[Northern Light]

It's Caisse - look at how they are delivering REM.

they can do it cheap because they do the design internally and don't overspec everything to the millionth degree like public-led procurement does. REM works and has been done cheap because it was designed specifically to keep it low cost. Re-use existing infrastructure, and when it needs new infrastructure, do it the cheapest way possible (i.e. minimal tunnels, small station sizes, etc.).

Except for the fact REM poached a tunnel from VIA/Regional Rail shifting a huge bill on to Alto...........

Except for the fact REM has had repeated teething problems.

Except for the fact REM and the Caisse so enamoured Montrealers they were chased out of REM De L'Est with pitch forks.

Oh........and REM is at least 2.4B over budget on a base of 7B which is to say 34% over budget and climbing.

PS the entire REM is currently shut down....... for six weeks...........

I'm not a huge fan.

If Alto / the Feds keep the delivery mandate to simply getting trains from Toronto to Quebec in specified timeframes, Caisse can make the design decisions needed to do that actually affordably and badly.

Fixed that for ya.

They may be able to build an excellent product, but it will not come cheaply, if they do.

 

[crs1026]

Personally I am grateful that the pension plan managers that I depend on for my golden years do not invest in risky ventures that could go south, taking my pension contributions with it.

'nuff said.

- Paul

 

[Urban Sky]

Yeah, I don’t recall that Canadian pension funds‘ exposure to European rail projects (HS1 and Eurotunnel, anyone?) were that lucrative either…

 

[nfitz]

Yeah, I don’t recall that Canadian pension funds‘ exposure to European rail projects (HS1 and Eurotunnel, anyone?) were that lucrative either…

407 is paying well though, for the CPP.

 

[innsertnamehere]

Except for the fact REM poached a tunnel from VIA/Regional Rail shifting a huge bill on to Alto...........

Except for the fact REM has had repeated teething problems.

Except for the fact REM and the Caisse so enamoured Montrealers they were chased out of REM De L'Est with pitch forks.

Oh........and REM is at least 2.4B over budget on a base of 7B which is to say 34% over budget and climbing.

PS the entire REM is currently shut down....... for six weeks...........

I'm not a huge fan.



Fixed that for ya.

They may be able to build an excellent product, but it will not come cheaply, if they do.

I mean it depends a lot on how you look at it. The "frills" of government ultimately are still for a specific purpose - skipping them cuts costs but also cuts effectiveness of a project to a certain extent. The question is just how *valuable* those scopes are to a project.

"use existing infrastructure" is what I specifically mentioned. Poaching the tunnel from VIA may have a problem for Alto now, but at the time made sense as REM will move far more people through that tunnel that the previous configuration did and cut billions off the cost of the project at the time. They will perhaps have to build the tunnel for ALTO now instead, but that is to be determined and would have been built for REM anyway. If anything it may work out better for Alto that it gets the new tunnel as it could be built to a higher speed standard for ALTO instead of trying to shoehorn a high speed train into an existing tunnel.

Most new lines, especially with new technology for metro areas, tend to have teething problems. It's not exactly a unique phenomenon, and I'm not particularly surprised as Caisse opened the line to regular service very quickly. Typically the TTC or public agencies keep the line closed for 6+ months after completion to work out every little kink to great expense - Caisse figured it would be better to just open the line and get passengers on it sooner. That works in my books.

REM L'Est had problems with the proposed alignment and NIMBYism, not with Caisse itself. And even then, it was rather silly and really should have been built.

Over budget isn't a surprise given the inflationary environment we have gone through over the life of the project, and even with those overages, the project remains remarkably cheap. Caisse is delivering a metro system barely smaller than the entire Toronto subway for only $9.4 billion dollars. That's crazy cheap. Even with overages.

Shutting the REM down for 6 weeks is one of those "frills" that keeps it cheap. Metrolinx or the TTC may keep the line open, but at significant expense to work around the operating line. Caisse shuts it down for six weeks and presumably saves millions in costs in complexity and time.

The problem with modern infrastructure projects is that they try to mitigate every little impact the project has, regardless of expense. REM doesn't do this, which means, well, there are impacts, but in the end Montreal is going to have 60+kms of new metro line for pennies on the dollar compared to what the rest of Canada is spending to get that.

In 2 years time Montreal will have doubled it's metro network for less than $10 billion. What other City can claim that?

 

[Thaboss]

Oh........and REM is at least 2.4B over budget on a base of 7B which is to say 34% over budget and climbing.

Given the scale construction, speed of the build, and technology employed for the rem Quebec got a massive bargain.

Regarding the routing, it was an unfortunate decsion but not a fatal one. Especially when high speed train isnt coming to montreal for probbaly a decade at best, I'd say it was acceptable.


Need I remind you how much ontario spends to built a 1/10 th of the scale of rem ?

So perhaps an org. That understands cost controls and compromise is exactly what is needed for a massive highspeed project to avoid scope creep

 

[Northern Light]

Shutting the REM down for 6 weeks is one of those "frills" that keeps it cheap. Metrolinx or the TTC may keep the line open, but at significant expense to work around the operating line. Caisse shuts it down for six weeks and presumably saves millions in costs in complexity and time.

Suffice to say we disagree on a great deal here. But I want to highlight this, rather than rest it.

You treat this in isolation as if this is a minor nuisance for riders. If you create a transit culture, and people give up there cars, or second cars, and buildings are built with less parking, Shutting a line down, unless you have a similar, high capacity alternative in place, puts people's employment at risk.

People will not be induced to make changes in their lifestyle if there is a risk of a six-week long shutdown of a corridor.

There is an argument to be made for a more redundant system that can hand that, but we're not there, nor is Montreal. There is also an argument to be made, with sufficient advance notice for workers and businesses that 1 week closure is worth the pain if it eliminates a month or more of slow or less frequent service............... six weeks, however, is an entirely different matter.

The problem with modern infrastructure projects is that they try to mitigate every little impact the project has, regardless of expense. REM doesn't do this, which means, well, there are impacts, but in the end Montreal is going to have 60+kms of new metro line for pennies on the dollar compared to what the rest of Canada is spending to get that.

In 2 years time Montreal will have doubled it's metro network for less than $10 billion. What other City can claim that?

We'll see whether it achieves its claims..........I'm dubious.

But even on its face..........to hit the projected capacity numbers (which it has not yet, nor will it test that for some time.)....... it does so to a great degree by removing seats.

For TTC, a typical rush hour train has 1,000 people on board inclusive of standees. It has 396 seats. The means a roughly 40% seated load.

For REM a typical load is expected to be 600 (the capacity claim is based on 780 and they will not achieve that)........the number of seats is only 128 (this is based on 2 pairs of 2 cars or a 4-car configuration) This means roughly 21% seated.

So simply put, the proportion of passengers that can count on getting a seat is cut in 1/2. That's very cattle car, very uncomfortable and makes the statistic misleading.

Lets try this, seated load per hour capacity:

TTC: (at maximum ATC theoretical, unproven, potential of 90s between trains) 15, 840

REM (at maximum ATC theoretical, unproven, potential of 90s between trains) 5, 120

There's a lot of game playing by the Caisse w/their claims.

 

[innsertnamehere]

Suffice to say we disagree on a great deal here. But I want to highlight this, rather than rest it.

You treat this in isolation as if the is a minor nuisance for riders. If you create a transit culture, and people give up there cars, or second cars, and buildings are built with less parking, Shutting a line down, unless you have a similar, high capacity alternative in place, puts people's employment at risk.

People will not be induced to make changes in their lifestyle if there is a risk of a six-week long shutdown of a corridor.

There is an argument to be made for a more redundant system that can hand that, but we're not there, nor is Montreal. There is also an argument to be made, with sufficient advance notice for workers and businesses that 1 week closure is worth the pain if it eliminates a month or more of slow or less frequent service............... six weeks, however, is an entirely different matter.



We'll see whether it achieves its claims..........I'm dubious.

But even on its face..........to hit the projected capacity numbers (which it has not yet, nor will it test that for some time.)....... it does so to a great degree by removing seats.

For TTC, a typical rush hour train has 1,000 people on board inclusive of standees. It has 396 seats. The means roughly 40% seated load.

For REM a typical load is expected to be 600 (the capacity claim is based on 780 and they will not achieve that)........the number of seats is only 128 (this is based on 2 pairs of 2 cars or a 4-car configuration) This means roughly 21% seated.

So simply put, the proportion of passengers that can count on getting a seat is cut in 1/2. That's very cattle car, very uncomfortable and makes the statistic misleading.

Lets try this, seated load per hour capacity:

TTC: (at maximum ATC theoretical, unproven, potential of 90s between trains) 15, 840

REM (at maximum ATC theoretical, unproven, potential of 90s between trains) 5, 120

There's a lot of game playing by the Caisse w/their claims.

Capacity is only important if demand loads actually exceed capacity - That may be a concern if demand is expected to be above 5,000pphd (or 24,000pphd including standing load)... but it may not be. I'm not aware of demand modelling for REM to comment. I suspect the line will generally operate below 5,000pphd outside of rush hour.

It could again, be a point as to why Caisse better scales it's projects vs. public sector design and procurement. I know we've discussed this about the OL before as well, but the TTC spends significantly more to get that theoretical capacity over REM. The question isn't if the TTC is better, because of course it is - the question is if the immense amount of money spent to get that improvement is worth it in the gains in capacity. And if the line is only going to have a demand of 15,000pphd, why do we need to spend billions to increase capacity from 24,000 to 34,000?

We live in a world of limited capital dollars. We can build to TTC standards and get 10km of subway with a theoretical capacity to carry half the city across town every day, or we can get 60km of metro which still manages to move everyone who wants to use it.

Bringing it back to ALTO, the reason Caisse likely is coming in well below competitors is that they are designing the line to maximize speeds while minimizing costs. Projects like California HSR goes for the "Best" of everything - a 350km/h run speed basically from downtown LA to SF without any gaps or slow speed zones, regardless of cost, then integrate a tonne of local infrastructure improvements along the route as it goes (CA-99 realignment, natural heritage restoration, downtown improvement projects, etc.). It delivers an excellent project, if they can get the money for it, but at immense cost. Caisse is likely going the other way - building it as cheap as possible, spending money only where significant time savings can be had with low capital outlay, building infrastructure with only what is required to deliver the core mandate of an HSR line, instead of dozens of add-ons.

Caisse is likely more closely following the "Brightline West" model than the "California HSR" model. Brightline West is delivering 170 miles of HSR for $12 billion at roughly 1/4 of the cost per mile of CAHSR.

 

[nfitz]

In 2 years time Montreal will have doubled it's metro network for less than $10 billion. What other City can claim that?

If the upgrade of a frequent 100+ year-old commuter line 60-years after it was promised is "doubling the metro network", then Toronto's conversion of 5 GO lines to RER-like service must be quadrupling Toronto's metro network!

Keep in mind, that the current REM only adds 10 new stations - of which only one is in on the Island in the City of Montreal (buried deep in a St. Laurent industrial park) - this is a very suburban line. Though the main corridor from Bois-Franc to Central Station is probably the biggest bonus, with the additional frequency and the added interchanges to the Green and Blue Line stations it already went underneath.

It's a great project sure - but other than the short extension of the blue line to Anjou, there isn't the 50-long list of other projects, or the dozen or so under construction that we see here.

The grass isn't always greener.

 

[SFO-YYZ]

Maybe they think they have figured out a way to build it at international price standards, rather than hugely inflated anglosphere engineering racket prices.

Exactly.

Idk why we are all desensitized in North America (Anglosphere) to that that major infrastructure projects like HSR HAVE to cost $100 billion + and put the whole government into decades of debt, that this has to be the status quo whereas other developed countries can build faster and cheaper. I’m not saying there won’t be scope creep that could inflate the end cost, but this mentality is really absurd and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy in the end.

 

[SFO-YYZ]

Suffice to say we disagree on a great deal here. But I want to highlight this, rather than rest it.

You treat this in isolation as if this is a minor nuisance for riders. If you create a transit culture, and people give up there cars, or second cars, and buildings are built with less parking, Shutting a line down, unless you have a similar, high capacity alternative in place, puts people's employment at risk.

People will not be induced to make changes in their lifestyle if there is a risk of a six-week long shutdown of a corridor.

There is an argument to be made for a more redundant system that can hand that, but we're not there, nor is Montreal. There is also an argument to be made, with sufficient advance notice for workers and businesses that 1 week closure is worth the pain if it eliminates a month or more of slow or less frequent service............... six weeks, however, is an entirely different matter.



We'll see whether it achieves its claims..........I'm dubious.

But even on its face..........to hit the projected capacity numbers (which it has not yet, nor will it test that for some time.)....... it does so to a great degree by removing seats.

For TTC, a typical rush hour train has 1,000 people on board inclusive of standees. It has 396 seats. The means a roughly 40% seated load.

For REM a typical load is expected to be 600 (the capacity claim is based on 780 and they will not achieve that)........the number of seats is only 128 (this is based on 2 pairs of 2 cars or a 4-car configuration) This means roughly 21% seated.

So simply put, the proportion of passengers that can count on getting a seat is cut in 1/2. That's very cattle car, very uncomfortable and makes the statistic misleading.

Lets try this, seated load per hour capacity:

TTC: (at maximum ATC theoretical, unproven, potential of 90s between trains) 15, 840

REM (at maximum ATC theoretical, unproven, potential of 90s between trains) 5, 120

There's a lot of game playing by the Caisse w/their claims.

Me screams in Osaka Japan on the Midosuji Line where office worker is used to standing room only for hour+ commutes in the morning. Beijing Line 10 comes to mind as well - forget about sitting down, in the mornings it’ll take 15-20 min just to get onto a train that isn’t packed. Like, cmon. Scrapping at the bottom of the barrel to find fault with REM (not sure how REM even gets dragged into a discussion on ALTO HSR other than the fact that CDPQi is a part of the ALTO consortium -- so this is assuming that CDQPi will use the same playbook on HSR vs. what they did on an entirely different local transit system that has very little parallel with what they will do for Alto HSR).

Update: apologize for the tone of the original post - it wasn't meant to be insulting or condescending! It was more of a reaction (not specifically directed at your extensive knowledge of the TTC/CDPQ and its inner workings) to the repeated downplaying of Montreal's REM system on this (sorry to be blunt) Toronto-centric forum. I think people need to give it a little time - especially since only a tiny portion of the full REM network (Southshore) is opened, and the majority of the network (especially the much anticipated YUL airport branch) has yet to come into service. I'll reserve judgment until the whole 67 KM of the network is in service and running for a while and see how each segment interacts with Montreal's existing Metro Green Line (McGill) and Metro Blue Line (Édouard Montpetit) - both of which will become large and very busy interchange stations in the next 4 months to come (starting October 2025). For the time being, vast majority of Montreal transit users have had very limited interaction with REM due to the limited coverage of the current South Shore branch.

Back to Alto discussion.

 

[Northern Light]

Me screams in Osaka Japan where everyone is used to standing room only on metros for hour+ commutes. Like, cmon. Scrapping at the bottom of the barrel to find fault with REM.

Back to Alto discussion.

There is no scraping, I don't like standing, most people I know don't, and I don't support a cattlecar concept.

You don't get to come in and drop the comment and then declare the matter closed.

I'm happy to shift back to the core topic here, but there is a relationship which is that I find the Caisse makes claims they cannot honour, and I find their track record far less impressive than some, and they are the proponent here.

I also don't care for Osaka, Japan or its overcrowded transit. Reducing everything to dystopian levels of discomfort and everyone is a number is not a present or future I accept.

You are welcome to a different opinion, but please don't insult mine, into which I put a great deal of thought, and which I support with research and facts, not shoot-from-the-lip hot takes.

 

[nfitz]

Scrapping at the bottom of the barrel to find fault with REM.

Given the intense criticism of these type of cattle cars here in the past, I don't see how it's scraping (or even scrapping) at the bottom of the barrel.

 

[Mihairokov]

I also don't care for Osaka, Japan or its overcrowded transit. Reducing everything to dystopian levels of discomfort and everyone is a number is not a present or future I accept.

Generalizing entire cities or countries as dystopian or permanently crowded also isn't conducive. I personally had a great time on Osaka metro, especially the cars on the Sakaisuji Line:

Osaka's (and Japan's) biggest problem right now is an overload of tourists, especially in Kyoto, but also in much of their transit infrastructure which, like most things in Japan, is stuck in the 1990s and seems reluctant to update or expand. The biggest difference between China and Japan is that the former is building infrastructure capable of handling large masses of people, up to and including Chinese New Year travellers. Almost everything is overbuilt to an obscene degree. Japan is the opposite, where the size built is the size and that's it. So when they double or whatever the number of tourists in an area it's overwhelming on top of already-busy lines for commuters. In Kyoto for example, near the temples, this bus line is so overwhelmed they cannot accept payment upon exiting of the bus, and riders have to exit the bus first and then pay on the curb after exiting, because paying on the bus would take too long.

Anyway, standing on transit is a part of the commute everywhere in the world and it is not exclusively a feature of Toronto, or Asia, or anywhere else. People stand on metros and this isn't groundbreaking. If you have trouble standing for long periods of time there are designated seats for you if you need them, and if you're inflexible on changing your commuting patterns to account for crowding that may prevent you from reaching those seats then i'm not sure what else can be done to accommodate you specifically. I frequently give up my seats for those who need them and I frequently see people offer them up, as well. If cars are overwhelmed (cattle car-ing, sic) then that's probably more an issue with the system's capacity, network, or frequency. Sometimes streetcars are very crowded when one hasn't arrived in a while; not specifically because there aren't enough seats.

Alto isn't going to be doing this as it will be paid fare with tickets so I hardly see how this is relevant to the conversation, anyway, other than using REM as a potentially stepping-off point, but given that it's a different format entirely I will remain more positive until we see something concrete.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Kind of getting off topic here though?

MoD