Stephen Rees blog has an article about the two Bombardier Flexity trams loaned from Brussels for operation in Vancouver during the Winter Olympics. These cars are similar to those Toronto will see, but with a few important differences.
- The Brussels cars are 2.3m wide because, as with many European systems, they run on a streetcar network built for smaller cars. The Toronto “legacy” cars will be 2.54m wide, the same as the CLRVs. When you look at interior shots from Vancouver, remember that there will be slightly more room on the Toronto cars.
- The Transit City fleet may be wider still than the legacy cars, but this has not yet been decided.
- The interior view from Vancouver shows the front entrance right beside the operator’s cab. This is not the layout currently planned for Toronto because of the different placement of the front truck. This change, visible in the standard shot of the proposed cars, was required to deal with clearance and derailment issues on our system and its tight curves.
As for the Transit City fleet, I understand that Metrolinx will decide whether Bombardier will, in fact, get the add-on car order in the near future. This matter needs to be settled so that cars will be available by the time the first Transit City line opens.
Steve Munro 
Mr. Rees has a lot of interesting posts on this site.
Do you read any other websites regularly on transit and urban topics? If so, can you perhaps post some links?
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And I doubt Toronto’s cars will have nice leather seats.
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As the article points out, leather seats are probably cheaper than plastic in the long run as they’re more durable. However, my objection to both is that bare skin sticks to them in summer, and when you stand up, it feels like a giant elastoplast coming off…. hence why I prefer fabric-covered seats.
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Steve, this is a comment to you rather than on the article: would you please consider adding the wptouch addon to your wordpress installation, or the wordpress mobile pack? thanks
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@ Justin Bernard
Nice leather seats and the vandals on the TTC = BAD IDEA
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The seats on the CLRV and the new buses look both the same. Time for a design change.
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@W. K. Lis
The seats on the CLRV and the new buses look both the same. Time for a design change.
And wider seats. People are getting bigger, so are parkas, so please TTC give us wider seats! Who cares what the seat count is when we can hardly squeeze into them!
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After watching the Vancouver Streetcar video, I’m convinced that a certain long-deceased former mayor of Vancouver by the name of Gerald McGreer absolutely, positively has to be turning in his grave. If what I’ve read about the Vancouver streetcar situation after WWII is correct, he was the small mind who wanted streetcars removed from Vancouver.
Steve: And, of course, that demo line in Vancouver is simply an old piece of BC Hydro trackage used normally for historic cars. Imagine what they could have done if that system had been modernized rather than killed off.
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Vancouver was going to build an LRT line before a certain government convince them to build ICTS, no?
Steve: Yes, Bill Davis was chummy with the BC Premier’s office in those days, and there was an anti-streetcar bias at the provincial level.
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Being from Vancouver, I am naturally biased, but I think the thing that I prefer about SkyTrain (and subways) over streetcars (and, from what I can tell, Transit City LRT) is really simply that SkyTrain and the TTC subway are not at-grade. (That’s the right term, right?) I think it’s patently ridiculous to attempt to build “rapid transit” if you’re going to put that transit at the mercy of intersections. You can have as much “dedicated right-of-way” as you want but, as St. Clair so very clearly indicates, you can still get majorly screwed by traffic signalling (or the lack thereof), left-hand turn lanes, and simply gridlocked intersections.
It seems to me if you’re going to invest in the infrastructure, don’t do it in a half-assed way… separate transit from other vehicular traffic completely. Yes, much more expensive, but I’m not convinced the savings of traffic-contaminated LRT or streetcar transit is worth the savings, especially if you consider expandibility–it’s MUCH cheaper to build subway or elevated rail now than it will be in 20 or 50 years when it’s quite possible the capacity of traffic-free transit will be required.
In cities like Toronto and Vancouver, where as far as I know all signs point to continued growth and densification, it seems incredibly short-sighted to be building what I can’t help but see as “toy” systems (consider the new Vancouver Canada Line). One thing that continues to impress me about the TTC subway is how frickin’ HUGE the stations are given they were buillt in the 50s and the 60s, when I assume Toronto was smaller than Vancouver is now (likewise the scope of BART in San Francisco). THAT is foresight. The Canada Line is appalling in that respect… a significant proportion of the stations are underground and are BARELY big enough now to handle full-sized cars. I hear there is a possible middle car that can be added to existing trains that will still allow them to work in the exceptionally tiny stations (you think the platforms at St. George are crowded?! The Olympics is going to be CHAOS for the Canada Line) but after that, there’s only so far you can reduce the headways. Apparently the line is already unpleasantly crowded during the AM rush–one’s mind boggles to think how it’ll be in 10 or even 5 years. The Lower Mainland is not due to shrink anytime soon (barring The Big One).
Obviously not every Transit City route requires the capacity of subway now (maybe not even any of them) but what about 20/50/100 years from now? I’m not that familiar with Toronto traffic/migration patterns yet but surely something like the Eglinton route and the one going to the airport… oh, that IS the Eglinton route. Yeah, surely that one should be subway?
Steve: Eglinton WILL be underground through the dense central section of the route, and if demand ever rises to a level justifying subway construction in outer parts of the line, the central tunnel will already be there. It is important to distinguish between “subway” (as in high platform rapid transit cars) and “grade separated” implementations. You don’t need 500ft long stations and huge trains to get the benefit of complete traffic separation. In that sense, an “LRV” can provide equivalent service quality. People talk about “converting” Eglinton to subway, but all that is really needed is an extension of the segregated right-of-way. In any event, the projected peak demand is very much below subway levels, and is concentrated in the underground section of the route.
Toronto’s problem, as shown on St. Clair, is that traffic signals are not as transit-friendly as they could be, and too many concessions are made to auto traffic on the street. On top of that, the TTC’s actual operation of the line is disgusting. Just at a time when they should have rolled out stellar service, they provided pure crap by their century-old tradition of managing to a schedule rather than simply spacing cars to a headway. Some of this will be more obvious when I publish analyses of vehicle monitoring data for the line (coming in February). If they managed the subway the way they manage St. Clair, the service would be a mess all of the time.
The Canada Line shows what happens when the financial constraints placed on transit projects bump into the cost of full grade separation. This was even a 3P project where the so-called advantages of private sector development should have given Vancouver the best possible. But if there’s only so much money to go around, that’s what happens.
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Oh and while I’m here, why does the Scarborough RT require work to enable it to handle Mark II cars? I know it was built pre-SkyTrain (actually, that was kinda a shock to me, that it uses the same tech) but only by a year, right, and I don’t remember SkyTrain needing retrofitting to handle the nicer cars?
Also, Toronto transit REALLY need to switch to automated, driver-less systems. That’s another thing that would be facilitated by traffic-separated transit. I don’t really want to put all the subway conductors (?) out of jobs because I’m pretty pro-union but the ability to reduce headways would be awfully nice. But at least for new rapid transit projects, automation!
Steve: When the SRT was built, the TTC was forced to downsize the tunnel at Ellesmere to ensure that only Mark I cars would fit, and they never had the option of changing back to the originally proposed LRT line. Mark II cars will not fit. Vancouver escaped this problem because they didn’t build in pinch points.
Kennedy Station is also a problem because the Mark IIs cannot handle the curves. However, this station was to be rebuilt anyhow in a north-south alignment and at the same level as the station mezzanine. This part of the work is common to either ICTS or LRT implementations.
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Thanks for all the info. I ran across the Eglinton tunnel info last night.
But is that peak demand now that you’re talking about or peak demand in the next X years? Because I still think there’s a lot to be said for building this kind of system much bigger than it currently needs to be in the knowledge that it will be easy/cheap to expand its capacity later, rather than having to build Eglinton now, then in 20 (or 30 or 40 or whatever years) having to extend the tunnel/grade-separation (when capital costs will have risen dramatically owing to inflation and the rising cost of labour) and potentially shut the line down to expand stations that could have been built bigger initially.
Steve: The peak demand I am talking about is future projections 30 years out, and they are still nowhere near subway levels. It is important on a route like Eglinton to distinguish between total daily riders and peak point demand because the trips are spread out in location and in time. There is a bit of room for more bus service on Eglinton, but not much.
Since an LRT right-of-way already demands a fair amount of construction (as opposed to say putting in 99 B-Line style express bus service), why not bite the bullet and do the bulk of the work now? When the Millennium Line opened, there was a huge outcry because its ridership was significantly below projections, but that situation only lasted 5 years or so, if I remember correctly, and I suspect going into the future the problem will not one of unused capacity. As much as it’s desirable to avoid building capacity where it won’t ever be fully needed, it seems to me Eglinton is a pretty safe bet. And not that it’s always the case but with well-run rapid transit, “if you build it, they will come.”
Steve: Of the full Eglinton line (Kennedy to Airport), a bit under 1/3 is the already-committed tunnel. Building the whole thing that way would add billions to the project with little benefit relative to the cost. Again, the main areas of demand are in the central section of the route where it is underground already. If that central section cannot get to subway levels in 30 years, the outlying areas are much further off.
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