Comment by bardak
1 day ago
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.
Kobe’s Port Island Line is generally considered the first fully automated metro and opened in 1981. Lille Metro is about the same scale as the DLR and opened in 1983.
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.