SameGuy

I kind of love how they are trying to make streetside on Brunswick and Revcon look like walkable neighborhoods, when they are anything but… In fact they are so bad — and so automobile-dominated — that the city chose not to build their main east-west bike path along Brunswick, opting instead to put it on Labrosse, a long block to the north.

Ya bwai

Jeez the reflection of the Château Champlain on Deloitte throws me off every time.

Our two really grand stations became office buildings and beer fest gardens. Centrale is only grand if you’re a fan of Fascist-era Italian buildings like the various ONB and GIL buildings, or the case del Fascio in towns all over Italy and its colonies.

Le lanceur n’a pas de trouble négocier les mêmes courbes que le train. Ça, je peux voir, je ne l’avais pas pensé. 👍🏼

100% d’accord avec chacun de tes sentiments. Smh big time. Mais pas surpris du tout. Comme je dis dans le fil de l’aéroport, ça se peut que M. Rainville a “leaké” des nouvelles que les ministres Alghabra et Bonnardel ne semblent pas prêts à dévoiler.

Ok fair enough. Then we do differ. 😄

I’m really not sure. It looks like a lot more work the old fashioned way. The 5 km PSC segment isn’t ready yet but is the first section slated to open, while almost 10 km of the Anse branch structure is complete and rails have been installed on a significant portion of it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It’s probably not less complex, but I find it shocking how much quicker and more efficient the launching gantry system is at building elevated segments. We still don’t know why it was chosen for all the western segments but not for PSC.

Do you find current iterations of Paris’ RER, the various S-trains in Germanic cities, or even Sydney Trains and Queensland Rail City Trains systems modern? This will let me know where our opinions differ, and we can move along.

Where have you seen $40 billion? No public documents show anything like that. But ok, for the sake of comparison let’s say that cost overruns double GO RER’s 2018 budget to $27 billion… they’ll quadruple service on an expanded, fully-integrated, modern, electrified system covering 270 km over the entire Golden Horseshoe, serving 175 million passengers a year.

This is the old Brunswick Medical Centre building, which long ago relocated to the building across Revcon street above the old Bill Edwards’ Cheers, facing St-John’s 😉 and which now is located in the brand new building they put in the parking lot. The Frontenac site also housed Bistro Table 9, formerly known as “Le Chambertin.” I had my wedding reception there a lifetime ago; we rented out half the space for our party of 36, and shared the dance floor and one-man-house-band with the rest of the patrons, it was fun.

The BEG? It was Cesar’s Palace roller skating rink, built right around the time of the Olympics. I worked in the skate room there when I was 15, for $2 or $3 an hour, which I promptly changed for quarters to spend any break time I had dumping them in the Donkey Kong Jr machine. 😂

I should add that Sydney’s city and suburban trains are more closely related to RER or S-Bahn than any “commuter” trains we have here, with headways as short as 2½ minutes under the central business district, and using modern EMUs in shorter, bi-level train sets. Replacing a line with short, automated metro trains when modernizing is logical if the planned ridership makes it worth the investment.

Sydney did indeed convert an aging suburban train line running through very dense neighbourhoods to rapid transit. But comparing it to the DM line conversion is inaccurate; rather, imagine a busy commuter line from, say, Lachine, running diagonally through VSP, NDG, PM, Vieux-Rosemont, RPP, VSM, St-Leo, all the way to MN, scale it up by 20%, and then project 3% annual growth in every neighbourhood along the line. When it comes time to upgrade that line, would it make sense to convert it to rapid transit and add more stations? Put simply, yes. I’m not saying rapid transit shouldn’t be developed — though I still have serious reservations about building a hybrid RER/light metro into less-dense suburbs — but how is it that we alone have once again decided that the rest of the world is wrong, and have been wrong for decades, yet we still haven’t built the Blue line extension after 40 years of talk? Exo’s DM line was a perfect candidate for substantial improvement up to modern standards, and was never likely for conversion to a light metro, but the deal for its infra was too good for the Caisse to pass up. Their mandate was not to build a light metro out to St-Eustache, but to service the airport from downtown. If I were a principal at the Caisse, I too would cackle at the jackpot that landed in my lap when the government offered the DM line, complete, for about 10% of its real value. But the fact is that major cities, successful cities, growing cities around the world build suburban heavy rail to serve the suburbs, and metros to serve dense inner areas. We just need to buck conventions here, no matter how rational and pragmatic those conventions may be. From rubber-tired trains without proper HVAC that can’t go outdoors and run single, narrow tunnels, to an elevated concrete monstrosity out into the far-flung suburbs (“but it’s automated!”), we just don’t need logic to guide us. Rather than me having to show you why I think you’re wrong, I’d like to be shown actual numbers on why you think suburban/regional rail is so much more expensive than a $10 billion dollar automated tram (with a tram’s capacity) that goes but 30 km with 23 tiny stations. Other cities in other countries — with similar purchasing power parity to ours — are able to build hundreds of kilometres of modern, electrified suburban railways with covered stations and level boarding platforms, carrying hundreds of millions of passengers per year, for a fraction of the cost per kilometre that is projected for REM-B. What am I missing here?

Exactly. VIA wouldn’t piss on itself if its pants were on fire without someone else’s say-so. Suburban/regional trains are much more effective and efficient for serving the common good of the farther reaches of a metropolitan area. Some cities have known this for decades, others have recently jumped on the bandwagon, but we should just abandon ours because… nobody wants to be firm with the freight railways (which were originally Crown corporations and given huge concessions because… COLONIALISM?)??? Cmon, you’re much better and smarter than that, @p_xavier. There are plenty of unused/underused rights-of-way that the government could easily reacquire if it had any backbone at all. As we’ve said before, all it takes is the will to get things done, but that would mean the end of pork-barrel politics and neoliberalism as we know it.

Very good news. Yes, it was a coffee place for a long time but as choices nearby popped up, fewer people fought traffic in that area to get in there. The whole area will transform over the next while, with the Spinelli dealerships relocating, perhaps to the areas incentivized by Pierrefonds (St-Jean near de Pierrefonds) or Dorval (A-40 east of des Sources) currently populated mostly with Dilawri concessions. Or maybe Kirkland, along A-40 near Scotti’s Lamborghini store.

Wow wow wow! Enfin!

Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue or Baie-d’Urfé ain’t exactly “local.” REM really is a low-capacity RER using metro equipment, its stations “express-distance” apart (with few exceptions). Four-car X’trapolis MU trains could serve exo1 well, and would offer substantial gains in service speeds, frequencies and comfort.

#GoHabsGo

Merci pour avoir élaboré ces points. 👍🏼

Yup. Je pense avoir déjà élaboré un scénario comme celui-ci ailleurs dans le fil concernant le pont de l’Île-aux-Tourtes…

Pour qui?