ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

These are supposed to be experts...they should know about this before hand.

There was an interesting comment on Reddit in reply to Cory, https://www.reddit.com/r/waterloo/commen...?context=1 . I have no idea if it's true, and 50% increase in capital cost seems like an exaggeration, but I do remember that there's some sections of the route (at least King/Victoria) that are right at the maximum possible grade for the Flexity Freedom. So it seems at least somewhat plausible.

The comment in full is:

My (unofficial) understanding is that the route itself is problematic for adverse weather. Specifically, that the grade in places is steeper than the trains can be expected to climb in icing conditions. Fixing this would have required a route change which would have increased the entire ion cost by 50% or more.

The decision was made that the local economic cost of shutting it down for a day or every year or two was more palatable than increasing the project cost by that amount. Also, since they expected to be shut down in icy weather due to the grade, they didn't initially invest in other features which would allow operation in those conditions if the grade weren't an issue (ie. catenary scrapers).

Assuming this isn't exaggerated (I heard it during a casual conversation), it actually all seems pretty reasonable to me. The economic case for increasing capital expenditures by 50% in order to increase reliability from 98% to 98.25% (or whatever it would have been) is pretty weak.

However, it seems like the grade has actually been less of an issue than they originally thought, meaning that the bottleneck to operation in these conditions has been the other equipment they chose not to buy. This has the appearance of poor planning, when they actually just made a reasonable decision based on operating expectations.

Yeah, the 50% increase seems silly. If the incline at King/Victoria was really a problem it could have been reduced significantly by making the King/Victoria station a centre of the road station, then by restricting cross and turning traffic at Moore and Wellington (something that would have had minimal impact on car trips given Weber and Agnes), and then sinking the tracks into the road up to Agnes to make the slope more gradual.

More expensive...sure....425 million...uhh...not even close.

But I'm guessing this is more to do with the in-feasibility of restricting cars than the actual cost.

In any case, it sounds like the problem is not the incline anyway...but other operational issues.

Again, I would like to know what the point of hiring an expensive contractor to handle these things.....it's supposed to be expertise, but we don't seem to be getting that.