Green Line LRT | ?m | ?s | Calgary Transit

[ByeByeBaby]

It's sort of a catch 22 though.. While the signaling tech may be capable, we know damn well that we'll never see 90 second LRT frequencies if a driver is still required.

So indirectly, automation IS the limiting factor as it defines whether additional expensive humans are needed to provided the increased frequency.

As for the current at grade NC plans, the sooner they find their way to a dumpster the better! Every one of those crossings is a service disruption waiting to happen...

We'll never see 90 second LRT frequencies because there's not enough demand. 90 second LRT frequencies are on the order of 5x the capacity needed for opening day Green Line ridership (to Shepard) estimates. An LRT train costs ~$200 per hour to operate; at current fares, it can carry ~$2200 worth of paying ridership. (Probably more like half of that given passes, low income, students, etc. so a mere 5x the cost.) A full LRT is incredibly profitable to run. Op cost will never be the barrier if the trains are full, and full trains are the only reason to run them every 90 seconds rather than every 3 minutes.

Where automation does provide a benefit is reducing the cost of lower demand off-peak service and enabling more frequent service then; running trains at 5 or 10 minute headways all day, or into the night or on weekends. But that benefit can also be attained through the technology of increasing everybody's taxes by two bucks. How many hundreds of millions of dollars need to be added to an already late and expensive project to achieve 3 million dollars a year in operating cost reductions?

 

[InfrastructureEnthusiast]

Sadly we are right on the cusp of chiselling those plans into stone with the sunk cost fallacy of getting the SE leg through DT. It wouldn't be too late to opt for running at-grade through the beltline and terminate at 8 ave with a cut and cover tunnel under the CPKC tracks, but that in itself has already killed with other sunk-cost fallacies.

Agree with your take on select upgrades to the red and blue lines, and I can see some of those happening past the 3mil population point, sooner or later automation of the lines will be needed to provide frequency and capacity increases.

You've lost me on your last point though, AFAIK there's no reason why the elevated segment through DT couldn't be automated?

 

[InfrastructureEnthusiast]

We'll never see 90 second LRT frequencies because there's not enough demand. 90 second LRT frequencies are on the order of 5x the capacity needed for opening day Green Line ridership (to Shepard) estimates. An LRT train costs ~$200 per hour to operate; at current fares, it can carry ~$2200 worth of paying ridership. (Probably more like half of that given passes, low income, students, etc. so a mere 5x the cost.) A full LRT is incredibly profitable to run. Op cost will never be the barrier if the trains are full, and full trains are the only reason to run them every 90 seconds rather than every 3 minutes.

Where automation does provide a benefit is reducing the cost of lower demand off-peak service and enabling more frequent service then; running trains at 5 or 10 minute headways all day, or into the night or on weekends. But that benefit can also be attained through the technology of increasing everybody's taxes by two bucks. How many hundreds of millions of dollars need to be added to an already late and expensive project to achieve 3 million dollars a year in operating cost reductions?

Appreciate the detailed cost analysis, but I never suggested that green line launch or even run at 90 second intervals, just that the ability of the tech to run frequencies *up to* that level is enormously appealing.

To your second para, having the line run 5 min frequencies all the time would be ideal! Run "loss leader" service as a way of inducing demand. It would be prohibitively expensive to do if drivers are needed, but trivial for an ALRT system. It also means stations can be smaller, offsetting some of the costs of full grade separation.

Canada line is more or less what GL should try to mimic IMO, not Shelbyville's Valley line. Which as I recall actually was shown to be more expensive than one of the ALRT routes initially considered, but that got vetod by the bus driver mafia reps in council..

Massive failure in vision IMO. ALRT eliminating drivers from main commuter routes frees up those people to run new or improved feeder routes instead. Hardly a bad thing in a rapidly growing city!

 

[Red Star]

69 Avenue will be closed this summer once they finish the 78 Ave tunnel so that's already one less crossing

correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Green Line is fully grade separated from downtown until Shepard road.

 

[badc0ffee]

The first phase of the SE GL is pretty darn close to grade separation - I believe just 7 crossings of minor roads: Highfield Blvd, Highfield Cres? 69 Ave, 86 Ave, 107 Ave, 29 St SE, 40 St SE.

correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Green Line is fully grade separated from downtown until Shepard road.

See what I quoted above from @lemongrab - it sounds like there are 6 or 7 grade crossings along the route.

 

[InfrastructureEnthusiast]

See what I quoted above from @lemongrab - it sounds like there are 6 or 7 grade crossings along the route.

https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/dam/transit/about-calgary-transit/reports/lrt/southeast_lrt_compendium.pdf

Maybe this link is out of date? But looks to me there's only grade crossings for 86av 107av and 40st.

Making Shepard an elevated station would take care of 40st (and 126av later on).
107av crosses right before GL goes elevated, seems like it would be easy enough to start that a but sooner and go over 107av instead.
86av doesn't seem like a show stopper either, but the road would likely have to move instead of the rail there.

IMO those are small prices to pay to get a line that can run at the highest frequencies, and can't be disabled or delayed by vehicle traffic!

 

[Red Star]

7th Ave is interesting - it's got to be near the top of the list for highest capacity at-grade rapid transit lines around the continent.

How they achieved this is was absolute signal priority, not just on 7th, but for downtown as a whole to keep LRTs moving including across all the major avenues in the NW Red line. Having two lines operate reasonably well with 24 trains an hour at peak is an incredible feat.

Of course, at modern ridership levels and frequencies, the design has limitations and reliability. At-grade inevitably has more collisions. Last week switching issues were caused by a car driving into the vehicle trap near 8th Street for example, leading to substantial delays. Importantly focusing on hyper-utilization on a single line means there's no redundancy, if anything happens on 7th - both Red and Blue are impacted severely.

Further, I doubt there's much more space to fit more trains per hour so wait times are already near the floor of what's possible with the current configuration and tech (although 4 car trains can be added to dramatically increase capacity). So for the foreseeable future, headways under 5 minutes are not a thing Calgarians will experience unless they travel to more transit-focused cities.

There's a bunch of lessons learned from 7th, notably:

1. If you give transit absolute priority in an area, you can add a surprisingly lot of capacity and frequency cost-effectively at-grade.
2. If you do #1, you will get incredible ridership that justifies further transit service improvements.
3. There's an upper limit to what you can do at-grade before you run into reliability problems.

So we should be applying lesson #1 to everything transit, particularly buses. Just prioritize them - particularly around pinch points and congested areas - sometimes that's queue jumps, others lanes and flyovers, others just simply closing a bus bay to prevent a time-wasting merge into traffic again. There's so much low hanging fruit on our bus system just waiting for a 7th Avenue treatment - cheap but effective.

Ironically, it seems like the low-hanging fruit is what is keeping us distracted - 7th Avenue is so good relative to under-performance almost everywhere else in the system, it's hard to imagine making many (expensive) improvements on 7th v. all the many improvements needed elsewhere. Culturally at transit it seems a shift towards accepting the LRT being more at-grade v. grade-separated seems to be entrenching, such as the 17th Avenue crossing. Cost control on major projects may be a factor here - transit is so expensive to build it starts to seem unrealistic and insurmountably expensive to build a grade-separated modern system.

I'd prefer we move towards a light-metro style Red and Blue line - full grade-separation, automation, higher capacity and higher frequencies - instead of more towards making these systems more like modern LRT.

I think using 7th Ave as an LRT transit line was one of two mistakes the planners of LRT made. 7th Ave is the Achilles heel of the LRT system as it take the trains a long time to move through downtown.

1. The planners should have utilized the freight ROW that runs through downtown. They should have built elevated tracks slightly north of the CPR line. With LRT stations at:
-Calgary Tower
-Between 4th and 5th street
-At 8th Street

This is an aerial photo of Calgary in 1966 when the LRT was first planned. The red lines are where the LRT should have been elevated.

2. I think the second mistake the planners made was over-building many of the suburban stations. There's no reason why a pedestrian overpass at Stampede/Erlton station is needed. It costs a lot to build and it costs a lot to maintain the escalators.

 

[lemongrab]

69 Avenue will be closed this summer once they finish the 78 Ave tunnel so that's already one less crossing

Thanks - I knew about the 78 ave tunnel but couldn't recall the implications

https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/dam/transit/about-calgary-transit/reports/lrt/southeast_lrt_compendium.pdf

Maybe this link is out of date? But looks to me there's only grade crossings for 86av 107av and 40st.

Making Shepard an elevated station would take care of 40st (and 126av later on).
107av crosses right before GL goes elevated, seems like it would be easy enough to start that a but sooner and go over 107av instead.
86av doesn't seem like a show stopper either, but the road would likely have to move instead of the rail there.

IMO those are small prices to pay to get a line that can run at the highest frequencies, and can't be disabled or delayed by vehicle traffic!

Highfield Blvd (aka 42 Ave) is definitely a level crossing.

It won't touch Highfield Cres (aka 46 ave aka 15 St) - I thought that road might be higher on the bluff but didn't check until now.

29 St SE is the other question, but I'm 99% sure it's a level crossing. There is currently a transit only road 200m to the NW and it looks like that will remain, so level crossings on each side of Douglas Glen Station:

So I think it's essentially 5 crossing spots: Highfielfd Blvd, 86av 107av, 29 St (x2) and 40st. It wouldn't take too much to remedy that, but you'd have to commit to going fully elevated the rest of the way south as the route doesn't go more than a couple hundred meters without crossing a road.

 

[lemongrab]

You've lost me on your last point though, AFAIK there's no reason why the elevated segment through DT couldn't be automated?

DT definitely could be. My point is that if they go to the expense for a complete crossing of CPKC+8Ave+7 Ave then they are not breaking up the north leg to be automated. And IMO there is 0% chance they switch the SE to automated at this point.

So the only remaining hope for north automation is if they break apart the legs, but that goes against all of the 'north-se transit spine' messaging they've been blabbering about for years to justify this. But if they are so adamantly against elevated all the way through downtown, then the sensible option would be to terminate a shallow tunnel at 8 ave.

But there are a bunch of headwinds against that now - grand central station, potentially level crossings at Macleod (which I think would be fine since they are one way roads and we're just building a tram), probably running at-grade through the beltline is likely just as unpopular with the beltline NIMBYs (this may have been mitigated with earlier ideas to run just one direction on 10/11/12 aves), and the fact that using 2nd St means demolishing and rebuilding the parkade ramp, where they've recently build a fancy new +15.

 

[InfrastructureEnthusiast]

Thanks - I knew about the 78 ave tunnel but couldn't recall the implications



Highfield Blvd (aka 42 Ave) is definitely a level crossing.

View attachment 660188

It won't touch Highfield Cres (aka 46 ave aka 15 St) - I thought that road might be higher on the bluff but didn't check until now.

29 St SE is the other question, but I'm 99% sure it's a level crossing. There is currently a transit only road 200m to the NW and it looks like that will remain, so level crossings on each side of Douglas Glen Station:

View attachment 660187

So I think it's essentially 5 crossing spots: Highfielfd Blvd, 86av 107av, 29 St (x2) and 40st. It wouldn't take too much to remedy that, but you'd have to commit to going fully elevated the rest of the way south as the route doesn't go more than a couple hundred meters without crossing a road.

Looks like you have a different source than what I'd linked earlier, I see Highfield and 29st as separated.

 

[InfrastructureEnthusiast]

And IMO there is 0% chance they switch the SE to automated at this point.

You may well be right there. Just seems like such a shame to build the line to 90% of what could be.

Although at over a decade late and certainly over 10bil by the time it's done, I think it's safe to say GL will wind up disappointing everyone in some way..

 

[trtcttc]

It's sort of a catch 22 though.. While the signaling tech may be capable, we know damn well that we'll never see 90 second LRT frequencies if a driver is still required.

So indirectly, automation IS the limiting factor as it defines whether additional expensive humans are needed to provided the increased frequency.

Huh? Not really sure how you reached that conclusion. I literally showed an example of a Canadian transit agency, operating at 90 seconds headway, WITHOUT automation. And again, automation is absolutely not the limiting factor. We are not operating the ctrain at the maximum frequency we can with human drivers, not because we don't have automation, but that we don't have the funding, and the limits with the street level transit mall. Automation has its benefits, but there's so much more to do before we get to automation being a limiting factor.

Does this include pedestrian grade separation? Google tells me 100% grade separation is not necessarily required for automation, but obviously you want to be as close as possible. What about remote monitoring? Human(s) watching CCTV of the few spots that can't be sensibly grade separated...

I'm not sure if it needs to be 100%, but I can't think of a single existing system that is not. That's a level of risk, Calgary Transit is very unlikely to be ok with.

 

[lemongrab]

Huh? Not really sure how you reached that conclusion. I literally showed an example of a Canadian transit agency, operating at 90 seconds headway, WITHOUT automation. And again, automation is absolutely not the limiting factor. We are not operating the ctrain at the maximum frequency we can with human drivers, not because we don't have automation, but that we don't have the funding, and the limits with the street level transit mall. Automation has its benefits, but there's so much more to do before we get to automation being a limiting factor.

I'm not sure if it needs to be 100%, but I can't think of a single existing system that is not. That's a level of risk, Calgary Transit is very unlikely to be ok with.

Nobody is arguing that fast headways are impossible with human drivers...they just aren't realistic. In the real world, automation increases frequency compared to what we'd otherwise do. Which leads to higher ridership, which has many downstream benefits (more fare revenue, decreased traffic and the many spinoff benefits from that).


As for the risk tolerance, who knows, it's an emerging field of law and liability. I believe I've read CT's own reports where they factor how increased transit usage leads to reduced vehicle collisions and the associated resources spent on them (including healthcare). It's probably an insignificant figure, but what about the PTSD treatment and paid leave when train operators are involved in an incident today? It's not like any legal liability goes away just because there's a human pulling the levers, nor do they prevent service disruptions when a car turns onto the tracks. And you still can't eliminate all risks even with 100% grade separation.

 

[trtcttc]

Nobody is arguing that fast headways are impossible with human drivers...they just aren't realistic. In the real world, automation increases frequency compared to what we'd otherwise do. Which leads to higher ridership, which has many downstream benefits (more fare revenue, decreased traffic and the many spinoff benefits from that).


As for the risk tolerance, who knows, it's an emerging field of law and liability. I believe I've read CT's own reports where they factor how increased transit usage leads to reduced vehicle collisions and the associated resources spent on them (including healthcare). It's probably an insignificant figure, but what about the PTSD treatment and paid leave when train operators are involved in an incident today? It's not like any legal liability goes away just because there's a human pulling the levers, nor do they prevent service disruptions when a car turns onto the tracks. And you still can't eliminate all risks even with 100% grade separation.

Why are they not realistic? In the real world, a Canadian transit agency is running trains up to 90-100 seconds. It’s literally what’s happening. We are no where near that level of headway here, why waste any of the budget we have available on something that probably will never be used.

You can’t eliminate risk, but people’s risk tolerance is different between humans and machines. When Cruze, a driverless cab company, got in one major at fault accident, it essentially killed the entire company. Whereas human drivers cause thousands of accidents a day. The Skytrain and Toronto’s old line 3 were the only driverless trains, and they not only ran grade separated, they’re elevated or underground, so a car accident cannot possibly impact it. I doubt Calgary transit is itching to be the first agency to implement mixed traffic driverless trains.

 

[whatchyyc]

Green Line will use CBTC and have a design headway of 3 minutes, Red and Blue have been doing fine with 4-5 minutes for 44 years on an interlined downtown tram so I don't think it's the end of the world at all