In response to your second paragraph, the measures used to evaluate what technology is appropriate are industry standards. I respect your disagreement, but when you are working with a limited pool of money it really boils down if the cheapest suitable solution can handle the most we expect to throw at it. If it cannot, we move up. As I said before, if someone wants to pay for a subway then wonderful. If not, then the above criteria applies.

I do not disagree with your third paragraph. It is a busy line, but how that ridership is distributed is the devil in the details.

I agree to disagree with you on your fourth paragraph. LRT is appropriate when used in a good context, and not appropriate when used in a bad context. But, on balance I feel it has been good.

In response to your fifth paragraph, I have yet to see a mainline train slow for a crossing. I envision a high speed line connecting Surrey to the airport without having to go via midtown Vancouver, but it is not a priority.

Speaking of the Toronto LRT plans, this discussion of capacity showed up there all the time: “unless we can objectively show that the passengers per hour is above the design constraint of LRT then we should not count it out.” But rapid transit is not about capacity, it is about service. It isn’t correct to say “there is a demand for 5,000 people per hour, can it be carried by bus, LRT or subway?” because actually each level of service will have different levels of demand associated with it. The better services will attract more people. And it is also more useful to measure total ridership over a day or week rather than demand per hour per direction. When evaluating a transit system, it is the total ridership that matters most, not the distribution over the day. When you see reports that harp on persons per direction per hour (ppdph) without talking about the actual ridership (like many of the reports on the Toronto LRT) you can be pretty sure that you are reading nonsense. It is really the second stage of the exercise when you decide for instance on a transit system that will cost 2.5 billion and will carry 120,000 people per day when built and 200,000 in 2030 that you check that the capacity, eg 15,000 ppdph, can handle the projected peak demand. Another way to think about capacity and service is to think about sidewalks. All the sidewalks in the city have all the capacity that the city will ever need, millions of people per direction per hour. But really it is the service that people are attracted to, and walking speeds for distances over a km or so do not offer an attractive level of service for most people.

The Broadway UBC line will have ridership demand all along its length, it really isn’t just a UBC service, so having an express UBC service really isn’t talking about the same thing. On Broadway we have a good natural experiment as to how time sensitive people are. The street has both a local stop trolley, the 9, and a faster limited stop service, the 99. The 99 is absolutely far more popular that the 9 and has apparently become the busiest bus line in North America. Actually, if there were more space on the 99 buses, some of the current 9 ridership would switch as well.

The advantage of LRT over BRT is no street-level pollution and a certain smoothness to the ride. The disadvantage is that it can be more easily halted by an accident on the rails. Other than that, there is no difference besides price. In some American cities there may be a development advantage, but in Vancouver and Toronto, we can have as much development as we are willing to zone for. Needless to say, I have become more and more convinced that the LRT approach to urban transit has been, in the main, a wrong turn.

It is true that many of the rail corridors are mainline corridors, but they are either busy, or they require slow travel because of the crossings. And the route across the Fraser really doesn’t add anything that Skytrain does not already provide with better speed and frequency.

Regarding your first paragraph: Each implementation of LRT is different, so I don’t think its safe to say that it would be not conducive to pedestrian life. There are numerous examples of on-street LRT killing the street (Calgary) and ones where it brought the street back to life (Toronto). It all depends on how its designed.

Regarding your second paragraph: Yes, there probably will be high ridership at all stations, but unless we can objectively show that the passengers per hour is above the design constraint of LRT then we should not count it out.

Regarding your third paragraph: If people are so time sensitive, why not remove all the stops and have the train run express to UBC? Of course I am being facetious, but we need to strike a balance between speed, access and cost. At some point, increasing the speed is not worth the cost. I do not profess to know at what point that is.

Regarding your fourth paragraph: Indeed BRT is cheaper, but I disagree that it offers the same level of service as an LRT line. It is a useful interim solution here though.

Regarding your fifth paragraph: The old interurban corridor, and the corridor along the river are mainline railways – not middle-of-the-road light rail. As such, I think your assessment that it will be too slow is based on a false assumption. The trains will operate as fast as the corridor will allow, and a mainline railway can allow very fast speeds. Indeed it doesn’t connect well with the commercial areas in Surrey, but the beauty of LRT is that it can leave the railways and run along the street for the last mile.

And as far as the ridership goes, there will be high ridership along the whole line, even through the lower density areas. (Actually there are only two proposed stations in lower density areas and both have three and four story apartment buildings nearby and even a few ten story apartment buildings within two blocks of both stations – this is by no means suburban densities.)

The LRT option is seven minutes longer end to end which does not sound like much and really isn’t that much, but it is 35% longer and people are very time sensitive. A big part of Vancouver’s transit success, such as it is, is driven by the fast, automated metro system. People like it because along the route, it is faster than driving.

And if only part of the line were to be built as Skytrain, it would not make sense to fill in the rest as LRT. BRT would be well cheaper, more than $500 million and maybe even closer to $1 billion, for very little service difference and with better service integration with the rest of the city.

This line would also not be the first phase of a new regional network. There is the Arbutus rail corridor connecting to the Flats, and at some point I would expect that LRT will be built there (right now there are many more important transit priorities). But the regional transit system is based around Skytrain which it totally appropriate because it is fast enough to be a regional system. LRT along the Fraser River and the old Interurban corridor would be too slow for regional travel and also the route does not connect the major commercial areas in Surrey very well.

It also produces the documentation to file for your transit credit on your income taxes, whereas the open fare system wouldn’t provide such documentation.

Additionally, your funds on your Presto card are secure. If you lose your card, you can get a replacement and your funds will be transferred to your new card.

For more information, you can visit the Presto website at prestocard.ca.

(I’m a user of Presto and not an official spokesperson.)