Friday Reads – 17 April 2020

1. re: Why is UK light rail still in sidings? (CityMetric)

   I can’t say I agree with much of this.

   They end by saying:
   “No other form of public transport allows you to travel about town smoothly and quietly, doesn’t emit noxious exhaust fumes, doesn’t need a parking space, runs so frequently that you don’t even need a timetable – and actually enhances the urban environment.”

   smoothly and quietly: electric buses
   doesn’t emit noxious exhaust fumes: electric buses
   doesn’t need a parking space: well where do the trams sleep then?
   runs so frequently that you don’t even need a timetable : buses

   Also, earlier in the article they talk about capacity. I see no techinical reason why a bus similar in length to a tram wouldn’t have a comparable capacity. Buses are usually shorter than trams, mostly due to flexibility.
   Well if you’re removing flexibility by putting the bus on rails, you could equally make it longer…

   So why exactly are trams better than buses?

   Don’t get me wrong – I’ve used the Croydon tram system, and I like it, but at the time it was built electric buses were not practical – that is changing now and I feel like (if you were doing it now) an equivalant electric bus system would be just as good, and cheaper to install (no tracks to lay, no unsightly wires to erect, although you may still have to modify road layouts in some places)

2. @djl
   You can power your bus with electricity, but on its own that doesn’t usually make it like a tram. Currently most bus services provide a markedly lower quality of service to the passenger. They stop more often. Boarding and alighting time is much longer. They get stuck in traffic jams. In Central London, many journeys are faster on foot than on a bus.

   There is a style of bus service which is much nearer to a tram service. It is generally called Bus Rapid Transit. The best known example is in Bogotá, Colombia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio Although not a fully segregated system, a BRT generally requires extended dedicated lanes which are properly dedicated in a way that bus lanes in London are not, to avoid the worst of the congestion – no vans loading in them. They have stop spacing like trams. They have payment and boarding/alighting like trams. They can even have suburban style limited stop services, which run fast from city centre stops to outer suburbs.

   BRT requires dedicated lanes to a much greater extent, and proper dedication, than most current British bus lanes. This means they take up more space than tram tracks would, a big issue in old cities with narrow streets. The former double-track tram tunnel from Waterloo Bridge to Kingsway, now used for motor vehicles, can only take a single carriageway of motor vehicles.

   Guided bus lanes are an alternative, less space-occupying, form of dedicated lane that a road vehicle, with relatively minor modification, can use. It is supposed to be much cheaper than a tram system. It is largely a British concept because most other places don’t need it. That’s because they can build trams at a sensible cost. It turns out we Brits can’t often build guided bus lanes at a sensible cost either, which is why they haven’t taken off. If we could in general build stuff at sensible cost in this country, then guided bus systems might be an unnecessary technology.

   There is also a role for the traditional, slow, frequently stopping, pay-when-you-board, gets stuck in congestion, bus service. But that style of bus service, the vast majority of our present bus service, does not approximate what trams do.

   What this comes back to is the point I keep banging on about, and amply confirmed in this article: our inability to build stuff at sensible cost in this country. As they identify, this is in part due to many requirements that do in fact add some value, but at disproportionate cost. Other countries are much better at saying “I’m not having this because it costs too much for what it offers.” We tend to go, “If I buy this my tail is better covered.” The direct consequence of this is that we have much less stuff, because there is only so much money. And when stuff is much more costly, you get a lot less of it for the same amount of money. So our recently built infrastructure is all splendid, but we can’t afford to replace or update the great majority of aging infrastructure.

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