Dumb Mode and Cost Battles.
When matters of cost are out of the way, much more logical decisions can be made.
If there is a single thing that motivated me to get into transit commentary and activism, it was the tendency for fast growing, English-speaking cities the world over to build trams — sometimes in sensible places, but often not.
I cut my teeth on this topic advocating for the Surrey light rail project in Greater Vancouver, which promised more rail (and something unique to the province) — which excited me, and trips hardly faster than a bus — which I’d rather have ignored had it not been for great advocacy from Daryl and others at the group “SkyTrain for Surrey”.
Now, when I actually step back from the light rail obsession in the English-speaking world (here’s a list of a few cities that should not be relying on light rail as their main form of urban transit: Seattle, Manchester, Los Angeles, Birmingham, Portland, and on and on…), I think a lot of the desire to build light rail never had much to do with light rail itself. Arguments about mode were retroactively created to justify an already assumed chosen plan, and instead light rail plans often seem to be based on the premise of light rail being cheap, or perhaps even a good value (although with light rail projects in Toronto now costing more than the subways of two decades ago after inflation adjustment, we might want to reconsider that). The idea that you could get more rail, and thus more lines on the map by going with light rail was very enticing — especially to organizations like the Surrey Board of Trade who think of public transport as a development tool and not a way people get around (because in that case you might prioritize less but faster transit).
These issues of trying to more or less get blood from a stone is what happens when you have an infrastructure cost problem: Cities across the anglosphere spend plenty on transit capital projects, but are forced into awkward and poor decision making trying to “stretch” those dollars.
That’s really evident when you look at say, small European cities, which build metros on corridors that many Anglosphere cities would try to build light rail on (Chinese cities also mostly build metro, but you can dismiss that as a byproduct of size). What you can’t dismiss is the a project like the Eglinton Crosstown or Seattle Link light rail would not be built in Europe or Asia, because if you want to build a subway you build a subway — and it costs less than these North American projects, and if you want a tram you build a tram. The language of “light rail is flexible! It can be a tram and a subway” feels like the English-speaking world coping with the fact that it cannot build the things it should, although I suppose it’s rarely that self aware.
The reasonable costs for various types of projects also tend to align them with geographies where they make sense — the priorities of a big city in a reasonable cost environment will heavily weighted towards metro because big cities can afford it. If they build light rail, they will do it as a small city would — with few frills. In Toronto, we should have been building subways in the 2010s, but instead we built something worse — even after Vancouver perfected the cost effective Canadian light metro with the Canada Line.
And to be fair, Quebec doesn’t get off scoff free, and the problems I see with the Montreal transit discourse are just as bad as anything in Toronto.
There has been significant complaining about the Mount Royal tunnels transfer to the REM, a pragmatic plan that should not be compared to regional rail through running as that never appears to have been on the table. Despite this, conversations revolving around the “loss” of the Mount Royal tunnel are plentiful. While the rail approaches to the Mount Royal tunnel certainly are difficult to replace, these discussions often end up feeling defeatist and obsessive around the century-old infrastructure, which is historic but really not so special. There is no good reason that in a reasonable cost environment new trans-mountain tunnels and cross-city links could not be built. I think this leads to unhealthy discussion: various proposals should not need to battle over a tunnel that is not particularly technically special — if they have merit, build multiple tunnels!
The ultimate takeaway here is that if your transit/infrastructure discussions all happen through a lens of “we can never built anything (affordably) anymore”, you’re bound to get some very weird outcomes. Any serious discussion of infrastructure needs to take its cost into account.
As Reece knows, I have been writing about defects MTA's proposal to use Light Rail vehicles for the proposed Interborough Express (IBX) between Brooklyn & Queens in the New York City at bqrail.substack.com. I get the feeling some system managements simply feel the need to have a light rail line, even to serve an area with a population of 900,000 as the IBX would do.
I suggest Reece post videos on what is a light rail, as distinguished from a "heavy rail" metro; and explaining the differences between the four categories of systems in China.
I thought about this when some Light Rail or Metro systems go on Mainline Train corridors or vice versa. Would’ve it been better in your opinion if the REM ran on like 25kv or had the TGV have dual voltage changes share portion of Deux-Montages so that the if the Corridor HSR plan ever got enacted, their trains can use it too going to Gare Centrale?
Would’ve fixed an awkward alignment for HFR or HSR plans without having to have a station in Laval or at find an Exo Station with a metro connection.