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Ottawa Transit Developments

CapitalSeven said:
This demonstrates the sort of wild talk going around Ottawa, everywhere from cafes to sidewalks to city hall. The dreaded sharp curves - 120 metre radius! - are to blame. Never mind that low-floor vehicles in Europe merrily zip around 25-metre curves all the time, and Toronto streetcars have been making right turns and loops of about 14 metres for a decade. Wait a minute, hasn't the Toronto Subway been turning from King to Union for about 75 years? But I digress.

People are seriously talking about rebuilding an entire kilometer of the system or tossing hundreds of millions of dollars of vehicles in the blue bin. Clearly something is wrong with either the bogies or the rails or both. These are things that can be fixed. Why the problem is taking so long to solve is a huge frustration, but Ottawa just doesn't do these things very well. Sticking with low floors on this line when they clearly served no purpose (and continuing to insist they did) is one symptom of the problem, and the badly botched service increase of 2014, which Leacock could have scripted, is another. And no one in officialdom is allowed to publicly question shutting down the system for days or weeks upon discovery of one leaky bearing on one axle of one bogie of one vehicle, or whether, now that several cars have been checked and cleared, partial service should be resumed. No service, no answers, and no discussion.
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Good post, and bonus points for referencing Leacock.
 
CapitalSeven said:
This demonstrates the sort of wild talk going around Ottawa, everywhere from cafes to sidewalks to city hall. The dreaded sharp curves - 120 metre radius! - are to blame. Never mind that low-floor vehicles in Europe merrily zip around 25-metre curves all the time, and Toronto streetcars have been making right turns and loops of about 14 metres for a decade. Wait a minute, hasn't the Toronto Subway been turning from King to Union for about 75 years? But I digress.
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My question is whether or not these numbers are comparable. The turn out of Union happens as soon as you leave the station, this means you don't have much time to accelerate out of the station and can take the turn at station speed. Meanwhile the Hurdman curve is comparatively quite some distance away from Hurdman, where trains can accelerate to a decent speed leaving Hurdman, but then all of a sudden has to pump the breaks in order to make it over the curve. As for Europe, how fast do they "zip" around those 25m curves? In my limited experience with Europe, they have never felt that fast, certainly not comparable to the light-metro type thing that Ottawa is.
 
Fair enough. But recently I walked beside the LRT from Ottawa to Hurdman and observed that the trains take the curve between the river and Hurdman at the same speed European trams move around curves that are several times tighter. The segment between Tremblay and the river is never going to be super fast but it is, or should be, is a reasonable design for light rail vehicles. I remain convinced that it's the execution of the design that is to blame.

Many new LRV designs have failed in comparable ways over the last two decades but eventually been rectified. Too bad this is one.

Time to read the writing on the wall, pause Stage 3, and fix the buses on Carling, Baseline, South Orleans, and the inner city roads like Bank and Montreal instead.
 
Screenshot_2023-07-23_141124.jpg
 
Maybe they'll be
reaperexpress said:
Maybe he's going to convert the Confederation line to a subway, which would be quite easy given that it already is one, albeit one they operate with low-floor streetcars for some reason.
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Might just be cheaper to buy some Flexity cars for now, to tide them over. They only got 34 of the 48-metre cars for this first stage in Ottawa. That's smaller than the Eglinton Line 5 72-car fleet of 30-metre cars. :)

I wonder what the implications are for the 17 Citadis cars that Metrolinx got for Finch West.
 
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nfitz said:
Maybe they'll beMight just be cheaper to buy some Flexity cars for now, to tide them over. They only got 34 of the 48-metre cars for this first stage in Ottawa. That's smaller than the Eglinton Line 5 72-car fleet of 30-metre cars.

I wonder what the implications are for the 17 Citadis cars that Metrolinx got for Finch West.
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You're suggesting they buy a whole new fleet of slow and unreliable trains rather than replacing the bearings on the fleet they already have?
 
reaperexpress said:
You're suggesting they buy a whole new fleet of slow and unreliable trains rather than replacing the bearings on the fleet they already have?
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I'm making fun of Metrolinx for paying huge penalties for cancelling the Flexitities for Finch and buying the Citadis cars

Is it just the bearings? I got the impression there was a bigger overriding issue.
 
Allandale25 said:
I don't have time to extract/screenshot but I can try later (cc @Northern Light )
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Replace every 60,000 km? That's a rough ballpark of about once every 120 days of service (assuming a given vehicle is in service a whole 20-hour day). Is that normal? I don't know what the expectation is. Or how much work it is.
 
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