Comment by bluGill
1 day ago
Tiny might make sense if they are running every 2 minutes and thus getting their capacity via frequency. However there is no reason to think they will do that. (if they were running anywhere near that frequent overhead wire would be a lot cheaper than a battery on every tram)
Yeah but you could do that with a bus today without miltiions in infrastructure spending
Not really because buses get stuck in traffic all the time because there’s a point where they need to share roads with cars. Once you spend the money on segregating buses entirely, you’re at the same level as the tram line.
Also, because of the expensive infrastructure that can only be used by trams, there’s a permanence there that prevents future politicians from ripping it out to put more cars on for a quick political win with drivers.
Going back to point 1: having a line means that any route needs to be properly planned because you never have an escape hatch of “just stick them on the road.” Example: where I live, the council installed a bus lane and a cycle lane. Where it pinches in (planning fuck up), it dumps all the traffic into a shared route with 2 roundabouts and 5 exits, each with an insane amount of traffic coming to or from them. Buses that are forced to use that route are always late. It takes me just as long to drive as it does to take the bus, faster if you factor in me waiting for a late bus.
The solution to that is dedicated bus lanes, which are quite common in some cities. Usually they allow taxis and emergency vehicles as well.
Trams here in Berlin share the street with the cars on some streets. So, it's exactly like a bus that can get stuck in traffic (and they do). Dedicated tracks are also common but they take up a lot of space and it's expensive infrastructure to install. Mostly trams are limited to the former East Berlin, though they've started to spread to some parts on the west side.
With electrical buses and bus lanes, you get most of the advantages of trams. There are probably still some advantages to dedicated tram lines. But they are expensive to install. I'm not sure it's worth the investment.
5 replies →
Trams very often still share the road with cars.
6 replies →
there have been no trams in my city for 70 years, but the tracks are still there in places. Trams are no more perminate than buses.
> Not really because buses get stuck in traffic all the time because there’s a point where they need to share roads with cars.
Like many tram lines, CVLR is being laid in-road and not segregated. In fact, while not mentioned here, the it's 15 m turning radius is so important is because it's planned to traverse roundabouts in-lane.
I didn't really mean that they needed higher capacity. If they had the passenger volume to justify such high intervals, they'd already have real trams.
But rather, this is giving up the benefit trams have over buses, without gaining any new edge to replace it. So why is it a good tradeoff? And why now, not 20 years ago?
The autonomous driving angle is the only idea I have.
A bus cannot be run ever two minutes. No amount of dispatch anywhere has pulled that off. I'm not sure if a tram can be run that often but subways are
Bus Rapid Transits can operate at frequencies of about 10 seconds per bus. Obviously they're highly parallelised to achieve that and have special infrastructure to enable it like dedicated stations and pedestrian access, so it's not just "a bus", but bus-based systems are how many of the very highest-throughput public transportation lines function, with up to 35000 people per hour per direction with three digit numbers of buses per hour.
For comparison, the most frequent London underground service is 100 seconds per train and the system moves about 50k passengers an hour (based on a 21% increase representing 10k passengers, I couldn't find a direct figure), presumably that being both directions.
2 replies →
I've used a bus service that ran buses every five minutes. It was eventually replaced by a tram.
I don’t know if two minutes are possible, but in Berne, Switzerland, the bus line 10 runs every three minutes. Parts of the loop have dedicated bus lanes, but it‘s probably less than a third of the distance.
PDF: https://www.bernmobil.ch/sites/default/files/2025-02/ah_0201...
Buses can hit that on interleaved lines. Here is a bus lane in downtown LA that moves 70 buses an hour:
https://x.com/metrolosangeles/status/1153807208229957632
That is in the article. The intention is a frequent, arrive and go service. Maybe every 2, 5, 10 minutes, whatever the actual details will be, that is the goal.