Raise the Hammer

Meanwhile, Mercedes unveiled a self driving us yesterday. Autonomous vehicles are the future but let's build a train that is limited to a rail line and can't go up the Mountain. Not to mention that the province will be $350 billion in debt by 2020 and sold Hydro One to build this mess. Each time my hydro bill goes up I'll take comfort in the fact that the B-Line is a train instead of a bus. What an improvement!

@JimC LRT can be modified so that it can become driverless and that technology is already here, they use it San Francisco, in Muni's LRT Tunnels. It's only a test project and it has had its issues. But like most things the devil is in the details! To make a LRT driverless it legally can't run on a open street right of way like most LRT systems do. Transport Canada or the Department of Transport/FTA in the US, just does not allow that.

The bus that Mercedes tested did not run in the open street it ran on a street in a closed circuit protected right of way. It also did not exceed 20 mph (32kph) during the tests. Regardless what it says on the internet. Truly driverless vehicles are years away and will most likely, combined with other forced improvements, double or triple the cost of an average private car. Even since 2008 car prices in Canada and the US have grown at a rate more than twice the rate of inflation. All at a time were for most people's income is barely growing, this is not me saying this but the president of Toyota. The driverless passenger bus is at best 10 years away for most transit services and this assumes that regulators play catch up with the rules. The Province of Ontario will introduce legislation that will allow testing of driverless vehicles in certain areas but it is not a blanket permission for driverless private or commercial vehicle ownership and operation, which is still illegal outside of aircraft and railway equipment. 15-20 years seems to be the likely time scale for general adoption by transit agencies and trucking companies of driverless technology. Assuming you can keep costs down.

Point is that, without the B-Line LRT service improvements that are desperately needed both for the infrastructure and the operational experience gained by HSR a having to plan bus service with LRT in mind, the environment that will make the central part of Hamilton really grow and prosper, just won't be there. The new reality for cities is that, unless your core is healthy the suburbs which just don't bring in anywhere near enough taxes, will just die! Buses and cars inhibit that growth!

Mercede's demo was impressive, and I am looking forward to self-driving buses/cars/LRVs -- but these are extremely expensive with the high cost of making vehicles driverless in a trustworthy/secure way -- over time they will be part of our transportation network.

Time will be needed to make them mature enough to be able to handle a TiCats/bar crowd, fragile-heart passengers, and unaccompanied kids, all in the middle of a blizzard. And capacity is still an issue, whether self-driving bus, self-driving LRT, or self-driving cars. As a software developer myself, this is all an exciting development to watch.

Regardless, mass transit will still be an essential part of growing our city's population as well.

I was opposed to the Hydro One sale, but with the horses having left the barn. Transit enhancements is one of the best places to put this into, especially along a route that provides huge economic development potential and over time bringing lots of new employers/jobs to town. This is increasingly becoming modern reality in many cities, including what's happening in Kitchener-Waterloo with many buildings of new employment being built.

Jim, you do realize that with proper planning, the A-Line can get LRT in the near future?

But again, we can have self driving cars to park in our 6-car driveways in Glanbrook with 500 houses crammed onto pristine farmland, right?

you should get together with another jim that used to post here. jim g was his name. he also had a fetish for self driving cars and flying cars and teleporters and such to solve todays transportation problems. i havent seen a post of his here lately. or anywhere. even on the hamiltonian which is where he used love to spread and share anti lrt nonsense. since no one at the hamiltonian would disagree with any amount or deranged anti lrt diatribes, i wonder why he doesnt post there at least. oh well. you two should hook up.

Jim, Even supposing autonomous cars were a viable alternative... We would need taxi companies to purchase and maintain fleets of them (cars are very expensive to maintain on a per rider-km basis compared to say, trains) and operate them at next to no cost to compete with public transit. Then we would need to expand roads even more to handle the additional congestion (we have a horrible track record with mitigating congestion by road building). However, realistically, GM's CEO himself put his projections for fully autonomous cars mingling with other vehicles freely at 20 years out and that's optimistic considering the dismal safety record of cars co-mingling. Finally if all of that happens to come about, you would have to take jobs away from all of the taxi drivers to make it affordable, and I'm sure you've seen how they reacted to a comparably minor infringement on their jobs when Uber came to town...

Jim was actually referring to the Mercedes self-driving bus.

I am looking forward to self-driving technologies (which can be applied to LRTs too) but the longer-term projections are realistic, given the need to self-taxi the 3am bar crowd and unaccompanied kids safely through a midwinter blizzard, with enough redundancy to overcome ice-damaged sensors, and being able to automatically recognize and handle emergencies with a passenger who have a heart attack. See my reply above.

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2016-07-22 11:25:43

Matt, just want to say, excellent article!

Just since (from what I see) it hasn't made its way to these pages yet:

Councillor Terry Whiteheads "Study" on LRT: http://terrywhitehead.ca/hamilton-lrt/

And Chris Higgins critique of Terry's office's "Study": https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AC...

Absurd abuse of ellipses and cited figures old enough to vote bring the terms out-of-context and circular reasoning to a new level.

I just read the first half of Higgins' annotated version.

Goddam - it's excoriating. This is just cruel ... before I stopped, I was pretty much cringing like Herod here...

Comment edited by moylek on 2016-07-25 18:52:00

Absolutely right, and Higgens even missed a few howlers. For example, under "Ridership":

Riders are currently choosing to take the local bus service more often than the express B-Line service as there are more stops along the route which means people don’t have to walk as far to get to a stop.

Hilarious. As if level of service is irrelevant. Of course, no survey data was cited, so it looks like Terry now has mental telepathy capabilities.

By the way, just speaking for myself, level of service is relevant. I will usually take the first bus that comes along, either local or express. Looks like Terry did not do a good job of reading my mind.

I just read an article in the Guelph Tribune about Guelph looking at the possibility of LRT in the long term and BRT in the medium term. It seems Guelph is looking at Rapid Transit with more forethought than Hamilton has. The way you are going in 20-25 years or so, Guelph will have LRT and your city will still be arguing whether its the right fit for you!