ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ac3r]

The Toronto subway claims many lives a year as well and its grade separated. We don't know the circumstances for this specific case but walking in a fenced area of the system in the middle of the night could have been due to many different reasons.
With the TO case, platform screen doors could help but really there's a point of declining returns for the investment made. Where there's a will to trespass there will always be a way.

There's quite a difference though. TTC subway fatalities are quite often suicides, accidental falls and the occasional psychotic person pushing someone onto the tracks (though that is extremely rare). And when it comes to subways, they're grade separated indeed but the stations are totally open. Thankfully, as you said, screen doors can be helpful. Unfortunately cost is once again the issue. It is estimated to cost well over 1 billion dollars to install screen doors on TTC subway stations, although that figure seems extremely bloated for such a simple technology.

The issue is: what price do we put on a human life? This forum will whine for weeks when a cyclist is killed and cry to the wolves that we should be lowering speed limits, putting crossing islands in, adding in new lights or speed bumps and so on and so on. All of that costs money, either in the construction of the infrastructure or the economic losses incurred by making it harder for people to get places in a timely manner. We want safe cycling lanes and sidewalks, so why not safe transit? I don't have any children but if I did, I would gladly put any sum value on their life...whether that was to improve bike lanes or rapid transit.

Unfortunately it is already too late to really do anything about this since we were too cheap to build the LRT in a safe manner in the first place. They got this thing approved as fast as they could and cut sooooooooo many corners to save money on it. Safety was not a priority. Any safety boils down to a horn, some signs and lights and essentially saying to anyone "it's your duty to not get your car hit or your life taken". Which, yes, it is our personal responsibility to ensure that but we also have to ensure we also mitigate as many avenues for those incidents from occurring in the first place.

Accidents will always happen, but we should be trying everything we can to design and engineer a world in which they are harder to happen. It's a very simple concept, money be damned. If money is an issue then to hell with bike lanes and pedestrian islands, right?

[KingandWeber]

The Toronto subway claims many lives a year as well and its grade separated. We don't know the circumstances for this specific case but walking in a fenced area of the system in the middle of the night could have been due to many different reasons.
With the TO case, platform screen doors could help but really there's a point of declining returns for the investment made. Where there's a will to trespass there will always be a way.

There's quite a difference though. TTC subway fatalities are quite often suicides, accidental falls and the occasional psychotic person pushing someone onto the tracks (though that is extremely rare). And when it comes to subways, they're grade separated indeed but the stations are totally open. Thankfully, as you said, screen doors can be helpful. Unfortunately cost is once again the issue. It is estimated to cost well over 1 billion dollars to install screen doors on TTC subway stations, although that figure seems extremely bloated for such a simple technology.

The issue is: what price do we put on a human life? This forum will whine for weeks when a cyclist is killed and cry to the wolves that we should be lowering speed limits, putting crossing islands in, adding in new lights or speed bumps and so on and so on. All of that costs money, either in the construction of the infrastructure or the economic losses incurred by making it harder for people to get places in a timely manner. We want safe cycling lanes and sidewalks, so why not safe transit? I don't have any children but if I did, I would gladly put any sum value on their life...whether that was to improve bike lanes or rapid transit.

Unfortunately it is already too late to really do anything about this since we were too cheap to build the LRT in a safe manner in the first place. They got this thing approved as fast as they could and cut sooooooooo many corners to save money on it. Safety was not a priority. Any safety boils down to a horn, some signs and lights and essentially saying to anyone "it's your duty to not get your car hit or your life taken". Which, yes, it is our personal responsibility to ensure that but we also have to ensure we also mitigate as many avenues for those incidents from occurring in the first place.

Accidents will always happen, but we should be trying everything we can to design and engineer a world in which they are harder to happen. It's a very simple concept, money be damned. If money is an issue then to hell with bike lanes and pedestrian islands, right?

You're missing a very important qualifier, which is "reasonably". In almost every case, it is unreasonable to take every safety precaution in engineering our world. And yes, that means we sometimes must make choices that will, at least on the face of things, statistically result in more direct injuries or even deaths to obtain certain other benefits. However, in the case of ION, I actually highly doubt (although it's impossible to know for certain) that there have been an increased number of accidents or deaths owing to its construction. Indeed, for the two people who have died and the others injured in car accidents involving ION, we don't know how many passengers did not die because they were never hit by a bus that ION replaced or never in a car accident and instead safely rode the ION. Further, the two deaths involving ION so far sound like they were the result of extreme recklessness or perhaps a willful intent to be harmed (as they involved individuals walking on active, dedicated train tracks at night) so I hardly think they're much different than the TTC fatalities you think are acceptable. And this is all without getting into the social, environmental and economic benefits of ION, which I think are numerous.

Boiling it all down though, I'm actually very interested to hear if your position is that the ION should simply not have been built at all. Taking into account the political climate and financial resources of the time, we know for an almost certainty that there would be no LRT today if it had to be grade separated so that was ultimately the choice that had to be made. I think the Region made the right choice in the circumstances, but I guess there is some argument we could have had a substantially larger BRT network with the money we spent. And this is not to say I think ION is perfect - far from it (I personally think it should have run through King St in Kitchener and that station planning could have been much improved, in both cases without any added cost) - but overall I think the project exemplifies not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

[dtkvictim]

There's quite a difference though. TTC subway fatalities are quite often suicides, accidental falls and the occasional psychotic person pushing someone onto the tracks (though that is extremely rare). And when it comes to subways, they're grade separated indeed but the stations are totally open. Thankfully, as you said, screen doors can be helpful. Unfortunately cost is once again the issue. It is estimated to cost well over 1 billion dollars to install screen doors on TTC subway stations, although that figure seems extremely bloated for such a simple technology.

The issue is: what price do we put on a human life? This forum will whine for weeks when a cyclist is killed and cry to the wolves that we should be lowering speed limits, putting crossing islands in, adding in new lights or speed bumps and so on and so on. All of that costs money, either in the construction of the infrastructure or the economic losses incurred by making it harder for people to get places in a timely manner. We want safe cycling lanes and sidewalks, so why not safe transit? I don't have any children but if I did, I would gladly put any sum value on their life...whether that was to improve bike lanes or rapid transit.

Unfortunately it is already too late to really do anything about this since we were too cheap to build the LRT in a safe manner in the first place. They got this thing approved as fast as they could and cut sooooooooo many corners to save money on it. Safety was not a priority. Any safety boils down to a horn, some signs and lights and essentially saying to anyone "it's your duty to not get your car hit or your life taken". Which, yes, it is our personal responsibility to ensure that but we also have to ensure we also mitigate as many avenues for those incidents from occurring in the first place.

Accidents will always happen, but we should be trying everything we can to design and engineer a world in which they are harder to happen. It's a very simple concept, money be damned. If money is an issue then to hell with bike lanes and pedestrian islands, right?

Since you didn't answer before: Should we have stuck with the status quo, or should we have spent the money we did on the LRT, which already has a better track record for collisions in front of CHCI than the previous 4 lane road did? Is the money we spent not an improvement?

And since you didn't answer before: Should all tram lines in Europe be torn out and replaced with elevated or underground rail? What safety features do you think they have which ours doesn't? Many European cities release footage compilations of crashes or close calls that are no different than our system, and I bet the statistics are in the same order of magnitude.

What additional safety features do you want? According to the reporting on the recent fatal incident, the pedestrian was walking in the LRT right of way, which is completely fenced off in that area except for road and pedestrian crossings which are all signalized and have crossing arms.

[Acitta]

Last month, I took the GO bus to Bramalea to find that the trains had been delayed or cancelled because of "someone trespassing on the tracks." This often seems to happen on the Toronto Subway also. There always seems to be some idiot who thinks that it is a cool idea to walk through the tunnel. No matter how safe you make something, there is always some idiot who will go out of their way to make it unsafe.

[Acitta]

‘Sorry for the disruption’: Company that manages Waterloo Region’s light rail transit apologizes after freezing rain left riders scrambling for transit
Keolis’ manager admits weather has been a challenge this year

[ijmorlan]

What additional safety features do you want? According to the reporting on the recent fatal incident, the pedestrian was walking in the LRT right of way, which is completely fenced off in that area except for road and pedestrian crossings which are all signalized and have crossing arms.

This point in particular is interesting in light of this discussion, because it entirely invalidates the complaint that the LRT was not built grade separated: in the areas where the fatal incidents occurred, it is grade separated. OK, not literally “grade” separated, as in existing at a different altitude from everything around it, but if the Toronto subway counts as entirely grade separated then the areas of the LRT where the collisions occurred count as grade separated.

The following are grade separated, yes?

https://goo.gl/maps/h1KbG4RhotvKUbdPA
https://goo.gl/maps/DSZ6gaJcohVgsrW3A
https://goo.gl/maps/qSVt3CU5qrcikKWY9

OK, the subway has barbed wire whereas the LRT doesn’t. What more could anybody want? And they shouldn’t bother to bring up level crossings. If somebody uses a level crossing to access the track and then walks along the track, that’s on them. It’s not anything wrong with the system design. Anyway, there are stairs at every subway station giving direct access to the track, so it’s not even true that the tracks aren’t accessible (well, not wheelchair accessible, but accessible on foot).

It is true that there are design errors in the system. For example, the failure to provide additional crossings in the Traynor area is an unforgivable lapse of engineering judgement. But the lack of grade separation is not a design error by any reasonable criterion.

[tomh009]

I don't have any children but if I did, I would gladly put any sum value on their life...whether that was to improve bike lanes or rapid transit.

Yes, I can believe that you would spend $100K to save the life of your (hypothetical) child. But that's still a non sequitur.

Or would you be willing to spend, say, $50K, (of your personal money, in either increased property taxes or increased rent) to either elevate or bury the LRT underground, because it would save some (a few) lives? In reality, not many people would be willing to do that.

[Rainrider22]

Sadly you cant rule it out as intentional. I have seen many cases where people have put on head phones playing music loud so they cant hear the train coming. They then walk with their back to the direction the train is coming from.... So to Neonjoe's point, yes, we need to wait and hear the facts.

[nms]

The section of the LRT tracks where this fatality occurred is about 1 km of track intersected by three pedestrian crossings (the RT Station, Quiet Place and Old Albert) plus two roads (Bearinger Rd and Northfield Drive) plus one grade separated crossing (Weber St). This is also the only section of Waterloo track that is not also paralleled by a multi-use trail. South of this stretch, pedestrians could walk all the way south to the main line at Kitchener via the TransCanada Trail/Laurel Trail and Spurline Trail. To the north, pedestrians can walk from Northfield Drive to the Market.

Without knowing the destination of the pedestrian, it's impossible to know whether a multi-use trail would have encouraged them not to walk on the tracks. I note that the other fatality along these tracks was closer to Columbia where there is a multi-use trail parallel to the tracks.

[Bob_McBob]

This article seems to imply Keolis didn't even order catenary ice scrapers for ION until the end of 2020, and that it's just pure luck we didn't have any major ice issues until this year, given none were delivered until last November.

https://www.therecord.com/local-waterloo...rains.html

[ac3r]

"Climate change will take care of it! No need to spend the money on this nonsense." - Keolis, probably.

[Bytor]

This article seems to imply Keolis didn't even order catenary ice scrapers for ION until the end of 2020, and that it's just pure luck we didn't have any major ice issues until this year, given none were delivered until last November.

https://www.therecord.com/local-waterloo...rains.html

Whose resposnibility would it have been to order them, though? Is it something that should have come with the vehicles, like (all-weather) tires on a brand new car? Or are the scrapers an "aftermarket" thing like getting winter tires?

[danbrotherston]

This article seems to imply Keolis didn't even order catenary ice scrapers for ION until the end of 2020, and that it's just pure luck we didn't have any major ice issues until this year, given none were delivered until last November.

https://www.therecord.com/local-waterloo...rains.html

Whose resposnibility would it have been to order them, though? Is it something that should have come with the vehicles, like (all-weather) tires on a brand new car? Or are the scrapers an "aftermarket" thing like getting winter tires?

I mean, one would have to read the contract specifically.

But given that Keolis is ordering them now, and that they are only attached to the train during bad weather, I'd be pretty surprised if they weren't Keolis's responsibility.

[Bob_McBob]

That dusting of snow we just had apparently took out most of the system for an hour, and there's still no service between Mill and Fairway.

[plam]

That dusting of snow we just had apparently took out most of the system for an hour, and there's still no service between Mill and Fairway.

There did seem to be a bit of ice accumulation on my bicycle...