Comment by ajkjk
1 day ago
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
There is no evidence that wires are expensive. There is evidence that wires are cheaper if you are running frequent service.
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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.
Interestingly, in public policy, how sexy something sounds tends to be directly proportional to how much the public is willing to spend. It's often easier to get 10-100x the money of a bus for a rail link.
CVRT is proposed to replace existing BRT for cost, environmental, and safety reasons.
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