Reece Martin
@rmtransit
Writer, CS Grad, environmentalist and optimist. Focused on infrastructure, macro-systems, and excellence. Bylines in The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, and Toronto Star. DMs Open.
We are getting less locomotives (45 not 57) for roughly four times the price (the Kiwis paid about 300m CAD). The fact that this isn't a major news item is crazy.
We should really think about the things that make Toronto and Ontario special and try to better incorporate them into the airport. Vancouver is great at this obviously, but Portlands insane mass timber terminal also has tons of good ideas.
The latest from The Transit Brief - Albertas lost decade and how not to do light rail (after doing it pretty well!) www.thetransitbrief.net/p/is-the-wil...
If you can avoid going outside today, working from home, mentioning to your boss that it's very unhealthy to be out if necessary, you should do that. Particular concentration is basically double what it was yesterday.
My latest talks about the ceaseless talk of "automating the trains", and to what extent thats the right answer and even possible! www.thetransitbrief.net/p/automate-t...
Toronto needs to get it together on transit, but something I've previously complained about actually seems like something we might be leading on in NA. Good job Toronto! Actually saw a few vehicles with recently. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
Toronto is too slow. This subway line moves more people than the 401 and it appears to operate worse every single year.
It is absolutely nuts that the only transit we are building for this is Finch West 2 Electric Boogaloo
It feels hard to justify spending effort on "drone-based digital twins" when we aren't using switches from this century and streetcars are often 30 minutes apart for no good reason.
Translink continues to absolutely blow other North American transit agencies out of the water. This is stuff you usually only see in Asia and Europe.
Lets run more trains! Ok, well it makes sense for them to be smaller then! Ok, but then they would have less capacity. Which is why we are running them more often? But, we have like 10 level crossings?
The first three door low floor bus in Canada. . . . ever? www.reddit.com/r/Translink/...
GTFS for Finch West and Eglinton . . . a disaster, GTFS for REM . . . perfect, why am I not surprised
Annoying because there *are* better tram options out there. This one in Munich is from Siemens, and its literally just for regular tram lines! Our vehicles don't even have all double doors!
Media should hop on this. Entirely fixable but at the moment crazy dangerous. Some reckless person is going to be badly hurt.
Last thing, there is some really nice public art in some places but a lot of the station walls are just blank concrete and are really screaming out to have a mural or something. That's putting aside the somewhat questionable all white "mental institution chic" design language.
Some teenager is going to climb on this like they do on the subway and the GO train and fall between the trains and get completely run over and it will be in part, because we left things in such an unsafe state.
The next train displays are nice, but the actual information on them is frequently incorrect. There also isn't a nice indicator at the terminal stations as to what train is going to leave first.