The interaction of road and transit vehicles has been problematic.
The GRT even owned themselves pointing this out about two years ago.
I lived in KW most of the ‘00s and still have half my family living there. The Ion isn’t really held in a great light, even by locals. It’s often too slow, too infrequent, and too often dealing with cars. Why weren’t all road sections grade separated? You’re telling me that car interaction, after all human beings have learned after 150+ years of trams, is “good implementation”? This was a system planned and built entirely in the 21st century; not a legacy system like the TTC.
As someone who lived there before, during, and after ION construction and after the ION began running I can tell you without question that the only people who don't hold it in a good light are those who were never going to ride it in the first place (i.e. those who live in neighbourhoods on the edge of the city who don't even commute to work within the core.) The road-running sections weren't grade separated because it designed to have the ROW be used by emergency vehicles to bypass traffic (which was later backed out of by those same emergency services for reasons that don't make any logical sense).
I’m one of the most pro transit people you’ll ever find, but OMG did they not plan Ion well. Is it really doing that much better than the iXpress bus it replaced?
From my personal experience riding the system, the ION is pulling much more demand than the 200 iXpress and original 6 branches of the Route 7 bus combined. The larger vehicles often give the outward impression of a sparsely used route at the outer extremities (i.e. Mill to Fairway, R&T Park to Conestoga) where passengers are able to spread out evenly throughout the vehicles, however, if you were to take all the passengers on the train in those sections and put them into buses you would have a nearly full standard bus during the 6AM - 7:30 AM, 10-11:30 AM, 1PM-2PM, 7:30PM - 9PM trips, a nearly full articulated bus during the 7:30-8AM, 11:30-11:50AM, 6:30-7:30 PM and 9PM-10PM trips, and at least 2 half full articulated buses during the 8AM-10AM, 11:50-1PM, 2PM-6:30PM trip windows. Once the trains reach the section between Mill and UW stations, the trains start to crowd quite a bit. from September to June, high school students heavily crowd the ION in both directions during morning and afternoon peak periods whereas they didn't do the same with the 200 iXpress.
“Of course”. Yeah, but KW had a lot of their own money to throw at it. That area makes gobs of money. There’s a reason it was called Canada’s Silicon Valley for so long, and in part it’s because like The Valley it had tax revenue to throw at just about anything it wanted.
If the Region of Waterloo had the kind of tax revenues you speak of they wouldn't have needed to incrementally raise tax revenues from 2012-2018 by a combined 8.7%.
Have you looked into the BS that is phase 2? It’s already delayed, may end up being a BRT permanently, or not even connect to Phase 1 and stop at Preston. Cambridge are pushing for the BRT option hard, because they don’t have the tax base that K-W has, and could save a few bucks on capital.
The Regional councillors and Cambridge city council all prefer having the full Stage 2 ION plan built as an LRT, paid for by the provincial and federal governments.
…For a system that runs quite a bit on a former rail corridors, operates only 15 vehicles total, and at its peak frequency runs one vehicle every ~15 minutes.
Collisions should be far less than about once a month on a modern day system.
Trains operate every 10 minutes from 6 AM to 7 PM on weekdays. 100% of automobile collisions have been the result of careless driving, illegal turns, or failing to stop on the part of the driver of the automobile. They only need to operate 10 vehicles to provide that 10 minute service as the end-to-end runtime is 43 minutes and 30 seconds southbound and 44 minutes and 55 seconds northbound.
Crossing arms activating waaaaay too early or while a vehicle is in station aren’t a sign of good implementation are they?
This is something that cannot be changed as it's required by federal regulations especially given the chosen signalling system. Had they gone with ATC for the rail spur segments this timing could have been improved significantly, however, the use of manual driven trains under ATP means that the risk of a train overrunning the platform onto the roadways or pedestrian pathways outweighs the delays to other traffic.
