Comment 46936

By Robert in Calgary (anonymous) | Posted August 31, 2010 at 22:25:09

Hello from Calgary,

My question would be, are you going to run LRT as rapid transit or a fancy streetcar? LRT as rapid transit is quite superior to BRT.

Calgary has built one the most successful LRT systems in North America because we run it as rapid transit. Three car trains every five minutes during peak periods. We're currently expanding stations (slowly) to run four car trains and the fourth LRT line is under construction while the proposed construction of the fifth line is being bandied about more frequently with civic elections coming up and money available. In Portland, most MAX trains are only two cars and most lines are at 15 minutes during peak periods. Dallas spent two or three billion on its system and now, to save five or six -million- will reduce peak service from 10 to 15 minutes.

Calgary's LRT runs in it's own separate right-of-way. As few level crossings as you can manage! The one exception is downtown where it runs on the 7th Avenue Transit Mall. Currently it's the bottleneck in the system because all the routes converge onto 7th Avenue. That's the tradeoff we made. We went on the surface downtown and built more lines creating more ridership. Edmonton started off building underground and then expansion money dried up so their one line produced less ridership.

Portland's streetcar system is different from MAX and it is SLOW!

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