ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

Right, it’s not hard, just expensive (in particular, dealing with water).

Even building the Gotthard Base Tunnel wasn’t really hard per se, just a stupendous amount of work.


The slow travel is due to safety paranoia, not due to cost cutting. It could run faster if we would just decide to do so.

To be fair, I don’t know if it’s local safety paranoia that could be fixed by changing personnel at Grandlinq, or if it’s imposed by regulators. But I find it unbelievable that, for example, the slow speeds southbound approaching Erb St. or when running parallel to Courtland are really justified by any realistic safety concerns.

If anybody actually knows anything about the slowdowns, I’m all ears — but I will be asking probing questions about the information and won’t quietly accept any bafflegab.


You do know where Laurel Creek runs through Uptown? You might actually be able to convince me that a grade separation at Agnes St. is not totally unrealistic (my biggest concern would , but threading a rail tunnel around the creek definitely moves it into the expensive megaproject category (relative to the size of our city).

I think the thing that this has really revealed to me is just how invalid the "cyclists run red lights" rhetoric really is.

I knew drivers ran red lights sometimes, but given how wide the tolerances for the LRT are, it's clear to me that drivers run red lights CONSTANTLY...and not like...just red...LONG red.

As for speed...good luck finding answers...I've been asking for a while and got nothing. But there is no justification for this, for the LRV to be surrounded by cars doing 20 over the limit while it's forced to do 10, 20, 30 under the limit in some places.

Everyone here is on board with slow = safer, but I guarantee you, STOPPED LRVs would get crashed into. At a certain point, the problem is cars.

And I'm so tired of tunnels being painted as the magical solution...Toronto has a streetcar tunnel...it is not car free..

So true! If a cyclist runs a red where nobody is around, I really don’t care at all — they have excellent visibility and can see when it’s safe. And if they mess up, it’s their life on the line, almost certainly nobody else’s.

And as you say, if it’s OK for cars in the road to whip by pedestrians on the sidewalk going 50km/h faster than the pedestrians (at least), then it’s OK for the LRT to go 20km/h faster than the cars in the adjacent lane. That would have the LRT going 80km/h on King, which would be awesome! I think the limiting factor would be acceleration into and out of stations. If the LRT has to be limited to 60km/h (or whatever) for some reason, I’d be OK with using technological measures to prevent adjacent motor vehicles from exceeding 40km/h (or 20km/h less than the LRT speed).

I’m just going to post this again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImU1mG7QC4I

Although one has to ask, at what point is the problem with individual drivers, and not with the system? This guy ignored both traffic control signs and that handy device hanging off the side of the cab known as a side mirror.