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Originally Posted by Nufy
Am I the only one thinking its wrong to use rail cars that aren't compatible with the rest of the LRT ?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
No, not alone. I mean, they have reasons, I'm just not sure they outweigh the benefits.
It all goes back to Druh wanting this to be an integrated streetcar like line that was not obtrusive. They wanted low stations that wouldn't be as large an impact, as it was going to run at street level for the most part. But then scope creep hit, it went underground, grade separated for 95% of it, and no one thought to re-examine whether the low floor plan still made sense. At least that's how I see it.
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Adapted from my post from a couple years ago:
New high-floor LRT lines just aren't being built anymore, and really haven't been since the mid-eighties. Since Calgary, Edmonton and a couple other cities were very early adopters, they have lines that were high floor from the outset, and thus every time they are extended (i.e. Crowfoot, Saddleridge, even the WestLRT was an operational extension of the NE line), they have had to build new high-floor platforms and buy high-floor trains.
The Green Line being low floor doesn't have much to do with what Coun. Farrell wants necessarily, although she may champion the idea. It's just what's being built by just about everybody now and has been for a long time. It was always going to be low floor design regardless of whether or not it was buried in central areas.
The Green Line will be operationally separate from the rest of the system, and thus is not mandated to built as high-floor. It will not share cars nor maintenance facilities with the rest of the system, nor will it likely be physically connected with it (as in the ability to shuttle cars throughout all lines on the system via track connections). Perhaps train parts and components could be shared though.
The scale of the current fleet and the scale of the new fleet that will be needed for the Green Line are large enough that they shouldn't see too many negative effects of not being able to share cars. Besides, as things are now, Calgary Transit currently operates 4 different types of cars that cannot be matched together to form consists.