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Originally Posted by madsad
I'm not sure I agree with a few of the posts above that have the connotation that Bus Rapid Transit is "making due" with a lower budget, that it's the poor-man's answer to rapid transit. While, it can be argued, that in many cases this is true, you have to remember that rapid transit systems need to be planned for a specific scenario. Each city is unique. Each city has it's own layout, densities, proportion of transit mode-share, price the citizens are willing to pay for rapid transit, and potential ridership along transit corridors.
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BRT IS a poor man's transit. Each city on the planet does have unique things about them, architecturally, and also ethnically, but aside from that every major city on the planet has the a downtown Central Business District, a central city residential area (like Crescentwood, West End, etc...), as well as inner and outer suburbs.
Winnipeg is absolutely no different from other cities in that regard.
Rapid transit does need to serve major destinations, and not be planned just for the sake of a rail line right of way being in place.
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Heavy rail can carry more than 10,000 riders per direction per hour. So you'll need to carry near that number to minimize subsidies and recoup costs, or you'll end up with another BART, a system that has had trouble keeping ridership up to avoid asking for higher county and state operating subsidies (although, I would assume BART's ridership is increasing due to gas prices). Same with LRT: you need (rough guesstimate) 2500-8000 riders per direction per hour.
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Does Winnipeg have this kind of demand? I would say no. There are some corridors which come close. The Pembina corridor from the U of M to Downtown, judging by the number of buses scheduled, probably could support a rapid transit system that would have a capacity for 3000 per direction per hour. Once again, a guess: Peak hours, combined routes have buses about every 3 minutes during fall/winter terms (20 per hour) at 50 pax per bus is 3000 pax per direction per hour. And that would be on the high side. This is bus rapid transit territory, on the low side for light rail, and certainly not heavy rail.
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The
Great Candian Talk Show quoted 50 buses per hour at the Osborne & Mostyn instersection where the ineffective diamond lane exists.
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If the system is planned well, has a great brand image, and encourages Winnipegers to be proud of their city and satisfied which the service, it will work. But it has to be done right.
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Heavy rail can support more than 30,000 per hour in peak... There is another thread in the Canada section of SkyscraperPage.com discussing the various peaks of passenger carrying capacity for heavy vs light rail vehicles. It's not the rail gauge or the weight bearing of the rail itself, but the passengers/hour that a train can carry.
If Winnipeg used 3 or 4 car trains with a carrying capacity of 400 per train that would probabbly work from day 1. The headways would be every 3 - 5 minutes during peak. I'm just guessing at the headways though... Maybe they could run less or more often... They're variables you can play around with as a transportation planner.
Toronto's subway was built for 240,000 passengers / peak hour, which 50 years later has not reached yet... but one day it will and the capacity is there, without having to widen expressway roads which get congested as soon as they're completed anyways. Again, the other thread on SSP says that the TTC subway currently carries about 30,000 pph.
Comparing Winnipeg and Edmonton, Winnipeg is more dense:
Edmonton = 1,067 people per square kilometre
Winnipeg = 1,365 people per square kilometre
Jeff Lowe, who is a bit better a figures and stats and stuff wrote an OP-ED back in 1990 that confirms that Winnipeg can support heavy loads of passengers onto a rail transit system. Please read this:
http://uwto.org/fp/transit_1990jefflowe.html
And of course metropolitan Winnipeg's population has grown in the 18.5 years since the piece was written, making the points in article all that more relevant.
Also read Jeff's submission to the RTTF from 2005, which is on our TRUWinnipeg.org website. It's listed as "
Why Winnipeg Warrants a Subway"
Can anyone point us to current figures on peak traffic volume (cars, SUVs, etc...) on the three major thoroughfares in Winnipeg?
* Portage Ave.
* Main St.
* Pembina Hwy.
Broadway is quite congested during the whole work days, what is the daily traffic volume on that thoroughfare?
One of the co-hosts on
The Great Canadian Talk Show mentioned last week that there are 50 buses / peak hour at the Osborne @ Mostyn intersection (near the bridge).... But the thing is NOT to increase the size of the bus fleet, for example, by adding 50 more buses, and run more buses downtown to catch the people who who ride the bus, but rather to shorten the routes and let the people take the train over the very congested Osborne St. bridge (under the Assiniboine River) and Osborne Village and of course to where they're heading afterwards (home or downtown or elsewhere).
Someone has suggested that if you built an underground rapid transit line running thru Osborne Village, that you'd be able to turn that part of Osborne into a permanent pedestrian street, and remove all the surface automobiles. That would be really, really, cool, and would be more effective as a pedestrianized street than doing banning cars on Albert in the Exch
And going by how they estimate uptake of rail transit, you could take 50% of those figures because that's how many (at least) that would sell their cars and take rail-based rapid transit if it were built here in Winnipeg. Then you also figure in the current bus passengers along those same major thoroughfares and count all the routes (local, Express, and SuperExpress) that use those streets where a proposed rapid transit line would go.
I know recent figures say that counting the whole of metropolitan Winnipeg, 130,000 passengers ride the buses daily. That's less than ride Calgary's LRT on a daily basis. So Winnipeg is not fairing that well after all, despite what Tom Brodbeck says -- add LRT ridership + bus ridership.
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Manitoba should get at least one billion, hopefully that will be put to a new (and necessary) mass transit project! 
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