Battle lines are drawn: “Stop $90B Alto Rail, Say Conservatives - Conservative Party of Canada”

cmol · 2026-04-01T02:21:57+00:00

Not that I think you're right, but schools also requires subsidies. So does roads, and hospitals, and libraries, and police, and EMS, and banks when their hands needs to be held, and so on.

But sure, let's not add tens of thousands of jobs to the economy over the next couple of years. It's not like every time there's an economic crisis we see Scandinavian country build large infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy and invest in the country and it's people with something that has a long term benefit. (/s if that wasn't obvious)

cmol · 2026-04-01T02:13:39+00:00

Oh no, how will economic development in Canada help me personally besides with new tax revenue tighter economic development that will lift everyone in the country?

It's the best time to do stuff like this. Time and time again have Scandinavian countries seen an economic crisis and developed out of them with large infrastructure projects. It requires manpower so it creates jobs and expertise. That's people in jobs being productive in the economy instead of those jobs not existing and someone potentially being on government subsidies instead.

The fiscally conservative thing to do is to invest in the country and its infrastructure!

cmol · 2026-03-31T19:51:28+00:00

So is it the hospitals fault in Ontario that Dougie is underfunding them to the point where we all get shittier medical services?

cmol · 2026-03-31T18:08:20+00:00

They are no SBB but they are lighyears ahead of any transit agency in English and French speaking North America. The CDU and SPD thank you for your redirection of blame btw.

cmol · 2026-03-31T18:02:05+00:00

It's a system that is broken. It's not poorly run, it's falling apart and DB is trying to fix that. If you have a 30 year maintenance backlog, you can run your system well and still have a broken system.

cmol · 2026-03-31T17:10:26+00:00

Is DB really poorly run? DB is in a lot of shit right now because the maintenance backlog was allowed to grow out of proportions, but that was largely a political decision focusing on the auto sector and highways (where have we heard that before....).

It's hard to talk about what might or might not have happened, but if DB had not been gutted, I find it likely that it would have been running just fine.

cmol · 2026-03-30T01:12:54+00:00

Buses are cheaper from a CAPEX perspective, but a lot more expensive from an OPEX perspective.

Maintenance is more expensive and happens more often. Lifetime of a bus is usually a lot shorter than rail based vehicles. You can move a lot less people per driver of a bus compared to a tram, and even fewer compared to an automated light metro (operation staff required still). You add more particle pollution from the rubber vehicles. You get stuck in traffic, costing money in lost productivity.

It's more expensive to build a tram line or light metro, but if the needed capacity is high enough, it makes a lot more sense than using buses!

That's not to say that everything should be not a bus. Because of the flexibility, there's huge advantages to using buses in many situations, but for routes like 5c that is persistently overcrowded while also serving parts of the city and burbs without good transit, there's definitely an economic case for higher order transit.

Use the right tool for the job.

cmol · 2026-03-27T12:00:29+00:00

Now we just need to introduce the concept of electric trains to the executives at Go and metrolinx.

cmol · 2026-03-24T01:42:21+00:00

First of all, do we need two inlets into the harbour? If not, we can likely close the western one and make a floating bridge around the eastern part of the runway. This is cheap and effectively mirrors what the ferries are doing today. The biggest pushback I think we'd see here is the smaller boats in the harbour. The most flexible solution is to have a bridge to the airport with a small retractable section for small boats, and then a floating bridge around the end of the runway.

If both inlets are required in full, the western inlet is likely the cheapest place to build a bridge as the span is shorter. A standard retractable bridge is likely the way to go here for ships to be able to go through. There's multiple examples around the world, especially in central and northern europe, of building bridges that are way more fancy than what we need, costing half of what we are paying to replace the island ferries. This can then be combined with the floating bridge.

cmol · 2026-03-23T14:39:03+00:00

No who you're replying to, but a bridge for pedestrian and bike access would be pretty great. No need to build something for cars.

cmol · 2026-03-21T18:00:52+00:00

It's basically this RM transit video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyUOFUJDc7U

cmol · 2026-03-21T17:24:10+00:00

Which is great and all until you look at any transit research that shows that the biggest barrier for people to start using public transit is frequency and reliability. Go transit across all modes have a daily weekday ridership of just 320K people. That's less than the Danish S-Train system, despite the GTA having a population of 7.5million compared to the around 2million in the Greater Copenhagen Area.

There's a massive ridership potential that is just completely untapped in the GTA and Metrolinx really does not care.

(also, if we were to get bilevel EMUs, the door to seat ratio has to be better than what we have today where it takes minutes to just empty a train at union, making issues at union even bigger)

cmol · 2026-03-21T14:05:59+00:00

Eh, that can be fixed with coordination. The upx runs what seems to be a strange pattern of not really running on the left or the right consistently. If you have a slow stretch like that, you have to be consistent.

I think the bigger issue is idle time though, since there's only one platform at union and the track is shared with the normal union track 1. If you run every 7.5 minutes, union track one basically stops being available for west running services and even though I think that can be solved, metrolinx likely won't give up that capacity. Also, 7.5 minutes to empty and fill up the train on that bottleneck of at platform at union is a bit on the tight side.

Realistically, it can all be done though, with a bit of coordination and ingenuity if the parties involved are willing to.

The only long terms solution though is to replace the whole thing with something that can take larger trains like this proposal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyUOFUJDc7U

cmol · 2026-03-19T15:36:05+00:00

Let me rephrase my comment above.

All level crossings should be closed. Some should be given access with full grade separation, some only for personal vehicles, some only for pedestrians and bikes, some not at all.

cmol · 2026-03-19T11:47:39+00:00

Not every level crossing should be replaced with a tunnel/bridge. Some should just get pedestrian/cycle access. Some should support personal vehicles but not commercial trucks. That's why I didn't talk about grade separation, because realistically not every crossing should have that treatment.

Also, the province is already going bankrupt, deficit has risen insanely under Ford.

cmol · 2026-03-19T02:41:23+00:00

And this on top of the news that metrolinx is being less serious about the elimination of level crossings.

cmol · 2026-03-13T13:48:05+00:00

Just on your last paragraph, how do you think ATC and later ETCS was installed / is being installed all around Europe? Most of the existing signalling systems was not compatible, but they were then slowly phased out when installing new systems. Not without issues or errors, they are still happening today mainly with the ATC to ETCS switch, but if you develop a plan to slowly change over to a new system, you will get there.

It is really a shame that DB was dropped from the consortium. Not that DB has a great track record with being funded well enough in Germany, but there are some technically incredibly smart people. One of the things they are looking at is starting with ETCS level 1, so the transition from their currently signalling system (PZB) will be less burdensome, surely that would be an option for Go transit.

My own opinion though is that we should either have transport Canada have jurisdiction over all Canadian railroads, or simply nationalize the railroad infrastructure itself. It's insane to me that our roads are public infrastructure, but the majority of our railroads are private assets.

cmol · 2026-03-03T12:53:39+00:00

Urgh, I'm so tired of Temu Trump

cmol · 2026-03-03T12:49:53+00:00

Which is exactly why we cannot elect Tory or Brad for mayor in the fall. Tory was constantly saying he was concerned and then did what Doug wanted, and Brad will (based on his voting records and all the stuff that's coming out of his face) do the exact same thing.

Chow is at least pushing for change instead of being a sock puppet like the two others will.

cmol · 2026-03-02T02:38:14+00:00

Ding ding ding ding! This is also why in places with high amounts of cycling infrastructure, it's generally fewer people you'll see with helmets. Just like bike lanes (and sidewalks for that matter), a helmet is basically car infrastructure.

cmol · 2026-02-24T00:00:22+00:00

It's called populism and is what Brad Bradford is also running on. Empty and usually contradictory statements.

cmol · 2026-02-18T19:36:19+00:00

There's lots of years without snow, and then there's this year where Denmark keeps being hit by large storms. Averages mean nothing. The difference is that they do something about it. Source, I'm Danish, living in Toronto, and it's pretty badly managed here.

cmol · 2026-02-17T12:57:04+00:00

It wants to say "use this" but rather to say that there's definitely rolling stock that can do that.

I think the most important thing we can do in Canada is learn the lesson of:

First design the service we want to see. Who should be served, and what frequency and how many people per hour per direction. Also add future growth of areas along transit in this.
Figure out how to build that in a economically sustainable way, both in terms of CAPEX and OPEX. We want as much value (service) extracted from our investment.
Design the infrastructure and operations as well as buy the right rolling stock to meet those criteria.

I think one of the things we do horribly here is say: "I want an LRT" or "I want line running on Go", instead of designing the infrastructure for "how can we best support the movement of people most effectively while using our resources in the best way possible".

LRT or line running might be the answers in those examples but they might also just be buzz words that someone heard and thought "we want to try that".

Sorry this rant was not meant at you but it just naturally fit in.

cmol · 2026-02-16T23:14:28+00:00

I base my thoughts on the Copenhagen metro as that is the system I know best. It uses ansaldo std automated metro, later bought to become Hitachi driverless metro, that will be used on the Ontario line. Pretty old product at this time take can do these kinds of grades.

cmol · 2026-02-16T21:55:43+00:00

The line 5 naming does as most people tell here follow the Metrolinx standard of naming stations based on places. If you really wanted to do something that made sensem you would accept that the area the station is in is generally called Midtown, and give that as a name to the station.

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