The ION has not been terrible by any stretch of the imagination. While it obviously isn't perfect it is still a system that is functional and something that doesn't exist in pretty much all similar sized metros in North America, one doesn't even have to look outside of Southern Ontario to realize this. KW has one, Hamilton and London both don't.
The interaction of road and transit vehicles has been problematic.
The GRT even owned themselves pointing this out about two years ago.
I lived in KW most of the ‘00s and still have half my family living there. The Ion isn’t really held in a great light, even by locals. It’s often too slow, too infrequent, and too often dealing with cars. Why weren’t all road sections grade separated? You’re telling me that car interaction, after all human beings have learned after 150+ years of trams, is “good implementation”? This was a system planned and built entirely in the 21st century; not a legacy system like the TTC.
I’m one of the most pro transit people you’ll ever find, but OMG did they not plan Ion well. Is it really doing that much better than the iXpress bus it replaced?
Mississauga, Brampton and Hamilton just get thrown money to build them so of course when the municipality itself is funding it there are going to be cost saving measures implemented.
“Of course”. Yeah, but KW had a lot of their own money to throw at it. That area makes gobs of money. There’s a reason it was called Canada’s Silicon Valley for so long, and in part it’s because like The Valley it had tax revenue to throw at just about anything it wanted.
Implementation has also not been terrible, the primary reason KWs LRT didn't open on time was Bombardiers inability to provide trains on time. The original opening date was 2017 but it got pushed to 2019 almost exclusively because of the lack of vehicles.
Yeah, my mother’s apartment building literally backed onto the Ion line. Delays weren’t just because of vehicles, trust me.
Sure the ION isn't anywhere near as complicated as Eglinton or even Hurontario but Metrolinx has the oversight on those and they've been complete fiascos which KW did not have.
Have you looked into the BS that is phase 2? It’s already delayed, may end up being a BRT permanently, or not even connect to Phase 1 and stop at Preston. Cambridge are pushing for the BRT option hard, because they don’t have the tax base that K-W has, and could save a few bucks on capital. If Ion were a roaring success in the minds of the golden triangle, why the desire to switch to BRT?
Then just to explain the stats sure there has been about 65 collisions since the LRT opened but that was 2239 days ago, or 1 crash for every 34 days. There is approximately 1 million km travelled per year by the LRTs which means roughly 1 crash for every 90000km.
…For a system that
runs quite a bit on a former rail corridors, operates only 15 vehicles total, and at its peak frequency runs one vehicle every ~15 minutes.
Collisions should be far less than about once a month on a modern day system.
Like any transit system there could be changes made to make the system better, be this better signal priority, KW has it but a few places behave in a weird way (nearside stations). Sure the signaling could be better on the train spurs (approaching Erb and approaching Hayward) but these aren't making the system terrible.
Crossing arms activating waaaaay too early or while a vehicle is in station aren’t a sign of good implementation are they?
