Comment by chgs
6 months 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...
Whenever I've taken a bus in London it tends to be in zone 1. Between the walking to the right stop, waiting for the bus, the traffic, then walking at the far end, it's rarely quicker than walking.
Last week for example I took a bus from near St Pauls to Trafalgar Square, the entire jouney took about half an hour for 1.5 miles.
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.
2 replies →
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.
>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.
Must be Romania...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BmoybIi8jIQ
It's very regional.
Buses meant for right-hand drive markets like the UK, Australia and Japan are (with very few exceptions) shaky, low-entry configuration two door junk, or double-decker one door junk.
If that's what you're used to, even the most rickety light rail system will feel luxurious by comparison.
Left-hand drive low-floor buses with three doors, and articulated models with four doors, which are intended for the European market, are as a general rule much more comfortable. If the buses you normally take fit the latter description, you'll probably find the average tram worse.
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.
Trams are much smoother than buses. I suspect that a bus can be made as comfortable as a tram with active suspension optimising ride quality, but I've never come across one. Jerky starts and stops, swinging around, kneeling for (dis)embarkation; these all make the ride unpleasant for users. Trams exclude those at the cost of additional up front infrastructure costs.
I can easily read a book on a tram. No chance on a bus (unless we want vomit all over the seats).
I agree, but I don't think that really matters. I mean nobody is going to spend millions on a tram just because it's a bit smoother.
It's a nice bonus; not a reason to build trams.
1 reply →
Trams beat buses in almost every way.
Passenger UX: - railed vehicles only move and accelerate longitudinally (with a little centripetal force at the very predictable corners). Consequences: people will often choose to stand even while there are free seats. Trams are so smooth that standing feels comfortable. (If you preference is to sit, you benefit too.)
- modern trams have lower floors than any road vehicle can realistically achieve (especially if built for use on random roads). They're near flush with the curb at tram stops, which is nice for accessibility (prams, wheelchairs, people with granny-trolleys for shopping).
Pedestrian UX: - trams follow tram paths, predictably. Once you're used to them (which doesn't take long), you'll stand just centimeters from a passing tram and feel completely comfortable about it. As a pedestrian, no transit line is as easy to cross as a tram line. (Certainly not a bus lane!)
Land use: - since trams follow rails without any lateral deviation or wiggle (and bonus: they're rather narrow), dedicated tram lines require about 40% less land than bus lanes. Especially on streets where there might not be much free lane width to spare, that counts!
Tiny operating costs, negligible marginal costs: - there's a far higher ratio of passengers to driver in a tram - electricity over wire makes the marginal cost of energy to operate negligible. Once the infrastructure is there, and once the tram is running, the frequency of service can be increased and the operating cost can get arbitrarily cheap.
Transit capacity: - road intersections are the capacity bottleneck in any road grid. Behind them, queues form and grow (congestion) until a point where the expected time (much of it queuing in traffic) presents too high a cost for the marginal journey to happen. - trams can pass at same gauge while scaling up intersection capacity by about two orders of magnitude, allowing much more rapid movement of people with much less urban land and less infrastructure
(buses with dedicated lanes could hypothetically deliver this, if buses were as popular as trams and operated like trams in dedicated lanes)
Air pollution: - the primary source of most urban air pollution is road vehicle abrasion (tyres on roads, brake dust) and road vehicle combustion engines. Getting rid of combustion engines solves less than half that problem. To stop primary emission of particulates, you need to solve tyres and car brakes. Railed vehicles do that: clean air. - a large part of air pollution is secondary: particulates settle on the large road surfaces comprising much of our cities. Then road vehicles with large tyre surface area (and varying lateral positions) run over the surface, re-ejecting that dust up into the air.
That air pollution is killing people (estimates vary: somewhere from 'many months' to 'a few years' of life expectancy are lost to urban air pollution). Trams get rid of it completely.
___
The biggest problem with trams is that they require competent civic administration, with a steady pace of long term infrastructure investment (boom & bust would destroys the capacity to produce & maintain trams & infrastructure economically), financed at competitive rates. They also benefit from very high urban walkability in the vicinity of potential tram stops, and high density of development (including housing). Not many cities have that.
Some cities do, and their trams are a dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Ph-L4Mbt4