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Ottawa Confederation Line LRT (City of Ottawa, U/C)

nfitz said:
You know well that most of the bloat on the Transit City costs are because the tunnelled section of Eglinton was very much under-estimated. Essentially an LRT in a subway tunnel costs about the same as a subway.

To use that to justify subway over LRT ... except perhaps for the 10-km of Eglinton that costs as much as a subway .... seems dishonest to me.
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I'm assuming that because you decided to cherry pick 1 sentence out of a 3 paragraph post that you agree with the remainder of my post?

And it wasn't just the tunnel, the at-grade portions were also very underestimated. To blame the entire cost increase on the Eglinton tunnel also seems very dishonest to me. I highly doubt that the tunnel can account for the $7B increase! Even if the tunnel was priced at $0, it still wouldn't account for the $7B increase. Why are you trying to deceive us?
 
gweed123 said:
I'm assuming that because you decided to cherry pick 1 sentence out of a 3 paragraph post that you agree with the remainder of my post?
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I agree very little with much of what you write ... but if I responded to everything you wrote that was incorrect, I'd never get anything else done.
 
nfitz said:
I agree very little with much of what you write ... but if I responded to everything you wrote that was incorrect, I'd never get anything else done.
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So then please enlighten me as to how I'm incorrect in deducing that the $7B gap between final cost and initial cost is not only due to the Eglinton tunnel being miscalculated, as you have deduced. I'd love to hear your rationale about how the cost estimates on an ~11km tunnel can be off by over $636 million/km (and yes, that's what the cost increase works out to if the tunnel was the sole reason for the cost increase). At most, the tunnel accounts for maybe 20% of that ($127 million/km), THAT I could believe. But $636 million/km? Gimme a break.
 
gweed123 said:
So then please enlighten me as to how I'm incorrect in deducing that the $7B gap between final cost and initial cost is not only due to the Eglinton tunnel being miscalculated, as you have deduced. I'd love to hear your rationale about how the cost estimates on an ~11km tunnel can be off by over $636 million/km (and yes, that's what the cost increase works out to if the tunnel was the sole reason for the cost increase). At most, the tunnel accounts for maybe 20% of that ($127 million/km), THAT I could believe. But $636 million/km? Gimme a break.
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It's not the only escalation, but it's the primary one. The cost is over $400 million a kilometre in escalated dollars. That's an increase of perhaps $200 to 300 million a kilometre. I can assure you that the surface sections haven't increased by 100s of millions per kilometre.

Most of the Transit City surface lines are coming in at about the $1-billion mark in current dollars. 6 of the lines would be about $6-billion.
 
gweed123 said:
All I was doing was stating the fact that the reason why the funding was cut was because of the ballooning cost.
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Funding was cut from one budgeted amount (around $9B) to a new budgeted amount (around $5B). Ballooning costs would have to find other sources of funding. If you promise $9B in funding, then costs balloon to $15B, why cut??? Despite the ballooning costs you still have committed to only $9B!! Cutting to $5B makes no sense in the context of responding to ballooning costs.

gweed123 said:
And no, I don't like how it was done. I don't like how Transit City was sold as being a cheaper alternative, and then nearly doubled in cost before a single shovel hit the ground. To me that smells of dishonesty towards the electorate. That is not a left vs right comment either, because it is all too prevalent on both sides of the spectrum (sell it as affordable, then jack up the price once it's been approved).

If Transit City had stuck to its initial cost (or at least within 20% of it), I would be much more in favour of it. Unfortunately, it didn't. It was a good bang for the buck when it was first proposed. However, with nearly double it's original pricetag, it's not worth it. It was a good investment of $8B. But there are better things we could be investing in for $15B.
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The ballooning happens with every project, LRT or subway. It is likely that any subway cost projected at the time of Transit City would have ballooned the same amount and that Transit City would be just as affordable compared to a subway plan in relative terms. Should a ballooning of subway costs be used to prove subway money is better spent on LRT? The reality is that the surface sections of Transit City are significantly cheaper than a grade separated option... ballooning or not.
 
What is the logic to the line being underground at Campus station anyway? There is a fully separated right-of-way through there already. Going underground wouldn't add any speed.
 
A big part of the issue at Campus is that it's difficult to build a 600-foot surface station there. At either end of the station area, the ROW is less than 40 feet wide. The solutions I can think of are very narrow side platforms or a center platform that's curved or angled on the in-bound side - all pretty compromized. Putting the station undeground allows for a full-width centre platform as well as an exit closer to the north part of the campus - don't forget that both the Laurier and McKenzie King stations are disappearing. Staying on the surface until north of Campus will require a long, steep incline between Campus and Rideau.

I think the underground solution seemed worth the extra money until they realized how much sand there really was in Sandy Hill. The geological profiles in the latest report are really different from the information in early documents, especially around Laurier.
 
Is there a cost/km for this project. It'd be interesting to compare what a completely exclusive LRT costs compared to Transit City's non-exclusive LRT.
 
Since a fair portion of the ROW is already reserved in Ottawa, hard to compared costs - especially when so much of the costs are for the crazy huge stations.
 
Yes, considering the new alignment burying it to Campus does make sense. If they are removing that section of the Transitway, it would be great if they were also to remove the Nicholas St. mini highway. That stretch of road isn't that heavily used and removing it would connect OttawaU and Sandy Hill to the canal and open some new areas for development.
 
dunkalunk said:
Or better yet, remove the highway, and put the rail line to Ottawa Union Station back.
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I wouldn't mind seeing a Grand Central-style rail tunnel leading into Union Station. A GO network in Ottawa is going to become more and more urgent over time. But I think that doing it at-grade isn't really an option. They spent so much time beautifying that area, putting rail tracks back in would be a huge step backwards.
 
If you're building a completely underground station there is no particular reason why it should be under the old union station. Placing it under the CBD would work far better for the riders - you might even avoid it having to go above or below the LRT tunnel. Also, for commuters going further on the LRT, right in the centre of the line would make sense for people taking the LRT for the last portion of their trip, to Tunney's for example, without trying to crowd onto a full train.
 
Darwinkgo said:
If you're building a completely underground station there is no particular reason why it should be under the old union station. Placing it under the CBD would work far better for the riders - you might even avoid it having to go above or below the LRT tunnel. Also, for commuters going further on the LRT, right in the centre of the line would make sense for people taking the LRT for the last portion of their trip, to Tunney's for example, without trying to crowd onto a full train.
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I've always been partial to a station right across from Parliament Hill. Highly unlikely...I don't even think there is a place for a even a small entrance outside of the contested Portrait Gallery site. I think it would be hard to pick a site if you were given carte blanche given site restrictions, who to serve, the NCC, etc.

Not only that but it would be super expensive. I really can't see them moving them their current station for at least 20 or 30 years. As for commuter rail, there is a lot of talk about it and even some planning in terms of preserving some right of ways in the Ottawa Valley and Pontiac. Again, outside of perhaps a few lines offering a few trips a day I don't see substantial investment being made in commuter rail for at least 10 or 15 years (and that isn't a bad thing either since the LRT network should be the primary focus during that time).

And as Darkwingo said, the only way to evaluate the true costs of the LRT line would be to include the costs of constructing the Transitway (minus stations, paving, etc). This would be really hard to do since much of the work being done to create the exclusive right of way is done bit by bit. Sections are added in 1 or 2 km lengths, grade separations are often done one at a time, stations such as the new one at Baseline are actually quite substantial projects, even though it wont see LRT for another 8 years or so once it opens. It's a fantastic strategy, and one that will allow Ottawa to expand its LRT network pretty quickly once the backbone is done, but hard to calculate the costs of.
 
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