TramTrain – Success Ignored
The birth of what we call TramTrain or a streetcar that can operate on the mainline railways, came about after much research and public consultation, to provide the the city and region of a ‘user-friendly’ public transit system. In the 1980’s cities with trams or streetcars were seeing a steady decline in patronage and seemed doomed to the history books. With tram management being given a simple diktat: “Get people to use the ream system or loose it“, much time was spent consulting with transit users on what type of service would bring the customer back to public transit.
Zwei notes that in Vancouver, the transit customer is seldom consulted with, nor is the customer listened too. Light metro is built with the provincial government telling the taxpayer, “You are getting SkyTrain whether you like it or not!” Added to this, the region has invented a pseudo science of densification which is a smokes screen for government to inflate property values to reward land speculators and land developers. This ‘Densification‘ pseudo science or Lysenkoism has proven not to attract much new ridership to the public transit system.. Ridership on the public transit is kept seemingly high, with over 130, 000 of U-Pass deep discount ‘ride at will’ tickets for students in post secondary institutions, which flood the transit system at peak hours.
Meanwhile back in Germany, the public wanted a ‘no-transfer‘ service, with reasonable travel times and the TramTrain was conceived to provide a doorstep to downtown service, omitting a 20 minute transfer from commuter train to tram.
A city tram with a TramTrain in the rear.
The success of the TramTrain operation in Karlsruhe was an instant success as the following table shows. In seven months ridership on the new TramTrain service, replacing a commuter train, providing a direct, no transfer service to downtown Karlsruhe saw 479% increase in ridership, from5 33,600 to 2,554,976 customers a week.
Compare to our $11 billion, 21.7km extension of SkyTrain, where TransLink is all but hiding the fact that there will be little or no increase in ridership on both the Expo Line extension to Langley and the Broadway subway.!
The ridership increase being so successful they had to build a tunnel to bury the longer distance routes and clear their busiest street routes, Kaiserstrasse (King Street) and Dulach Tor (Dulach Gate) as well as the city’s two busiest public squares, Marketplatz und Europlatz. Kaiserstrasse was moving over 25,000 p/h/d at peak, using 80+ trams/hour/direction. The “T” shaped tunnel was expensive but it greatly decreased the surface crowding, vastly increasing the throughput of trams and improving the travel times. Finally moving the near endless wall of trams at peak, known locally as the yellow wall (gellbe-vand).
That’s when you build a tunnel, when you have absolutely no other choices.
The system functions not only as a tram/Light Rail Transit system hybrid but it functions as a Regional Rail/Light Rail Transit/Tram hybrid.
Route S4, the trip I went on was a 180 km trip from Karlsruhe to Heinbroin straight back to downtown Karlsruhe. That particular route’s total length was 210 km long. It has since been cut into 5 separate routes and branfhes with the super long 210 km long express route (Karlsruhe-Ottrigen), serving at 2 trains per hour.
Whereas now the 165 km AVG/KVV run portion adds 2 more trains per hour (Karlsruhe to Brettegen).
The HWD/KVV/AVG 45 km long section (Brettegen-Heinbroin-Ottrigen), runs 8-10 trains per hour with 6-8 of those trains leaving the Deutschbahn mainline to travel down the main street of Heinbroin, as part of that town’s 2 route LRT network (Routes S41 & S42).
The best part is that its a single ticketing regime. Technically 1 main route but operated by 2 separate local transit services, 1 regional railway and DB but all run with consistent route schedule and the same vehicle fleet.