations,. That being said, i would love to see in the future hsr milk run and limited services, but i suppose quad track sections would be required for passing. hopefully if this does get built they would have the foresight to plan for that. They really need to hire a few JR employees as consultants

 

[nfitz]

Londoners were clearly promised London to Union times within 70 minutes so how they reach that goal is QP's issue ...

I recall no such promise. The promise I recall was a preliminary feasibility study before the last election. Do you have a link?

In my neighbourhood, Queens Park promised subway-like frequencies and more stations on GO back in the 1970s, in exchange for cancelling the Gardiner expressway. Over 40 years, and still waiting ...

 

[crs1026]

In my neighbourhood, Queens Park promised subway-like frequencies and more stations on GO back in the 1970s, in exchange for cancelling the Gardiner expressway. Over 40 years, and still waiting ...

Well, over the past 40 years we have seen a subway-like frequency of high speed rail studies.....

- Paul

 

[steveintoronto]

It makes sense to be strategic and maximise the potential system attributes rather than plan the line as a standalone. But we have to recognize that few people will have the Toronto-KW-London service "at their doorstep" at either end of their journey. We have to design it so the connections at each end work optimally for the greatest number of potential travellers.

Pearson is a no-brainer, certainly.

If Brampton is to be served, is the center the best location? one could make the case for Mount Pleasant instead, as it is going to become a transit hub eventually and offers good access for both Brampton and Halton Hills via car or bus. It's a reasonable place to transfer to RER also. Arguably, the east side of Brampton is served by Pearson and it makes more sense to space out the stops.

So long as Brampton can't get its head around the future of the Hurontario-Queen zone as an urbanised hub, my personal reaction is, screw 'em, let the through trains blow on by. Buy yes, look for how to serve Brampton, just don't assume Bramptonians want or need to head towards Queen and Main.

- Paul

How timely is this?

Brampton searching for new vision after hire of urban planner
The city has hired award-winning urban planner Larry Beasley to reinvent the rapidly growing suburb, but will it bring the change residents desperately want?

[...]
Residents of Brampton say that the city is long overdue for someone like Beasley to give the community some direction. The city still lacks both the alternative transportation infrastructure and business hubs of other large cities, despite being situated in between Toronto and Waterloo, in Ontario’s planned innovation corridor.

Brampton also doesn’t have a university, or a well-defined white collar labour market for residents to work in, despite being home to one of the youngest demographics in the GTA. There is still no “downtown”— in fact, according to one resident, “The Rose Theatre has been struggling for a long time to get more people to come.” And the waiting lists for affordable housing in this rapidly growing city are unsustainably long.

“Brampton is a big city but thinks like a small town,” said Harpreet Zingh, co-founder of Lab B, a startup incubator based in the city. “For so long, we’ve had unstrategic growth simply for the sake of growth.”
[...]

https://www.thestar.com/news/2017/0...r-new-vision-after-hire-of-urban-planner.html

I remain skeptical, although with fingers crossed.