Costs and Effectiveness of Light Rail

Check out these links on the costs and effectiveness of light rail.

Transit Capital Investment Per Route Mile
From Light Rail Now!
http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_00002.htm

Transport Planning Details On Light Rail
KonSULT, the Knowledgebase on Sustainable Urban Land use and Transport, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds.

Taxonomy and description
First Principles Assessment
Evidence on Performace
Contribution to objectives and problems
Complementary instruments

Light Rail Capacity
From TramForward by the Light Rail Transit Association of Great Britain
http://www.lrta.info/tramforward/Topic5TFs.pdf

Light Rail Ruled Out in the CBD

This except comes from the NSW State Government's Urban Transport Statement

Chapter 4 - page 56

The Government has explored a number of options – including light rail – for improving transport services into and within the CBD. While light rail has attractive features which may be applicable in certainlimited areas of Sydney (for example, Barangaroo to Wynyard), the Government has concluded that it will not deliver real benefits within the main CBD routes – and in fact may run the risk of increasing transport congestion in the future. This is because light rail in the CBD would necessarily be required to operate within certain constraints which would have an impact on existing traffi c and passenger movements into and within the CBD.

For example:

• light rail would only take about 20% of the buses off the streets of our city;
• the two currently proposed CBD light rail corridors (George and Castlereagh Streets) would operate in mixed traffic with relatively low operating speeds of approximately seven kilometres to nine kilometres per hour;
• strict quarantining of CBD streets from general traffic would be required to improve running times; – for example, if both George and Castlereagh Streets were used, our main north-south corridors would be quarantined for light rail with a resultant impact on general traffic;
• light rail would rely on the transfer of significant numbers of bus passengers at the CBD periphery to the light rail system – patronage studies have shown that commuters are reluctant to use public transport once an interchange is imposed;
• surveys suggest that up to as many as 89% of bus commuters want a direct trip into and out of the city – not an interchange onto another
  transport mode;
• in order to meet the forecast 2021 demand, 45 second frequencies onthe two light rail corridors proposed inthe CBD is required, whereas evidence suggests that a 2.5 minute frequency is the maximum attainable for a reliable system;
• future capacity expansion would require a doubling of light rail vehicle length, which is not practicable in central Sydney and would create further congestion problems;
• the lead time and construction requirements to implement a light rail system are signifi cant, disruptive and costly;

Consequently light rail should not be used for our main CBD routes.

See our forums for discussions of transport modes.
See the complete Transport Statement.

Sydney's Tram Network

When anyone says that Sydney was built around the car, you know that they are up to no good. Sydney was built around the pedestrian, the horse and cart, the tram....anything but the car.

This image is a slightly reduced view of the tram system in Sydney just before it was dismantled.
Note the extensive coverage of the CBD, lines to the main beaches and areas of the North Shore.

To get an idea of just how world class our old system was, take a look at our occasional paper series Letters of Transit.

The tramways were the key to the remarkably efficient people-moving systems that then existed. They had a loading capacity midway between buses and heavy rail, but with a dense coverage of the then-existing metropolitan area and the ability to run at much greater frequency than heavy rail. When required, they could be operated almost nose-to-tail as a ‘moving footway’.

In view of the current problems transporting the public to special events at the Cricket Ground and Fox Studios (formerly the Showground) there is a special irony in the ease with which 175,000 people could be simultaneously transported to and from these two venues during the interwar years. Today it is considered impressive when buses deliver 8,000 people to a sporting event – equivalent to about 10 minutes of tramway operation.

Impressive, eh?