First Look at AMT multi-level cars this Friday

The AMT has announced that the new Bombardier multi-level cars will be unveiled to the public this Friday, August 21st at the Bombardier plant in La Pocatiere. These are the first cars out of 160 ordered in December 2007 by the AMT.

AMT Multi-level car

Features of the cars:

• Contract price: 386M$ for 160 cars
• Two levels of seating with an intermediate level at the extremities
• High and low level doors (two of each per side) for operation at all stations of the network (including central station)
• Stainless steel body shell (heavier than the aluminium shell bi-levels currently operating)
• Sized to fit in the Mont-Royal tunnel.
• Toilets (in some cars)
• Passenger information system

They will first operate on the Montréal/St-Hilaire line. And they are the only cars that can be used on the train de l’est. Eventually, they could operate on all lines.

Bixi Chosen by London & Boston

Montreal’s Bixi bike system has been selected as the technology to use for the bike sharing programs what will be implemented in Boston and London.

London will have 6000 bikes distributed over 9 districts
Boston will use Montreal’s call centre.  Luckily, for the success of the system, helmets are only mandatory for children under 16 in Massachusetts.

Some of the announcements:
The Gazette
Transport for London
Boston Announcement

There are competitors to our bixi however :
B-cycle has a pilot system in Denver

Here’s a very favorable review in the Boston Globe

Bike share seems to be sweeping over the continent!

Trams to return to Vancouver

Trams will make a special appearance during the Olympic games in 2010 from January 21st to March 21st.

Brussels Flexity Tram

A special demonstration line will run from the new Canada line station on Cambie Street to Granville Island. It will be 1.8km of single track line with a passing loop ½ way (the red part in the image below). STIB, the public transport operator in Brussels, will provide two of their new Bombardier Flexity trams. The best part – it will be free!  If successful, the system could be expanded to go to Stanley Park via the skytrain stations of Main Street and Waterfront (the blue part).

Street car route

The participants of the demonstration project are:

• City of Vancouver
• CMHC (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation)
• STIB (Société des Transports Intercommunaux de Bruxelles)
• Bombardier

As the pictures on Bombardier’s web site show, this is definitely a temporary installation. The catenary poles are just normal telephone poles! It does appear that even though there is an existing rail line, the entire track is being renewed.

With a passenger capacity of 178 (seated + 4 pers/m2 standing) and 6 doors per side, this vehicle will show to Vancouverites what can be done with modern transportation systems.

More information:
http://olympichostcity.vancouver.ca/gettingaround/publictransit/olympicline.htm

More News about Trams vs. Buses

Writing my previous post caused wordpress to amusingly automatically create a link to a pro-tram blog in Edinburgh (a very nice city that I have visited – I went to the Haymarket train depot of First Scotrail).

This link caused me to discover that similar discussions have been held in Edinburgh and West London precisely about this topic. They write about it far more elegantly than I ever could! The result – Trams are what are needed.
To be fair here is the other side of the discussion: Pro-Trolley bus

I have to say that the picture in the pro-trolley bus is more like a rubber-tired tram. These have been tried in a few French towns Clermont-Ferrand (home of Michlenin), Nancy (disaster of a project), and Caen with not very much success.  In fact these trams-on-wheels are no cheaper than a real tram.

Nobody is saying that trams should be everywhere in the city. They are desperately needed on the routes such as Cote-des-neiges, Parc, Pie IX, Notre Dame, Cote-Vertu/Henri Bourassa where buses cannot provide a quality service even though there is (at peak times) a bus every five minutes.
The problem in many cities is the “metro or bust” phenomenon.  Metro’s are only needed on routes where really high capacity is needed.  Anything else is served by buses.  Pushing metro extensions and nothing else generally ensures that the project doesn’t happen because the projected ridership is simply not there to make the project viable.  In the mean time, car use and urban sprawl continue to rise.

What is needed is a medium capacity service (at medium cost). That is where the tram comes in!

Trolley Buses aren’t the solution to Montreal’s transit needs

There has been lots of talk about using trolley buses instead of trams for Montreal’s plan de transport.  I’m not one of them.   Trolley buses have fewer advantages than people expect. On a one-to-one replacement basis, they are just buses that don’t emit CO2.

Being simply buses that run on electricity, they have the same disadvantages as diesel buses.

Trolleys buses are no faster than regular diesel buses. Therefore will be no more likely to convince people to change their travel habits.

Trolley buses require two contact wires above the bus resulting in complicated and ugly wiring. Trams, since they use a pantograph with current return in the rails, only need a single wire resulting in a much more harmonious integration with the city.

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, regular diesel buses have considerable advantages over cars already. For an urban environment these are the estimated energy consumption and emissions:

Transport Type	kJ/pass*km	gCO2/pass*km
Car (single occupant)	2100	143
Diesel Bus (full)	567	40
Diesel-Electric Hybrid Bus (full):	567	24
Electric Bus(full)	567	0
Tram (full)	300	0

Sources:
Hydro Quebec and STM

From a greenhouse gas reduction point of view, we need to get people out of their cars. Simply replacing diesel buses with electric (or even hybrid) ones will do very little to convince people to leave their cars at home.

As shown in the table above, Trams also use roughly half as much energy as a bus of any type. Last year, the STM spent 40 million dollars in fuel but only 23 million in electricity for the metro.

Labour costs are a very considerable factor in the operating costs of the STM. According to their 2009 budget, salaries account for 63.7% of the operating costs. Trams are one way of improving the passenger to driver ratio and reducing labour costs since they can transport more people and can even be coupled together to form a double length train but still operated by just one person. Of course, I would want to see those drivers assigned to other routes to improve the overall level of service.

Trams are matched only by metros in the speed in which people can get on and off:

• A 30m tram will typically have 6 wide doors for entry/exit.
• Regular Buses have 1 exit and 1 entrance/exit
• The articulated Buses have 2 exits and 1 entrance/exit

This is another of the reasons why Trams can travel faster – they spend less time stopped picking up passengers.

Trams are definitely the way to go. Lets stop talking about it and just do it!

Peak Oil Publicity – Finally

The Gazette had a front page story about Peak Oil this Saturday. This is the first time to my knowledge this subject has been given such high visibility to the general public. Le Devoir has reprinted some AFP stories but this subject has a lot less visibility in Canada compared to Europe.

In my opinion this is a subject long overdue to be publicized to the general public. I’ve actually read quite a bit about this issue and my first letter to the editor in July 2007 was about this subject.

Most people assume that we have years and years of oil before we “run out”.  The “run out” number is typically calculated by dividing the estimated reserves by the current production to arrive at a certain number of years. The implication of this is that everything will continue as normal until the magic day when oil will just stop flowing completely. The reality is much different and alarming.

The production of oil has been shown to generally follow a bell curve for individual wells, individual fields and entire countries. What remains is to show it for the entire world which has not happened yet but is only a matter of time. Our society’s problems will instead begin when the available supply starts to decline (or peak) not when it “runs out”.

Another dynamic was well illustrated last year when oil skyrocketed to 150$ a barrel. People seem to think that you just poke a hole in the ground and oil just bursts out of the ground. This used to happen but not any more. Oil that is being found today is much harder to get than in the past and requires sophisticated technologies and a lot of money to finally bring it into production. Declining production from the easy oil and more expensive new oil will combine to push oil prices very high in the future.

Why is this important?

• Oil is used for 95% of all energy used for transportation
• Oil represents 43% of all fuel consumption.
• Our agriculture is heavily reliant on oil: for every joule of food energy consumed, 10 joules of fossil fuel energy is consumed.

This is an issue that every citizen should become informed about and demand action from their representatives at every level of government.

What can you do as an individual?

• In the short term you can switch to a more fuel-efficient car, reduce the number of cars you own, and start taking public transit.
• In the long term, you can move to a neighborhood where you are not so dependant upon the car where you can walk to various activities and shops.

Our government needs to play a larger role to stop encouraging car use by:

• Stopping building highways and bridges that encourage people to live further away from their jobs.
• Investing in public transit infrastructure such as tramways, metros, buses, inter-city trains.

We need to take action now to be ready when the crisis hits.  So far, unfortunately, not much as been done.

If you are interested in this subject here are some books that will make you think:

• The End of Oil
• The Party’s Over
• Hubbert’s Peak
• Beyond Oil
• Twilight in the Desert

And some Web sites:

• The oil drum
• Wikipedia
• Mathew simmons (author of Twilight in the Desert)

Problems with AMT’s leased cars

The Gazette is reporting that the doors of the cars that the AMT has rented from New Jersey Transit (NJT) don’t always open properly.

I’ve seen some of these rented cars in Vendome station and they are mixing the cars within existing trains.  I’ve noticed that the doors are configured for both high and low level platforms but there is no door cover over the steps that are used for low level platforms.

Perhaps snow is getting into the door mechanism?

They have been painted with a basic AMT logo but here is what they looked like before: Locos & Car in Montreal & Car in service in NJ

According to this, AMT has rented 7 Locos and 14 Comet IB coaches at a price of 15,000 $US per car per year for a total price of 420,000 $US for two years. Seems like a bargain – if they work!

STM gives an early Christmas present to Families

Note: No, I haven’t disappeared or died.  I’ve been busy working on this.

Starting on December 6th, up to 5 children will be able to travel for free on the STM network during weekends and holidays if they are accompanied by an adult.

This type of program was requested several months ago by a municipal politician (sorry can’t find a reference) and it seems that it worked.

I will definitely take advantage of this program as I like to bring my children downtown on the weekend.   But when I travel with my wife we often take the car because it is cheaper.

My situation:

2 parents (1 with a CAM) + 1 child (7 years old) + 1 child (4 years old)

• Round trip cost before: 6.16 $
• Round trip cost now: 4 $

With just me (with a CAM) & my children

• Round trip cost before: 2.16 $
• Round trip cost now: FREE

I’m sure lots of other parents will come to the same conclusion!

Here are the announcements:

STM (French)
STM (English)
Le Devoir

Media Day for the New Metro Cars

STM had a media day about the new tender for the metro cars to replace the MR63.

Reported here: The Gazette and Le Devoir

Since I do work for Alstom, I can only offer my personal opinion about the features of the cars.

Full gangway between the cars:

• This adds a lot of flexibility and spreads out the passengers
• Better chance of getting a seat.
• STM will have to operate the 9-car sets all the time though.
• I’ve been on the NS-93 in Chile (practically the same design as the MP-89 in Paris) that have them and I was impressed

Air Conditioning:

• Bad idea.  Montreal’s climate doesn’t justify the expense for only a few months of the year.
• What people forget is that air conditioning only moves heat around.
• The tunnels and the stations will be hotter – then people will demand air conditioning in the stations as well (big $)
• A better way to reduce the heat in the tunnels would be to have regenerative braking but this requires changes to the track power supply.  It would save quite a bit of electricity though!

3 doors/car:

• From a maintenance point of view it is better because there will 25% less chance of a door on the train malfunctioning
• The doors will be wider than they are right now so that will compensate for their reduced number
• The doors all need to be equally spaced (including from one car to the next) this will allow the future addition of platform screen doors in the stations.
• As they say in the story, recycling of each door independantly if they are not closed will greatly improve the dwell time at the stations.

Interior Noise

• I’m sure that the current trains are nowhere near the current standard for allowable noise levels.  The newer trains need to be a lot quieter.

Surveilance Cameras

• This is a standard feature on metros today.
• It should increase the sense of security of the passengers

Door close warning

• I don’t think it adds that much – you just get an earlier warning (1 or 2 seconds) that the doors will close.

I can’t wait to start working on this tender when it finally is issued!

Sneek Peek at the NDG-CDN Bike Path Proposal

Although the NDG bike path will be publicly announced on June 19th, a look at the city’s official ‘Plan de Transport’ (approved on June 11th) gives a sneek peek.

Here are the main projects for the NDG area (there are others for CDN as well):

1. Complete the de Maisonneuve bike path from DeCarie to Claremount to travel through Westmount.

• The CHUM mega-hospital project needs to start and the CP Decarie overpass needs to be modified.  This won’t be ready until at least 2010.

2. Cavendish from de Maisonneuve to St-Laurent

• Requires the Cavendish over pass to be completed before it can go further than Cote-St-Luc

3. From Concordia North on W. Broadway until Fielding and then east until Ellerdale and then to Isabella to eventually arrive at UdeM.

• Can be implemented now

4. Terrebonne from Concordia University to Girouard.

• Can be implemented now

5. Grand Blvd (not 100% sure but it makes sense since it is so wide) up from de-Maisoneuve until Fielding

• Can be implemented now

6. Girouard (& Clanranald/Earnscliffe) from de Maisonneuve all the way up to Ferncroft where it turns east to use Barclay/Plamondon until Wilderton.

• Can be implemented now

The full map can be seen on page 107 of (this link)  (40MB download – high quality maps)

The other question is what kind of paths will they be?  Here are four types with their evaluation according to Projet Montreal (page 26 of this document)

Happy Cycling!

UPDATE (July 1): The official Presentation from the City
Avid Cyclist Peter McQueen of Projet Montreal has his comments