PtboQCConvs

The following are culled from the email correspondence between Mark Woolley and his Uncle Paul Bowman, an urban rail fan, who provides insightful commentary on triumphs and foibles in the realm of streetcars and light rail.

September 2021
From: Paul Sent: 2021-09-06

I have something here from Yves Boquet at the University of Burgundy at Dijon. With a population of around 150,000, Dijon has one of the most admired new tram systems in Europe. It's truly amazing the transformation some cities have achieved with the addition of a couple of streetcar lines, whereas in N. America designers tend to want to hide them away on back streets (hello Kitchener) or bury them (looking at you, Ottawa, and Toronto Eglinton) so as to pretend the car is still king. Whether hidden away or buried, the impression is that vastly greater sums are spent for the same number of kilometres of track, with so very little to show for it, and what there is, arranged so as to preserve the sanctity of traffic flow rather than make the new tram system the major focus of personal movement within a renewed and refreshed urban fabric. A permanent state of denial that anything could change, with light rail seen as a token gesture rather than a new style of living more locally, more collectively. Ugly rules.

Anyway, here's Yves Boquet; the article is 4 years old so some things he mentions happening in the future have already happened. Caen has finished tearing up its rubber-tired tram system and replaced it with one on steel rails. Rubber-tired trams are one hell of a bad idea; you have to be really motivated to tear up your downtown and major streets twice in one decade. Nancy will be doing the same. Blame Michelin...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316573692_The_renaissance_of_tramways_and_urban_redevelopment_in_France

August 2021
From: Paul Sent: 2021-08-20

Concerning rail-transit initiatives in North America;

There is no coherent vision or consensus about what a city should be, how it should look and how it should function. Especially post-covid, if there is a post-covid. Not to mention the climate crisis, which screams from every weather-related headline that there is no post-covid normal to go back to.

Rail projects are being proposed and built at the same time the over-built road system, which was designed to force everyone not living in a pre-1950's era neighbourhood in a (rare) city with decent public transit to drive a car every time they leave the house, is being maintained and even enhanced. How can there be both efficient, high-capacity, frequent rail-based transit and a road system designed to make it unnecessary?

Isn't putting rail transit underground just a way of saying the streets belong to people driving cars and everyone else must tunnel like a mole?

An example: the Q.C. project includes a 2-kilometre, billion dollar tunnel so as not to violate a single square centimetre of the 6 lane highway funneling heavy traffic right along through 3 of the most historic neighbourhoods in the city, right on the edge of the walled city. Old Quebec and Parliament hill are honey-combed with underground parking garages. Instead of using the tramway project to totally rethink the city's relationship with the car, the tram will be put out of sight, out of mind, and buried right where it could be most at home, on the streets of very old neighbourhoods.

Ottawa showed the way, of course, by burying their light rail through downtown, even though the buses had reserved lanes for years and there was no crying need to suddenly free up road space. And where it's not underground it will be on an overwide, raised platform taking up so much space that to preserve all the traffic lanes now in place, over 1,500 mature city trees will be slaughtered all along the route, and over a hundred buildings leveled to make the street wider. It will be an overbuilt eyesore blighting every street it passes through.

They're just copying what Toronto and Ottawa are doing in the middle of suburban roads that are already 6 or 8 lanes wide; a charmless concrete slab in the middle of the street instead of European-style, subtle, discrete integration of tracks into existing streets with the least amount of disruption, and looking like they've always been there. Generations who grew up in car-dependent suburbs don't know what a city is, but they're the ones planning these... things.

P

From: Paul Sent: 2020-08-18

To clarify what I meant about a 'vanity project' which involves closing Queen street in the heart of downtown: Vast underground caverns for public transportation should not even be contemplated, knowing what we now know about the carbon footprint of these so-called 'green' projects involving millions of cubic metres of poured concrete, until all surface options have been fully exploited. Such as banning single-occupancy, private motor vehicles, as well as through traffic, from sections of the city with street-running rail transit. Amsterdam requires motorists to make long, wide detours of the densely populated parts of the city, thus making every trip there faster by transit or bicycle. And also the elimination of urban expressways. Why tunnel when the Gardiner expressway and Don Valley Parkway's rights-of-way could be repurposed for electric rail transportation? Surface rail in dedicated lanes could appear (or reappear) on all of Toronto's north-south arteries. It can approach that of a classic metro line in capacity at a fraction of the cost, and distributes accessibility to high-capacity transit across a wider area. The only reason mass transit is buried is to enable the continued addiction to single-occupancy cars. Cities like Karlsruhe, which have been building out their tram-train network for decades, are now exploring the use of their ubiquitous street-railways to distribute freight and produce throughout the city. So many options, besides tunneling in order to sustain the unsustainable status-quo. Of course that presumes the presence of a population capable of appreciating not only the necessity of doing things differently, but the positive benefits of living in a car-light environment. As for inserting a new street railway line with minimal disruption, in a city like Peterborough, Portland, OR divided their miles-long projects into short, 2- 3- or 4-block sections and concentrated great effort into installing track and repaving each section as quickly as possible, before moving on to the next section. That approach is, of course, conditional on the type and number of underground utilities that need to be moved...

From: Paul Sent: 2021-08-17

(The Ontario Line subway stop at Queen and Yonge) sounds like a horror story resulting from a vanity project. After the present crisis, how many people will return to office towers in downtown Toronto on a daily or even regular basis? With massive efforts diverted to preventing the planet from losing its capacity to support life, how important will 'business-oriented' infrastructure be? Even before this summer of horrors, world opinion was swinging wildly away from acceptance of the 'established order'. Here, from the Guardian:

Humans ‘pushing Earth close to tipping point’, say most in G20

February 2014
From: Paul tramquebec@... Sent: February-04-14

Hello,

That is a truly astounding site and no, I didn't know about it. Did you explore the Peterborough street railway map? It was a far more complete and sophisticated system than I ever imagined. I'd never heard of the CGE test line up behind the old Teachers' College and out to towards Bridgenorth. Or the line to Lakefield. And so much more double track than I'd imagined. Thank you so much for sending that long. It seems all the street railways in Canada are on that site. There'll be many hours spent exploring. I've just begun looking at Quebec City.

Take care be well and keep in touch...

Paul

PS If this streetcar map could be published and made known in Peterborough it might make people starting thinking; and seeing their city in a different light. Especially if someone could photo shop the streetcar lines into contemporary views (as I do mentally whenever I'm there, which is slightly depressing)...

From: Paul tramquebec@... Sent: February-06-14

There are of course towns in Europe with half Peterborough's population who have several tram lines. Some because they were in a country in the Soviet Bloc, which protected them from the Kar-Krazies just long enough, and others in France where the population has fallen (justifiably) in love with their own domestic product built by Alstom, whose modular vehicles have been adapted for cities of less than 50,000. And when a larger city finds its trams are no longer long enough to handle demand, they can just add a standard, prefabricated module fitted out to match the city's trams and slip it into place in a couple of days, converting a 120 person tram to a 160 or even 250 capacity vehicle depending on the requirements and the number of modules needed to satisfy them. When you add to that the exceptionally long life expectancy, low operating cost and very high rider satisfaction, any other kind of surface public transportation become ridiculous, except where you're dealing with extreme sprawl, where small frequent buses need to gather in the unwary dispersed to the nearest rail facility. So now I know where to park the interesting and relevant findings of my daily streetcars, light rail and tramways searches. Of course, the most interesting and relevant for Peterborough are all in French or German (which I can follow well enough to extract basic information from a tram (strassenbahn) video. I'll post them anyway, just in case someone can read and get the gist...

Take care...

Paul

From: Paul tramquebec@... Sent: February-07-14

This can go on the Peterborough site. Of course the local chapter of Ford Nation are doing everything in their power to derail this. I've been following this story for quite some time...

From: Paul tramquebec@... Sent: February-07-14

As far as overview comments go, I prefer to have any statements I make supported with material from the source. With the big streetcar manufacturers, it's easy to go on their site and look up specs and images of their vehicles in use. Every day I google-news streetcars, streetcar (nearly all North America), light rail (mostly North America, some UK, EU, Asia, Australia and Africa), tramways and tramway (nearly all France). For Germany and Austria, I youtube strassenbahn or strassenbahnen, sometimes with the name of the city or region.

Paul  ps. For the moment, anything for which I send you the link, with accompanying  commentary, can be posted on the Peterborough site. A detailed track map of the Peterborough system might blow a few minds.

From: Mark

To: Paul tramquebec@.... Sent: Fri, 7 Feb 2014

I was wondering about adding the proposed lines that you were talking about before Christmas to the dataset. It seems like we’d need some sort of reference material to support adding that data. As I recall :

one proposed route went from Hunter and George, across the bridge then a zigzag – Rogers/Douro/Armour – up to a loop at Nichol’s Oval park

the other route went from McDonnel and George, west to Reid, north to Chemong briefly the onto Wolsely and finally Benson reaching the Normal School/Teacher’s College at it’s terminus (presumably another turning loop). Do you have any idea where to find that information. From my perspective it came from your copious memory.

From: Paul tramquebec@... Sent: February-07-14

To: Mark

During the 50's I quizzed all my parents' friends who'd grown up in Peterborough in the early years of the 1900's, about anything and everything they could recall about the street railway system. I recall that even 25 years after the end of service, many still had a sense of wonderment, loss and betrayal about the sudden shutdown of a service everyone loved and used. Those people are now all gone, but I seem to vaguely recall supporting documents, perhaps unearthed while I was at university or during the time I was teaching in Peterborough, between '69 and '75. Perhaps it was in files of Ontario Hydro during the period when Sir Adam Beck was promoting the modernation and expansion of all of Ontario's electric street and interurban railways. That was a lifetime ago. Without supporting documents there's no way I'd want to put anything on line. But 'someone' told me track had been laid in Ashburnham in preparation for an extension across the new Hunter Street bridge, but it was never used, perhaps because the final cost of that bridge was double the estimate and there was no money to install the track. Although the bridge was built to support track and streetcars. And perhaps the line out McDonnell and up Reid came from the Ontario Hydro files. Wonder if they're online. Ontario Hydro planned to expand the system to parts of town without service, put on all new Birney cars built in Ottawa (they went to Guelph, Kitchener/Waterloo and Windsor instead, I found out by going through equipment rosters) and double track more of the system to increase frequency, etc. As for the line to Lakefield, I had heard it existed but didn't really believe it to be true until you sent me the electric railway maps.

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-08-14

Edmonton, Hanover and Vancouver; the type of interconnexions that can exist with streetcars:

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/wants+Hannover+German+city+delighted+take+unpopular+streetcar+Edmonton+hands/9483545/story.html

Apart from the fact that streetcars have never rolled on rubber tires (cautionary example of how bullshit can creep into even the most seemingly well-intentioned article) this is mildly interesting but sort of gee-whiz and not really helpful as it lacks specifics and detail. Also the word 'obsession' betrays the author's negative bias...

The Konservosaurs and their well-funded backers are sure to reflexively poo-poo anything that threatens the viability of the tar-sands, which seem to be Canada's only raison d'être at the moment...

The sordid reality of lrt/streetcar politics in this country; the catatonic element prevails...

What's on the market...

http://www.alstom.com/transport/products-and-services/trains/tramway-citadis-compact/

And let's not forget the Peterborough-Toronto link; GO Transit's one-size-fits-all double-deckers hauled by stinky, noisy deisels are dépassés...

http://www.alstom.com/transport/products-and-services/trains/regional-train-coradia/

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-11-14

what a wonderful thing to see streetcar tracks being laid in the 21st century. What silly pretexts people find to oppose this. what are they thinking?

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-18-14

Subject: Comparison...

Report from Calgary... and from Atlanta...

Who's behind the consistently negative news about streetcars and light rail in Harperland?

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-18-14 “Will Toronto ever be a great city? Will any city in Canada ever put transit ahead of automobiles? Does anyone even care anymore?" Until Toronto learns to put transit first, it will never be a great city.

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-19-14

Planning for a future with more (rail-based) transit. Note that in Europe, trams can hop on and off a regular passenger and freight railway line for intercity travel; no need to change modes or build duplicate infrastructure. Rails are rails...

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-19-14

Planning for a (different) future. Cities that aren't doing this don't have one...

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-19-14

Planning for a different future... (Houston)

vs. inability to conceive of a different future... (Kitchener-Waterloo)

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-19-14

Meanwhile, if Mississauga had a sane city as its neighbour to the east, this would link up with the Eglinton light rail via Pearson Airport. Hurontario-Main LRT Project Moves Ahead

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-21-14

The agency tasked with revitalizing Toronto’s waterfront says the 2.4-km section of the Gardiner Expressway east of Jarvis should be replaced by an 8-lane boulevard.

"And while they're at it, make the Gardiner redundant by electrifying GO and tripling frequency with flexible, self-propelled railcars in trains of variable length..."

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-22-14

How to create a permanent public transportation infrastructure (see slideshow)...

From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: February-22-14

Subject: Road collapse leaves 8-metre wide sinkhole at tunneling site - Ottawa - CBC News

Hi,

People seriously unaware of the basic concept try to put STREETcars UNDER the street. HAha... sigh...

March 2014
From: Paul (tramquebec@...) Sent: March-11-14

And why use an old file photo of a Toronto streetcar to illustrate a rather banal tram accident (although tram accidents are so rare as to be anything but banal) in Rotterdam, during what is a period of such manufactured tension? Distraction?

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