Comment by bluGill
1 day ago
Gadgetbahn - a derisive term transit advocates use for something that claims to be innovative but in fact doesn't do anything not thought of before and doesn't solve any problems.
They make all kinds of claims that don't stand up to over 100 years of history running trains. The claim they are innovative, but there is nothing new here, and no evidence they have looked at the real problems of transit systems. Someone is going to make a lot of money on this at the expense of the community that loses.
Trains have been around for a long time. You can buy all the parts you need for a good system off the shelf. You won't be saving money by designing something new, you just waste money on engineers to design something and then lose the scale factors you could get from buying the same thing as everyone else. If you buy the same thing as everyone else that means there will be a market for spare parts and thus in 20 years when (not if!) something breaks you can keep the system running.
Yes overhead wires are expensive - but they are a rounding error compared to track. Batteries are expensive too, and you have to buy a lot of them. Batteries need to be recharged which means these trams will be out of service often so they have to buy a lot more so that when one is out of service for charging the others can work. (you still need a few extra for maintenance, but battery charging is more common so you need a lot more)
If you want to build a train the best way to save money is to build exactly the same as everyone else does: standard off the shelf trains, running on standard off the shelf rails, and standard off the shelf overhead rail. If you want to innovate make sure that everyone is fluent in Spanish, Turkish, Korean, or Italian - because places where those languages are spoke build and run trains much cheaper than other places you can think of so you want to learn from them. (note that French or Japanese are not on the above list - while those areas do cheaper than English speakers, they are still expensive)
I'm not sure about the UK, but in the US most of the cost blowout for trains seems to be in stations, so focus all your innovation there: don't make them monuments to how much money you can spend. (The UK has cost problems almost as bad as the US, but I'm not aware of any study on where the issues come from, while at least in the US there are studies).
Well the standard response to this kind of "do it the way everyone does it" is "... change has to start somewhere". It's hard to tell, without hearing a report from a council of open-minded-rigorous-experts, whether some claimed innovation on a particular is actually worth doing or not---but certainly neither of "innovation is always good" and "innovation never works" is true.
Anyway everyone is pretty sure that that something is wrong with the standard train economics as you describe them, because if there wasn't something wrong with it there'd be a lot more trains. I can't tell from the site, or from your comment, if this is the solution, or even worth doing as an experiment... but "don't change anything ever" doesn't strike me as productive either.
The problems with trains are well known and they are not addressing them. There might be unknown problems an well, but the things they are talking about have already been tried and failed for reasons they don't seem to be aware of.
Innovation should require some knowlegde of what is already done - otherwise you invent square wheels.
They are addressing the problem of cost by 1) using BEVs to reduce overhead wire cost, 2) using tighter turn radii to reduce retrofitting needs, and 3) reducing the depth needed to avoid costly subservice infrastructure disruption
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They're addressing one problem, and one problem only.
Adding a bus line isn't sexy, even bus rapid transit (BRT) sounds like a wet fart. They work, they can work extremely well, but nobody gets excited about it.
This thing is just like a monorail; something worse than a bus but that sounds sexier.
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You’re talking about trains, but this is about trams. The design constraints of building into an existing and very dense road network are complex.
I agree with much of your sentiment, and hope that the Coventry council is being challenged in these sorts of ways, but at the same time I recognise that each city is going to have quite different requirements for trams driving down the roads in its centre.
Perhaps a better push back is: why isn’t this just a better bus network?
A tram and train are the same thing. No difference at all.
There are different modes of operation that differentiate them but fundamentaly they are all trains and face the same issues
They operate in completely different scenarios. They’re the same shape, but they’re a different set of hardware, constraints, accessibility, need to be scheduled in a different way to account for traffic, different safety concerns, different signalling systems, different distances, different surroundings.
Again I sorta see what you mean, but feel you’re massively over simplifying this.
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Your comment contradicts itself.
The second sentence is partially true: they do have different modes of operation.
But no, they don’t face entirely the same issues. Trains should hopefully never routinely encounter cars sharing their track and they don’t have to make tight turns to follow existing roadways.
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Well then there's no difference between overground and underground trains. But it's pretty clear that there are different issues facing building new metro lines.
Unfortunately the Coventry VLRT is all about aesthetics over actually transit benefits. If the they were concerned about being useful transit the vehicle would have capacity higher than an articulated bus. Instead the main benefit of Trams/LRT over buses, capacity, is sacrificed leaving no real benefits. You can see the same thing with the Obama ere streetcars in the USA where most of them proved no real benefits over the buses the run alongside them but at least they retained the capacity even if it was never needed.
London’s DLR is a gadgetbahn. For all its obvious limitations it’s been quite successful. Lots of new stations, lots of expansions, decent integration with traditional rail. VLR would work similarly.
I don't think it's gadgetbahn
>something that claims to be innovative but in fact doesn't do anything not thought of before and doesn't solve any problems
The DLR was I think about the first decent scale autonomous rail system and provides a lot of transport.
I mean things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Tran... predated it by a decade but is dinky in comparison.
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Finding the right balance of capacity is a tough problem because cities generally intend to grow, and it's expensive to to have unused capacity. As well if you actually build for that, people will say the project is a failure since ridership will seem low.
These shelves must be huge!
In Australia, highest cost is buying up required land and construction of buildings. We spent ~100mil USD on a single, open air platform for a line extension of exactly that one station. It was about 5 km of extra track. It is amazing we have any trains at all.
Have I encountered a fellow Rail Natter enjoyer?
You’re grossly oversimplifying and ignoring knock on effects.
Eliminating overhead wires isn’t about cost. It’s about being able to build in existing urban areas that don’t want high voltage live wires everywhere, and likely already have above ground infrastructure they would interfere with.
> If you want to build a train the best way to save money is to build exactly the same as everyone else does: standard off the shelf trains, running on standard off the shelf rails, and standard off the shelf overhead rail.
You are speaking like a naive person that thinks that most the challenge is the physical world
But in UK most of the challenge is archaic and idiosyncratic laws, disproportionately powerful NIMBY’s and the treasury brain.
The treasury brain will approve a project with 1X capex and 10x opex instead of one that has 2X capex and 1X opex
The NYMBY is wild and unpredictable, they just killed project for a data centre placed on top of a literal dump because it would ruin the view of that dump from a motorway (nobody lives there)
A project to re-open 3 miles of railway that already exists took 5 years to approve and 80,000 pages of environmental accessment
But if it’s innovate and designed in UK it might just slip through