Comment by chgs
15 hours ago
Trans don’t need dedicated lanes, not sure where you got that idea from. Trains do.
Buses however are slow (in London about the same as walking) and (outside London) prone to vanishing on timetable changes. Closing a rail link is tricky, you can be confident that if you live near a tram stop it will be there in 10 years. 60% of our local (say 10 mile radius) buses have been removed in the last decade, removing entire villages from service.
A rail solution allows you to read, a bus throws you around everywhere and makes you sick.
Buses are considerably faster than walking, no? Eg 8 to 9mph or about 13kph in London on average[0].
I also observe that this is an average speed, which night be useful for statistical summarization but is not as useful as knowing whether the portion of the route that you want to take is in the faster part or the slower part of the data readings.
For example, if I took a bus from Aldwych up Holborn to Euston I might expect that the first mile would indeed be walking pace but the second mile I would be zipping along. It's important as a bus rider to not let the slow parts color your perception of the whole ride.
[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...
My data point: in NYC, the crosstown bus on 125th is noticeably slower than walking.
I usually take the tube in London but there are some point to points where bus is clearly faster than tube connections would be and absolutely faster than walking. Don't really know Manhattan up that far but crosstown tends to be slow in general.
Buses also put a lot of weight on the road surface. Even more if you fill the bus with batteries. If you can reduce road surface wear at a cost of an upfront investment in installing these rails that could be a good trade off.
Trams can be removed too. Bristol used to have trams. I doubt it is alone.
I definitely feel like trams are a weird technical solution to a policy/perception problem. On a technical level I don't think there's that much to recommend them over buses with bus lanes. It's just that governments never put bus lanes the whole way like you are forced to do with a tram.
>A rail solution allows you to read, a bus throws you around everywhere and makes you sick.
I got exactly the opposite impression the first time I rode a tram in my life. The tram is really really shaky and the connection with the overhead line is flaky, leading to all sorts of strange noises.
I wonder which tram that was?
My experience has been the opposite: every vehicle on rails has offered a superior ride quality to every vehicle on rubber tires. I can't read on a bus, but on a train it's no problem.