Comment 118705

By mdrejhon (registered) - website | Posted May 19, 2016 at 21:25:21 in reply to Comment 118675

Subways are not crappy.

Modern LRTs

  • are traffic separated
  • with automatic transit-priority green lights on approaching LRVs
  • daisychaining ability (Hamilton LRT will future support up to 2-vehicle trains with 8 doors simultaneously opening)
  • level boarding subway style, all doors simultaneouslty open up like a subway train
  • super smooth operation. You can comfortably text while standing up, stable enough not to need to grab pole. Unlike bus.

Even in the Olden Days, people preferred the subway/streetcars for reading newspapers, due to their relative presictability on tracks, and older commuters find it didficult to keep standing on a bus compared to subway or LRT.

Path to 10,000 people per hour in one lane in Hamilton LRT design. Some LRTs manage to do 15,000 to 20,000 per hour on surface routes, using longer consists -- like Calgary C-Train LRT which is now four joined vehicles long.

Transport Canada says a freeway lane does 1700-2200 cars per hour per lane maximum -- there is only 3600 seconds in one hour and that is tailgating less than two seconds. Traffic signalled corridors like King/Main only manage less than 900 cars per hour per car lane. At an average of about 1.3 to 1.4 occupants per car, that is only a tenth the maximum capacity of a Hamilton LRT lane.

If you have ridden MODERN surface LRTs they feel more like a surface subway, not a streetcar or a bus. On a scale, it is my experience that it feels 75 percent subway, 25 percent bus, for the design of Hamilton B-Line LRT. It is the cheapest way to get a "subway style experience" as much as it is possible without raising or tunnelling.

Yes, buses are more flexible at going around onstacles. But we are at least more flexible than Toronto streetcar routes -- our LRVs are double ended and reversible. There are crossovers at several strategic points of the whole LRT route. The pros of LRT and the extra ridership outweigh the inflexibility. This is NOT slow TTC streetcar.... It is a modern, traffic-light-prioritized LRT with subway-style stop spacing and subway-matching speed with a subway-style all-doors accessible level boarding experience.

The Hamilton LRT stations are custom designed for gapless unassisted perfectly level boarding, no "ramp" deploy, it is fully subway style wheelchair-rollon, no assistance, and you have multiple doors to wheel into. Walkers, strollers, assistive devices, bikes, it makes family travel MUCH more pleasant, your baby and grandma too.

Buses alone do not attract as much ridership as a result.
LRT attracts much more ridership to the point -- it even amplifies ridership of connecting bus routes. A bus expansion will be important for the LRT, too.

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2016-05-19 21:46:08

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