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| Re: London's five-year plan (11227) | |||
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Re: London's five-year plan |
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Posted by David Fairthorne on Fri Oct 22 01:04:39 2004, in response to Re: London's five-year plan, posted by Max Roberts on Thu Oct 21 12:04:10 2004. Many of us think that Crossrail as proposed is a mistake, and ... I think that the Paris RER lines were too.The RER seems a very fine system to me, and at least some lines (including line A) have high ridership. But it must have been very expensive to build. I don't know how much of it ran on existing rails and how much was new tunnelling. As for the Metro, it is incredibly dense, being concentrated mainly in department 75 (not even 92, 93 or 94). Does every building really need to be within 500 metres of a Metro station? And some lines seem to stray too much from straight lines. Its the long distance services that should use the tunnels Here I tend to disagree, and that's what makes me wonder about the RER. Some RER routes are very long. Given a choice I would prefer short distance services to use tunnels. On tunnel routes through a city you have lots of passengers getting on and off at most stations, and they are well served by local rolling stock with wide doors and plenty of standing space, all helping to reduce dwell times. The priority on long distance commuter lines should be to provide plenty of seats for a comfortable journey, even if they don't take you to the very centre of the city. Compared with RER, Crossrail's lines are not very long, extending out about 30 km from the centre. But Thameslink 2000 is another story, having short and long distance trains that seem unlikely to mix well on the tame tracks. I also share the concerns of London Rail that they are trying to do a shoehorn job, and the 24 tph projection may be unrealistic. If there were fewer trains serving fewer and shorter routes, it could be made to work reasonably well, but where are the shorter routes? Most of them are in south London and would be better served by extensions to the UndergrounD. Brussels has a suberb cross-city rail tunnel for all-comers. That's probably much easier to organize in a less populous city with fewer lines. don't forget the Waterloo & City Line. The W & C could provide the short cut from Liverpool Street to Blackfriars, but that wouldn't be so convenient as feeding the Shenfield line directly onto the District line, as R.B. would like. However R.B's plan may not be feasible because the City streets are too narrow. And the same could apply to a W & C extension. The cutaway diagram of Bank and Monument stations shows some of what you would encounter if you tried to extend the line beyond Bank. a Liverpool Street to Waterloo service would do much to relieve the Central Line It would be a useful link, but the most overcrowded stretch of the Central is east of Liverpool Street. That's because the load is unidirectional. Through the centre the line may be busier but it's not so crowded because people are going in both directions. See fig 4c.2 in this pdf file. |
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