Posts Tagged: BRT

14
Jan

2016

Hamilton Gondola — We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

NOTE: An earlier version of this post originally appeared on December 4th, 2009 (yup, that’s over 7 years ago, kids). At that time, the report “City of Hamilton Higher Order Transit Network Strategy” was available online. Unfortunately, it is no longer available. 

Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know and that’s really nobody’s fault.

For example:

In the spring of 2007 a working paper by IBI Group called City of Hamilton Higher Order Transit Network Strategy came out. For those who don’t know, Hamilton is a city in southern Ontario that is cut in half by a 700 kilometer long limestone cliff that ends at Niagara Falls. It’s called the Niagara Escarpment and has made higher-order transit connections between the Upper and Lower cities difficult.

You See The Difficulty

You See The Difficulty

In the IBI paper the writers conclude that a connection between the Upper and Lower cities is “physically impossible” and that the Niagara Escarpment Commission might “strongly resist” any new crossings of the escarpment. As such, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) became the focus and preferred technology of the report. That’s because streetcars and Light Rail can’t handle inclines of more than about 10 degrees. The only way for a rail based technology to work, IBI concluded, was if a tunnel or viaduct was built.

No where in the report, however, was Cable Propelled Transit (CPT) even mentioned, despite cable’s ability to resolve most if not all of the issues IBI highlighted.

It’s no real surprise. Back in 2007 there was virtually no publicly accessible research available on cable. Believe me, I know; I had just started my research in 2007 and it was incredibly difficult to find anything.

Should IBI have considered cable? Should they have known about cable? I don’t know . . . and furthermore, I don’t think it’s relevant to this discussion. What you don’t know, you don’t know and that’s all there is to it.

What is, however, relevant to our discussion is this:

Hamilton Gondola

Photoshop of a gondola traversing the Hamilton Escarpment. Image via Hamilton Spectator.

The City of Hamilton is now updating their Transportation Master Plan and they’re surveying the public on their opinions. And the survey includes a question on gondolas. Last summer, meanwhile, around half of the people that responded at Hamilton’s Transportation Master Plan public meetings said they liked the gondola concept.

So why does that matter?

Because in less than 7 years’ time, a large North American city made a complete about-face on this matter. They went from a place where they thought (incorrectly) that a specific transit problem could not be solved with a fixed link solution due to their topography; to a place where they are actively soliciting the public’s opinion on using a gondola to solve the very problem they previously thought couldn’t be solved.

I know people in the cable car industry think seven years is a lifetime. And it is. But not to a large municipal bureaucracy. To a city, seven years is a heartbeat. In a heartbeat, Hamilton went from basically not even knowing cable cars exist to considering it as a part of their overall Transportation Master Plan.

That’s progress no matter how you look at it.

Creative Commons image by John Vetterli



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01
Mar

2012

Transit Aesthetics – AutoTram / BusRail

Can the AutoTram revolutionize the way we think about transit planning? Image from fotogalerie.verkehrsgigant-portal.de.

When a city plan is planning a new transit infrastructure project, a lot of time is often spent deliberating over which technology should be implemented. This discussion generally floats back and for between bus and rail (and more recently, sometimes even CPT). For many cash-strapped cities looking for quick wins and cost-effective mass transit solutions, the debate often settles on the mid-tier options, namely bus (BRT) and lightrail/streetcar opportunities (HRT tends to be too expensive and time-consuming to construct.) Amongst the many debate points — capacity, aesthetics, speed, cost, etc. — proponents of both technologies claim their technology is superior.

From my personal experience (your experience may be different), based on conversations with transit planners, engineers, operators and average joes, one of the biggest arguments in favour of LRT is its aesthetics. You can go on and on about all the capabilities and characteristics of modern bus technology, but in the end, a bus is still a bus.

But what makes a bus, such a bus? Its shape? Size? Look? Smell? Other than rubber on road vs steel on rail, what if a bus could be completely remodeled and redesigned to look and feel like LRT? Would this make it as attractive as LRT, and therefore able to attract just as much new transit riders as the rail systems claim?

The Fraunhofer Institute decided to find out. In 2005 they introduced the AutoTram — essentially a road-based LRT. The makers of this technology describe it as:

“… [it] combines features of conventional buses (e.g. high flexibility, low infrastructure costs and moderate life cycle costs) with the advantages of trams like high transport capacity, driving comfort and the possibility of partial emission-free operation.”

Could the AutoTram succeed and if it does, what does this mean for the future of light rail and transit planning?



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27
Jan

2012

Weekly Roundup

Just some dude climbing on a cable 3491m long. No biggie. Grimselwelt Mountains, Switzerland. Image from Dailymail.co.uk.

It’s been a busy week here at the Gondola Project. So let’s take a quick look at some of the highlights from around the world of Urban Gondolas, Gondola Transit, and Cable Propelled Transit.

 



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07
Sep

2010

Duck Season!!! Rabbit Season!!!

The 1950’s Looney Toons animated short Rabbit Fire is perhaps one of the best-known of all Bugs Bunny cartoons. It’s an influential piece of work that’s invited all kinds of scholarly conversation.

In it, the confused and generally helpless Elmer Fudd is hunting for rabbits. Self-servingly, Bugs Bunny convinces him that it’s not actually rabbit-hunting season. Bugs claims it’s duck-hunting season instead. This – quite understandably – raises the ire of Bugs’ long-time nemesis Daffy Duck (who appears out of nowhere).

The two engage in an almost never-ending argument over whether it’s Duck Season! or Rabbit Season! With no objective outside way to resolve the debate, Elmer becomes increasingly impatient and angry and lashes out, firing indiscriminately at both Bugs and Daffy.

The genius of the work is that there is no single authority to answer the question. Surely in the rational world outside of cartoons, a park ranger could answer the question very easily. Yet the film’s creators wisely leave all semblance of authority out of the debate as it increases the drama and prevents any side from having objectivity on their side (you’ll see where I’m going with this below).

I can’t help but imagine the LRT vs. BRT debate in much the same way.

Like the Duck Season! Rabbit Season! debate, both sides claim a position (LRT is the best! No, BRT is the best!) that is impossible to prove. The two sides are virtually equivalent, both with a performance-cost package relatively similar to each other. There are plusses and minuses to each, but both are reasonable facsimiles of each other.

Conveniently, authority is left out of the conversation and when such authority is brought in, it is typically just as partisan (see the National Bus Rapid Transit Institute and Light Rail Now! for two such groups) Like in the cartoon, it’s a great way to increase the drama, humor and entertainment value of the situation, but really only causes confusion, anger and frustration.

Unfortunately, in this debate, the public is cast as the exhausted and impatient hunter, Elmer Fudd. We’re mere observers in a debate that has no judge, no jury and no solution. We’re powerless onlookers whose opinion switches every moment we hear a new talking point. All we really know is that someone’s face is going to get blown off and – like in the cartoon – it’s likely to be our own.

One thing we’ve tried to do with The Gondola Project is get above the knee-jerk, reactionary mode-choice debate. LRT’s great when implemented in the right way, poor when implemented the wrong way. Ditto for BRT. Same for Urban Gondolas and CPT. Again, it’s about multi-modality and options. We believe transit planning isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s about match the right tool to the right task at the right price. Sadly, this is a position other transit advocates don’t seem to share.

Hopefully sometime in the near future, LRT and  BRT will find a way to elevate their feud to something a little more than cartoon-level antics. Until then, it’s likely to be a never-ending farce resulting only in people getting hurt.



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