To the editor:
Re: "Light rail along 16th better than $3 billion subway," Letters, Dec. 21.
Up to a point I agree with Jim Burgner that there should be a light rail line to UBC starting at the VCC station just west of Clark Drive. It makes sense to use the existing tram line alongside West First Avenue to Granville Island. However, I think it would be better to continue on West Fourth Avenue to UBC (basically the route of the #84 bus).
The city's plan to spend nearly $3 billion on a Broadway tunnel ending at Arbutus is pathetic. I don't think it would ever get built - too expensive and only gets halfway to its goal. Twenty years from now we could still be talking about the Broadway line and still have huge diesel-spewing buses thundering back and forth from UBC to Commercial.
The city should look at light rail, on Fourth or 16th, or wherever. These may be imperfect choices, but affordable. The Broadway line makes no sense.
Lynn Kisilenko, Vancouver
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To the editor:
Jim Burgner's promotion of non-automated light rail, be it for short or long distance trips, still requires seriously considering the many cuts across many streets, thus negatively and very annoyingly affects (via traffic light) stop-and-go, fossil-fuel-emitting traffic.
Additional fuel-burning buses hopefully will be ignored by the powers that be; and, oh yes, they spew their toxins aplenty with their unrelenting stop and go in vehicle-congestion infested Vancouver. However, there's much green potential in a massive addition to overhead electric-line grids.Unfortunately, as long as SkyTrain is a monetarily - though not an environmentally - greater expense, there'll be letters to newspapers aplenty denouncing this superior form of mass transportation.
Regardless of its price, SkyTrain's benefits considerably outweigh its negatives - unless, of course, one foolishly places breathable air on par with the necessity of money.
Frank G. Sterle, Jr., White Rock
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To the editor:
Only in Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»would the specter of an LRT (or tramway as Europeans call them) on a major street have so many people foaming at the mouth.
The main reason why these modern trams with several articulated sections (also known as LRT) have been so popular around the world since the mid-1990s is because they run along, or across, major shopping streets.
Portland transit mall, where several lines meet, hasn't destroyed the businesses around it. Far from it. Cars don't have any problem turning left across tram tracks and sharing the roads with them either. As in many towns on several continents with big LRTs, most stations are on a sidewalk.
Seattle, too, has a tramway and it looks just like the SkyTrain, especially in the tunnel section in downtown Seattle and on the Tukwila viaduct to the airport. This is not too surprising as SkyTrain is a Light Rail Transit system (an automated one).
Tramways come in many sizes. A popular one is the Alstom Citadis 402: 44 metres long, it carry 300 passengers. The trams in Portland (Siemens S70) and Seattle (Kinkishario-Mitsui) are 29 metres long but run in a twin unit that is 58 metres long and carry 344 passengers in Portland and 400 in Seattle.
As a comparison with Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»rapid transit, a Canada Line fixed pair is 41 metres long and carries 334 passengers, while a twin unit of Mark II cars is 33.4 metres long and carry 290 passengers.
Calgary's LRT ridership is much higher than any comparable U.S. light rail system at 300,000 passengers per weekday (according to Wikipedia)
Cost of a LRT: in 2007 the Portland Green line cost was $43 million per kilometre. Paris T3 tram cost of the recently opened latest section was 38 to 54 million Euros per km depending on the sources.
The latest French tramways built in a couple of small towns cost 20-30 million Euros per km ($ 26-39 Euros million km) depending on the design of the trams, the level of beautification of the streets.
Jean-Louis Brussac, Coquitlam
