Indeed they are also used to prevent staff fraud. When we were the only passengers on a bus in Florianopolis as a group of foreigners they made us board from an exit door past the turnstile and presumeably pocketed the fare. Later others boarded the normal way.
A bit of a mystery really. They should be well proven vehicles in theory.
Interesting choice of wide and short vehicles. Optimizing costs with shorter stations?
Close to the average speed of our legacy tram system. With 330 m stop spacing and including sections shared with cars.
Calgary and Edmonton being based on German stadtbahn technology will absolutely have all this newfangled stuff from the 1970's. (Probably 1960's actually.)
You may find that single blade is not the only limiting factor. You might also need deep grooved crossings and/or locking switches with position indicators. The latter can indeed be fiddlish with dirt (in our case grit).
Frankfurt is upgrading to CBTC (Trainguard MT) for the tunnels, but will maintain line of sight on the surface. The CBTC system will communicate with traffic control to provide priority though. www.urban-transport-magazine.com/en/frankfurt...
Our short line 15 / Jokeri tunnel has a lower speed limit on the inner curve (eastbound) to account for the requirement to see far enough ahead for service braking. The tunnel also has signals to prevent trams following each other, but no train stopping system.
Stockholm at least used to have what they called ATO on Tvärbanan. A balise based system, so not CBTC per se. Resulted in quite a few emergency stops in the street running sections when the system got confused or 30 km/h was exceeded even slightly. Not sure what they have now.
We have lobbying and even intent to provide professional (mostly freight) users with diesel tax discounts to compensate for a producer requirement to add x % of biodiesel. Terrible policy. Electricity is clean and cheap here so everything possible should electrify.
Yes. There is a per vehicle day (maximum net service runout), hour and km component. Bids also score points for things like emissions and providing more than the minimum amount of seats. Some portion is now required as zero emission and extra points for more (or lower emission diesel, but less).
Our (Helsinki) tendered private operators now only buy BOB. We don't care how many buses or drivers they use to provide the service. There is an incentive for zero emissions though. And diesel is quite expensive here. HVO even more so.
Interesting viewpoint! We have a rather strict policy of allowing pedestrians to cross in one go. Islands are only used to shorten the intergreens. This does tend lead to long cycles and pedestrians just waiting on the side for a long time to get that long green.
We also suffer from this disconnect. It doesn't help that our traffic signal professionals tend to be detail oriented & on the introverted side.
The same issue exists for measuring cycling infrastructure quality/progress as the length of paths or lanes. Quantity does not equal quality.
One should aim to have refuges/islands on both sides of the tracks at every (major) intersection. Might not cut minimum greens, but should shorten intergreens. I literally wrote this into our tramway planning guidelines ten years ago.
If memory serves me right there is some creative use of this on the Luas Red line west of O'Connell Street. Basically keeping the mixed running lanes clear by not allowing through traffic on them.
One should aim to split pedestrian crossings with refuges/islands to reduce intergreens. It surprises me that there are no refuges on both sides of the tracks in places where they would seem to fit. Also one reason to prefer side platforms.
The full gamut would be green extension, green advancement and additional phases. Use these well and you can get a lot of priority with limited impact to other road users. Long crosswalks are challenging though.
Yes. I think we theoretically could have delivered our line 15 for 5-10 million less, but in practice we probably would have failed. That being said, avoiding an inflated target cost is a real challenge.
You want to get it done quickly to save money. That is why our project alliances are usually built ahead of schedule.
Indeed. That is what our metro trains have. (New tunnels have platform level walkways.)
Some German cities and Bergen are probably the only ones to still use ballasted track in urban environments. You need to be able to tamp ballast, so it can't be permanently covered. Green track with ballast is possible though, Kassel has it for example.
We have to use railing for drops of 18 cm or more behind stops. Not that this can be applied in any way consistently in other parts of streets.
Also pretty low for stops. We simulated 20 km/h for stops for Helsinli line 15 and found it would cost a lot of time. Settled on 30 for stops and any associated _unsignalled_ pedestrian crossings.
Indeed even low floor vehicles can do better. The Metrolinx Flexities seem to have rather short modules which might limit door placement. A 25 m minimum curve radius should allow longer modules, but the basic vehicle layot seems to follow the TTC vehicles. They were designed for tighter curves.
Some German systems prefer trams with no end doors for this very reason. Cologne and Karlsruhe for instance.
Switch and crossing speed limits and automated control have been a tough nut to crack also here in Helsinki, but we are hopefully getting there. (Line 15 / Jokeri does not have these limitations.)
In my experience a lot of the discourse comes from peoole who don't actually use public transport. "I would if it was door to door like my car!" It will never be a taxi, sorry.
Our National Transport Infrastructure agency and the largest cities jointly maintain an online cost estimation system (IHKU) which is fed with actual unit costs from ongoing projects. Not used for contract adjustments though. It replaced a similar commercial system (EG Fore).
