elysia trains!

YAYYYYY

ottawa!!

o train is three urban rail lines in ottawa. it's so cool!! everything is so well designed and thoughtful feelings and its very functional . there's also like 50km of BRT and it's one of the world's most important BRT cities.

well, it's very functional when it's running. line 1 always is having issues. line 2 and 4 are awesome. line 1 is because it was rushed into opening.

we REALLY like the user experience design of Ottawa's transit. you can tell that so much thought was put into the design system, and it completely trounces anything else I've seen in Canada. Even from basic things like bus stop signposts, they're much better. They are large, bold, easy to spot from a distance, and have easy to read information. The pole usually has a map of the most important routes that stop there, some timetables, and support information. If there is a shelter at the bus stop, there is almost always a full system map. The full system map at regular bus stops is incredibly rare, but incredibly nice!

and everything down to the announcements and colours chosen! its quite clean. I absolutely love the new O-Train wayfinding design theme, and am very happy that some Transitway ( BRT ) stations have been retrofitted with it. Love it.

There's also been a fair amount of thought around how people are gonna use and interface with the system, and it's all kinda sensible in a way that i cant say is true for most english speaking cities. maybe not french speaking cities? which ottawa is technically also? but yknow what i mean. it could be that Ottawa statistically has one of the highest number of transit users to population ratios out there, but i also find that there are very few infrequent users who are confused. The culture of transit in the city and the very good wayfinding contribute to a seamless experience that is pretty rare in a sprawly underfunded city like this. Ottawa also seems to have the most sane implementation of bus priority measures ive seen yet !

the city's transit often gets compared to toronto and montreal's transit, because Ottawa is sandwiched between them geographically. This is generally pretty unfair to Ottawa, given the population and funding disparities, and how comparisons are always cherry picked to ignore ottawa's strong suits ( such as its wayfinding and culture of transit! ). i think it says something that a conservative mayor, in a sprawly city, post quarantine funding and ridership woes, is trying to expand the transit system in a major way, and secure reliable long term operational funding. That's really rational in a way that's difficult to envision for a place like toronto (although... it would also be rational to raise property taxes to "low, but still higher than ottawa's current property taxes" in order to fund transit more reliably....)

i think ottawa people probably don't understand how much of a huge priviledge the o train is now, and how absolutely massive of a city building project the current expansions will be. of course there will be growign pains early on in any new rail system !!

people in ottawa call them light rail, which is extremely funny, because line 1 is a metro and line 2 is regional rail. line 1 uses modified alstom citadis, which are really common trams in paris for urban spaces, but they aren't really meant to be used for metros, which is probably why it keeps falling apart. the tram vehicle probably isn't built to handle the high frequency and acceleration and speed and route design of a metro network.

line 2 in the uses Stadler FLIRTs and coradia lint multiple units, which are very commonly used for regional trains in europe. line 2 is legally considered a mainline railway and so it needed to get a special exception by the government of canada to let it import euro trains! canada requires mainline passenger trains be able to handle a crash with a canadian freight trains (some of the heaviest and longest freight trains in the world), which lints aren't, capable of, nor should they be expected to on a nearly entirely passenger only line!!

we think its super cool that ottawa uses mostly normal european trains and doesn't try to pull some bullshit like most north american cities do. calling it light rail doesn't give the o train nearly enough credit as it deserves.

we're not all that happy with any of our images of the o train but we've been sitting on some for at least a year or two and want to put it on webby site.

i think it would be awsome to hang out under a train at night time and record the ambience of it passing

montréal métro

rubber tyres french

im gonna be real with u i have a bone to pick with public transport in montreal. i even wrote a blog about it.

the metro is extremely loud, extremely sweaty, extremely upskirt prone, extremely hard to stand on, horrible seating layout that makes standing and sitting more uncomfortable than it needs to, takes forever to get somewhere, poor for accessibility, bad fare structure, uses turnstiles instead of fare gates, etc etc etc.. The trains are super cute though !!

im drunk but i wanna share the door sound

im not drunk but i wanna share the next stop screen from the older MR73 metro cars. I really like the lighting in those cars and wish the new cars used them at night time.

gare windsor is really pretty. the outside is extremely grand and the inside is extremely dark and edgy. we love it.

namur station is also really nice? uhh. there's this one exo/metro station in laval i really like too. think its one stop before the terminus. A lot of the green line stations towards the olympic statium are also really nice, especially the pie-ix one that has the olympic rings on the platform. i dont remember what station it is between berri uqam and pie-ix that has a skylight but i like that one a lot too.

the whole aesthetic of the metro i think is one of the killer features. read somewhere that montreal and stockholm were the first capitalist metro systems to include public art?? its awsome

there is a lot less to photograph also because it is entirely underground. we like using flash in the dark parts of the station because it looks goth :) yay 🥰

it would probably look really cool if the train was out of range of the flash but something in the foreground was, or vice versa. huge contrast!

métro kinda feels like a microcosm of montéal culture as a whole, and it also feels like one of those rail line that is interlinked with the city's identity in a deep way. it is full of art and flair and thoughtful design, and it just does things Differently from everywhere else cus we're french fuck you. but it is also incredibly stubborn and resistant to new ideas, demonstrated by the fact that no new métro has been able to be build for many decades, despite politcal power existing to do so, purely because of a commitment to doing everything the way they've always done it.

the old shitty turnstiles, the deep cavernous stations with glorious artistic masterpieces, the rubber tyred trains, the dated signalling.

the Réseau express métropolitain is all that has been built in a very long time, and it only exists due to the circumvention of the traditional building process. we usually consider the REM to be a part of the métro, except in the case of the fact it, actually continues to be relevant.

i wish madame rem could go east

more pictures!

gøteborg

i love göteborg they should make it real i wanna kiss the trams also im drunk

big placeholder !

m34 so long friend kererū!! kereű wide freiend and m34 long friend

i lov eyou

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wellington

omg hiii!!!

metlink is the brand for public transport in wellington region, and we really like them! really, we also really like wellington as a city.

metlink vehicles look really really really cool. their trains especially are awesome.

we've never been exposed to a proper suburban railway. Toronto's regional railway, GO transit, is the only one we've used before, but that uses railcars designed for commuter transport , that were later adapted to high frequency suburban-urban services. and so feels very different from a purpose built suburban railway.

metlink's rail network entirely uses electric multiple unit trains called matangi, named after wellington's status as the world's windiest city (matangi is one of the several te reo māori words for wind). i think it's really cool they have an actual name !! most trains are just named the brand name, like ottawa's flirts and lints and citadis trains are just brand names.

orginally we expected the trains to feel more like metro trains in how theyre designed but it turns out they are a lot more like long distance heavy rail. they are very large on the inside, way bigger than they look, and that is an especially refreshing surprise after coming to expect cramped interiors flooded with way too many seats, which we've been conditioned to expect from new zealand buses.

matangi do have a load of seating too, but it works so much better because of how much wider the trains are. when we first saw pictures of matangi interiors we were concered it would be like the buses, but thankfully its not a problem.

something very peculiar to us about new zealand public transport is that standing and walking space is minimised in favour of as much seating as possible. only the accessibility sections of some vehicles even have standing hand holds, and flip down/up seats. On matangi trains it is comparatively much nicer, though, since an half of an entire train car is dedicated to the accessibility space.

something even stranger to us is that the trains cars had steps inside them. the accesibility car in particular has a low floor for boarding but then halfway through has interior steps to get to the main seating area and the other cars. and level boarding is very strange. it feels like at some stations they tried having level boarding but just gave up part way there, and the trains also have ramps inside them that have to be layed out by the door operator for wheelchairs and anything else with wheels.

actually, this is all very similar to GO transit, weirdly enough. it just feels strange since these are brand new railcars, whereas GO is using a gigantic fleet of legacy coaches that should probably be changed out with something more fitting for the service.

just like GO, there are fare zones and you need to tag on and off the train, and just like GO, we constantly forget to do both. Except the train staff actually check your card like 50% of the time on metlink to see if you've payed, which is really embarassing when you think you tagged on but you actually tagged off and so your card gets read as fare evading. Oops. i dont mean to do it!!

GO says they do this but we've literally never seen or heard about it happening.

Also at one point a train staff gave us this, which, huh. I mean one time the bus driver charged us the 13 year old fare, but this is a little rediculous~

I don't think children are actually charged a fare, it's just a cute gesture. we've heard paper tickets aren't even accepted anymore. we know this because the staff worker also gave them to the kids in front of us after checking an adult's snapper.

those kids also mentioned how they didn't like the train cuz it didn't have toys or anywhere to play, which gave us an oppurtinity to tell them and the adult about ontario northland's play area railcar, that used to be used on one of the ontario northland railway lines!!

toy trains

the doors to the matangi trains all have buttons for passengers, which is surprsing! the buses have operator only doors and we thought button operated doors was only useful for places that needed air conditioning or heating. and, they actually use the passenger door buttons! some of metlink's double decker buses have buttons to open them but they go unused, and toronto's trams also have door open buttons, but they're also ignored since all doors open at every stop.

train should go to cbd

more pictures!

many of our matangi photographs are directly inspired by taitset's welly video [youtube]

we really like the matangi

HDR version [ jpegxl ]

this one was taken from hanover street, looking over the ngaio gorge on the johnsonville line.

we wanted to create a specific aesthetic with this image to highlight the calm environment in the photo, and worked our hand at making our own preset in darktable. we're happy with it, but have some qualms with it. it feels too bright and too flat, while also feeling too colourful.

probably want to go for a faded film look,,

we really really wanted a picture of the train with the water! we had either wanted to take it further inland or from the water, and get some compression in, but we didn't know where to go! so this is the best we've gotten

metlink bus

metlink probably has the best quality of life buses we've ever used

the vehicles are new and cozy and have a rad colour scheme going on (green and white with yellow highlights), a screen that shows the next three stops and how close you are to them, giant live departures boards at most important stops, voice announcements on board, a ton of the vehicles being electric, even the double deckers, good frequencies on core routes, and every bus has a unique tagline on the exterior that never makes much sense but is a great distraction! double back doors with two card readers to allow faster and more comfortable boarding (although the doors are still too thin to comfortably allow two people through at once) they even have an awesome website that tells you the fastest bus to take in any given location and destination.

we've only really used buses in wellington city, not the surrunding region (new town, johnsonville, airport, cbd). im sure this is where frequencies are highest, but there is a major bottleneck in the cbd. a load of buses all head through the exact same routes, and the CBD roads are very tight and have a load of stops next to each other. the only CBD express bus that we know of is the airport express, which charges much higher fares than normal buses, and also gets stuck behind normal all-stop buses for most of its route.

especially since wellington (or at least the private companies operating the network) opted for double decker buses instead of bendy ones for higher capacity. double decks have a huge problem in that boarding and deboarding time suddenly gets like exponentially longer, since every single person needs to funnel through a single steep and winding staircase to enter and exit. also, our partner really doesn't like the top level anyways, and kinda views it as a gimmick, and like,,, its not,,, but also, im not disagreeing either!

the stairwell absolutely destroys passenger flow and therefore dwell times. now imagine youre on the airport express and there is all-stops double decker in front of you.

this wouldn't be a problem with bendy bussies, which are just normal buses but longer and with more doors. well, it could still be bad, if wellington continues to uphold front door only boarding, meaning people would bunch at the front of the bus and leave the back empty, or people cycling to the back would take longer to walk there. but like, if you have bendy buses in a high capacity arrangement, which is precisely what they are for, it should be assumed you are gonna have all door boarding, right??? right?? please

like, please add express bus lanes, please. please let buses bypass other buses. really though, the CBD should have some form of rapid transport along that route. like a metro or a BRT system. please make trip times in the cbd acceptable.

it is actually incredibly strange that wellington's extensive railway network stops just north of the CBD. Some kind of railway should continue into the CBD and probably further into some of the suburbs. Wellington buses are always full and constantly stopping and getting stuck.

another huge issue with cbd buses that could probably only be resolved with grade separation is traffic signals. it is frustratingly common to get stuck for several traffic signal cycles every couple of stops because of how long it takes to board and unboard, and also many of these signals last for several minutes. most of your travel time in the cbd is spent moving 0 metres. like. we tried making a video of riding the buses in wellington, but most of it just ended up waiting at signals and dwelling at stops.

a lot of the signals the buses get stopped by are ped signals, and we gotta keep those. the other option would be to remove more stops, since the network has the problem of having way too many way too close together. although, in all honesty, the frequency of stops makes a lot more sense in a city as dense as wellington, so maybe not. the other option to increase travel time is to have it so it takes less time for people to get on and off, which means gettign rid of the double deck, getting larger doors, and getting more doors. the suburban routes could keep their double decks so long as they dont lead too far into the city or dont use the main corridor.

an automated light metro is what wellington should have

lots are battery without advertising, no more trolleybuses, double deck and single, lots of seat, great frequency, tons of live next arrival signs

should be express in cbd

toronto

comp[laoinign]

toronto got all the trains. i really mostly like the trams so i talk about them lots. i have taken Three photos of the toronto subway in my life, and one of them was taken from the 401

we love trams a lot they are so pretty.

it is interesting! it is powered by both trolley poles and pantographe power.

we really love the colours! whenever we see a petro canada gas station roof from a distance and through some foliage, we always imediately are confused, thinking it is a toronto streetcar.

they have a special design that lets them use a variable height ramp. that is really cool! in toronto, many of the tram stations are in the middle of the street, with no kerb or platform, just roadway! in addition, some have kerbs, and we think some also have level boarding. The first two require different height ramps for wheelchairs!

we think it is really funny how governments and others try and explain how LRT and trams are different it is really funny 🥺

more pictures!