Wednesday’s headlines

15 comments

1. My understanding is that switching is impossible with cable cars. When the subway closes due to an emergency, it is usually only a short segment of the line. With cable cars, the entire line would need to be shut down. Also, the fact that no city uses cable cars for their mass and rapid transit applications and instead use them as people movers over short distances, is not a good endosement.

   If an alternative mode should be explored, it is monorails (I’m sure the next few replies will now reference The Simpsons, my apologies). The main problem with them is that they are perceived as being grade separated light rail, even when grade seperation is not necessary. However, monorail can be built to heavy rail capacities. When it is, it offers metro/subway rail capacity and speed, at a price point comparable to elevated transit, all while being far more eye pleasing than elevated transit. This is a huge plus for Toronto, where our inner-core rapid transit is under developed and tunneled rail is almost cost prohibited, grade seperation would be necessary, and elevated rail would be an eyesore and not be accepted.

   Also, SAFEGE suspended monorail are virtually immune to snow and sub-zero temperatures, making them more than ideal for Canadian cities.

2. Can you imagine being isolated in one of these cars late at night high above the ground with one other stranger? I think riders would be a lot more vulnerable to sexual assault and robbery, and the vehicles would be vulnerable to vandalism. Unattended cable cars work ok in tourist settings such as resorts, but in urban settings such small vehicles would likely need attendants. The SkyTrain in Vancouver has no staff on board, but there are way more passengers, and transit cops can easily move through the system.

   This isn’t a big issue on the Roosevelt Island Tramway which has attendants on each vehicle. However, with a <5 minute quick trip over the river, this is easy to do. In Toronto, it sounds like the idea is to have longer distance cable transport with multiple stations, ie. as an alternative to light rail. Carrying 6,000 people on cable cars per hour in each direction, I’m guessing the amount of vehicles could easily be in the hundreds – can we have an attendant on each?

   At off-peak periods, there would still be the same amount of cars on the line unless they are detached from the cable and moved off to the side which seems like a big expensive operation. Staffing of attendants therefore may have to remain just as high in off-peak periods as during rush hour.

3. Thirty years ago, Queen’s Park had ideas about elevated transit over downtown streets. They came up with all sorts of lovely thin, airy guideways with slim trains. Amazingly, the points of view were always some distance from the street, not under the guideway, and never ever at a station.

   Elevated stations, regardless of technology, must span the street for access to the sidewalks below except in the very rare cases where access is provided via adjacent buildings. If you want Queen and Yonge to disappear under a station structure spanning the street from about Victoria to the “cattle crossing”, go right ahead and build an elevated.

4. Steve,

   While I don’t advocate building an elevated railroad along Yonge (it already has a subway) or Queen (DRL alignment to the south will pick up most of the slack), some of the most vibrant neighbourhoods I’ve ever been to have all existed under the shadow of an elevated rail line:

   Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, Jackson Heights in Queens, Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, the Goutte d’Or and other neighbourhoods in Paris and Brixton in London which is bisected by the elevated National rail lines out of Waterloo. The el is an icon rather than a detractor of downtown Chicago and the skytrain is distinctly Vancouver. I don’t think the unsightliness of elevateds should be used as an argument against them.

5. Also, check out Google Street View in some cities with monorails. While not perfect, far more pleasing than elevated light/metro rail. Obviously monorail isn’t perfect, but neither is subway or elevated rail.

6. There are enthusiasts for every kind of transportation technology: monorails (always a popular one), compressed-air propulsion, cable cars (of the ground and elevated sorts).

   If these people were knowledgable, and the systems as foolproof-good as they claim, they’d be able to explain how these systems will avoid obvious technical and operational objections. They never do; they generally ignore your question or answer a different question, and go on proselytizing.

7. I can’t believe the Star went through that whole “cable” article without references to actual built systems. Head in the sand much?

   What is the judgement on the cable cars at Pearson? http://bit.ly/5T99w2 I know it’s technically in the 905, but still… Success? Failure? Was it a better result than an LRT?

   Nice to include that Don Valley rendering, but what about Portland’s experience with the gondola they just built to serve as transit up a hillside? http://bit.ly/5e4Vds Costly? Tourist-pleasing?

   Toronto does not exist in a vacuum. A little context, please.

8. Given the consistent problems with US security laying waste to Pearson’s operations, I wonder if the Island expansion will gather more steam?

   As a preclearance facility, customs delays directly lead to flight delays at Pearson, but the Island does not preclear and so suffers much less from sudden lurches in US border protection. If you take Air Canada from Pearson, you get hammered because any change to the process breaks down when applied to thousands upon thousands of people who, at the best of times, wait 20 to 30 mins just to get through Customs, never mind security. We saw this with 6 hour delays for 1 hour flights to New York. But anyone leaving the Island is by definition on a tiny plane with fewer overall passengers to have to pat down, scan, whatever. Any increased border scrutiny happens at the international arrival hall once you get to Newark or Boston, a place much better equipped to handle surges in security traffic. Porter passengers probably saw a peak of 45 min delays at the Island and maybe an extra 30 when they landed.

   All of the above would certainly make me think that any turboprop-equipped US airline who values their Toronto business (Continental, US Air) will jump to the Island the moment they can get a slot. Preclearance is now a burden, not an asset; the pendulum has fully reversed its 90s swing and is heading back to YTZ…

9. “Preclearance is now a burden, not an asset”

   From the American perspective, preclearance at Pearson makes a lot of sense because it no longer requires mid-size airports in the US to have customs facilities or, in many cases, to just get by with a skeleton staff to handle 1 or 2 daily flights to the Carribean. Think about all the places in the US that you can have a direct flight from Pearson to: Milwaukee, Indianpolis, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, Columbus, Kansas City, half a dozen airports in Florida. There’s a lot of business to be done in these sorts of cities. If preclearance wasn’t around, many people would be fighting their way through the customs lines at JFK or O’Hare waiting to get on to connecting flights to many of these mid-sized destinations. Personally, I fly through Pearson on the way to the US about 8 times a year and I’ve never encountered a line up longer than an hour. The last three times I sailed through in 10 minutes. I don’t know what the fuss is about.

10. Re: Ed’s comment… “There are enthusiasts for every kind of transportation technology: monorails (always a popular one), compressed-air propulsion, cable cars (of the ground and elevated sorts)…”

    What? No mention of the catapult?

11. Add LaGuardia to that list: it also only accepts domestic and precleared flights.

    They’re building US preclearance at the island airport as part of the terminal expansion. I believe it will be built to the new standards (already in use in Montreal, Halifax, and I think Vancouver) where the order is baggage check first, then security, and finally US Customs and Immigration. (For the curious: customs officers get info on the bags you’ve checked and can recall them if they want to take a closer look.)

    This security alert has been especially hard on Pearson because 27% of its passengers are US-bound. At Heathrow, by comparison, it’s only about 18%.

12. Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, Columbus, and Kansas City are all International airports now, complete with customs. That was not always the case 20 or 30 years ago. Yes, preclearance allows AC flights to mesh seamlessly with partners like United and masquerade as domestic travel — there will always be a market for that. I’m just stating that suddenly not having preclearance is not so bad and this may have an unanticipated effect on the prospects for expansion at the Island.

13. iSkyscraper, the Pearson cable car was recently shut down for about 3 months to have maintenance done so we were back to awkwardly located shuttle buses from the long stay. When it works, it works well but it can’t be easily extended beyond the car park and is limited to one car per cable (of which there are 2). Would make a good mode for the Island Airport though, assuming a fixed link with a Bathurst streetcar extension is out of the question…

14. The most far-flung pre-clearance I went through was at the Shannon airport in Ireland. Agents got on the plane after and flew back to JFK.

15. Re: Ed

    I’d be happy to answer some operational objectives that monorails have problems with.

    I’m not saying monorails are perfect for every application, but they should be looked at. Transit City for example, LRT/BRT I believe are good choices for much of the lines since they will be able to operate in their own ROWs, but for Eglinton where tunneling is involved it COULD be cheaper to build a monorail above the entire route. Then again, the tunneling costs along with at-grade ROWs may still be cheaper than going elevated the entire route. I don’t know, but I am saying it should be an option worth exploring.