The Failure To Understand Modern Light Rail = Public Transit Chaos – From May 2010
The Failure To Understand Modern Light Rail = Public Transit Chaos
First published in May, 2010
From, May 25, 2010 – five years later, the song remains the same.
ai???Zweiai??i?? has been taken aback by the viciousness of the SkyTrain Lobby and the great lengths they have taken in discrediting the LRT, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge the marketing failure of the proprietary (ICTS/ALRT/ALM/ART ) light-metro system, known in Vancouver as SkyTrain.
ai???Zweiai??i?? is also taken aback by abject refusal by many supposed experts to take the time to clearly understand modern light rail and/or modern LRT philosophy,Ai?? instead treating it the same as a glorified bus or a poor-manai??i??s metro.Ai?? As well, ai???Zwei is dumbfounded, by many of the same supposed transit experts who do not understand the fundamentals of transit and or rail operation, especially from a customers point of view. In Metro Vancouver, many planning bureaucrats abjectly refuse to acknowledge that Ai??Ai??modern light rail is a very strong tool to mitigate congestion and pollution, which only exacerbates our regional transportation planning ennui.
A good example of not understanding ai???railai??? operation are those who continue to pontificate that automatic transit systems have fewer employees, therefore cheaper to operate than light rail. This simplistic view is wrong and except when traffic flows are in the order of 20,000 pphpd or more, then there are noticeable cost savings in automatic operation. The notion that automatic metros can operate 24/7 is just that, a notion as driverless metro need daily ai???down timeai??i?? to adjust and check the signaling system for if something goes wrong, the driverless metro stops and until a real persons checks the system to see why the metro stopped and if it is safe to continue operation, will operation be started again.
Unlike LRT, with an on-board driver, automatic metros need a full complement of staff to operate at all hours to ensure the safety of passengers, on trains and in stations. Many LRT operations have service 24 hours a day and with the simplicity of the transit mode, very few staff are needed. Contrary to what many ai???bloggistai??i??sai??i?? post, modern light rail is much cheaper to operate than metro and driverless metro.
The hysterical wailing’s of those wishing grade separated transit systems also ignore the fact that modern LRT is one of the safest public transit modes in the world. The fact that SkyTrain has a higher annual death rate than comparable LRT operations is forgotten in their zeal to discredit modern trams. Yes, cars do crash into trams. Yes, car drivers do disobey stop signals and deliberately drive across tram lines in the path of an oncoming trams, with predictable results. Yet tram/LRT/streetcar road intersections are about ten times safer than a road ai??i?? road intersection. In Europe, if a car driver ignores a stop signal and is in an accident with a tram, the car driver is heavily fined and may lose his right to drive. In Europe, autos seldom come to grief with a tram, as the legal consequences colliding with a tram is a strong deterrent.
The speed issue is another ai???man of strawai??i?? argument as those who want SkyTrain. They bang the ai???speedai??? drum loudly proclaiming that SkyTrain is fast and speed trumps all in attracting ridership. Speed of ones journey is just one facet of the many reasons why people opt to take public transit. What is true, it is that the overall ambiance and convenience of a ai???railai??? transit system has proven more important attracting new ridership. Contrary to what many believe, elevated and underground transit stations tend to deter ridership. The speed issue is a non-issue and fact is, if the Vancouver to Chilliwack tramtrain comes into operation, it will have a much faster commercial speed than SkyTrain, yet Zwei would never make the claim that tramtrain would be better because it was faster!
Studies have shown (Hass-Klau Bus or Light Rail, Making The right Choice) that in urban areas the most beneficial distance between transit stops is 450m to 600m and with any greater distances between stops tends to deter ridership and stops closer than 450m tend to be too slow. Those want a fast subway under Broadway are commuting from the far reaches of the SkyTrain and or bus network and one would question why they would live so far away to commute to UBC, if they are at all?
In the real world, transit systems are designed and built to economically move people, not so in Vancouver where transit is built to cater to the needs of land use, thus we continue to build hugely expensive metro lines on low ridership routes (for metro), where selected property owners make windfall profits from up-zoning residential properties to higher density condos and apartments. This is a ai???fools paradiseai??i??, because we are spending up to ten times more to install a metro on transit routes that donai??i??t have the ridership to sustain a metro, while at the same time failing upgrade many bus routes to LRT to cater to higher passenger flows, which now demand greater operational economies. Much needed transit upgrades and improvements in the region go wanting to fulfill the extremely expensive and questionable SkyTrain/land use dream on only a few routes.
Please note Zwei’s prophetic paragraph!
The failure to understand modern light rail is leading the region into a massive financial black hole, by continually building extremely expensive metro while at the same time treating LRT as a yesterdayai??i??s transit mode. Today, Vancouverai??i??s transit fares are some of the highest in North America and fares will continue to rise, largely in part due to SkyTrain and light-metro. TransLink will continue to be in financial peril if planning bureaucrats continues to plan and build with metro on the Evergreen Line and the Broadway subway.
Modern light rail has been crafted, with over 125 years of public transit experience, to fulfillAi?? human transit and transportation needs, unlike our automatic SkyTrain light metro, which original design and selling point was to mitigate the massive costs of heavy-rail metro in an age before modern LRT. To put SkyTrain in a subway is an oxymoron and demonstrates the modes proponents gross ignorance of transit history; to continue to build SkyTrain on routes that do not have the ridership to sustain metro demonstrates complete fiscal irresponsibility.
As Zweisystem has always observed, ai???Those who fail to read public transit history are doomed to make the same very expensive mistakes.ai???
The failure to understand the role of modern LRT, streetcars and trams, will lead the region into transit and transportation chaos, where the much needed ai???railai??? network will be but patches of expensive politically prestigious metro lines linked by buses: impractical, unsustainable, and fool-hardy.
Chaleroi light-metro station – Too expensive to complete and never used!
This isn’t really related to this article at all, but to transportation planning and funding in general…
People don’t want to pay for transit projects, because they use their car, and the transit customer should be paying for their transit system. I disagree… I think that much more transit funding should be coming from the car driver, because the reason transit is so expensive here is because it is built with a key feature being that it not interfere with car traffic. We can’t have at grade light rail because we don’t want to take away public space from the car driver. So we get skytrain, expensive tunnels that destroy businesses, and massive concrete bridges. The entire system has to be built either in the air or underground, massively driving up cost, because at grade public space is car space. It’s not transit space, and it damn well better not be bicycle space, those cyclists don’t even pay their own damn way! Everything is for the car. Sprawling parking lots. Street parking, so that they can door passing cyclists, and of course all of those beautiful wide swaths of asphalt that cover the region. Like our new 10 lane bridge, that is part of a massive highway widening project that by completion will already not be wide enough, and just shuffle bottlenecks along to another spot. When 10 lanes isn’t enough, we can always tear it down and put up 16, or 20… And of course, there’s no room on that wide strip of asphalt for light rail.
We need to take our region back from the cars. We need public spaces, for cyclists, pedestrians, gathering, meeting, eating, relaxing, and for public transit. We need a war on cars, because the planning in this region is decades out of date.
I agree completely. We are now at a stage many European transit authorities were 30 years ago. The subways they built were busy enough, but ridership on transit was falling, the joke was there was even a nickname for it, the “German Disease”, where transit was used by the poor, the elderly and students.
City centres were clogged by cars and on the whole transit customers were not happy with the service. Enter modern LRT with modern low-floor cars, rserved rights-of-ways the concept of customer service affordability and a constant ear for customer wants a well as telling the customer the truth, like “subways are very expensive and tend to suck monies from the rest of the transit system.
Our transit planners and politicians do not have the “balls” for change and TransLink drifts on an on into a very expensive ennui.