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| Re: Here comes Staten Is. Light Rail? (269594) | |||
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Re: Here comes Staten Is. Light Rail? |
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Posted by Fytton on Wed Jun 21 04:05:38 2006, in response to Re: Here comes Staten Is. Light Rail?, posted by Max Roberts on Tue Jun 20 11:53:05 2006. "The Bury and Altrincham lines both ran every 15 minutes off-peak, so I wouldn't characterise these as being infrequent, no worse than many London Underground branches."LU now advertises that runs at least every ten minutes (6 tph) at all times right out to the ends of its lines, the only exceptions I know of being Amersham and Chesham (which are really suburban rail masquerading as an Underground line) and the hopeless Hainault-Woodford section, which gets 3 tph offpeak. I think this subthread is being unduly negative about the Manchester Metrolink, which is actually a success story, in terms of passenger loadings. "Half a loaf is worse than no bread" seems to be general line of argument. The failure to build the Picc-Vic tunnel was more central government's fault than Manchester's, and who can blame them for eventually deciding that they would never get allocated the capital to build the tunnel, and making sure that they actually got something useful built. The routing of the onstreet section in the city centre was rather carefully planned to minimise congestion. Of course it is true that it is backwards to build a system that is the reverse of Philly's and Boston's (and Newark's) subway-surface systems, private RoW in the outer areas and onstreet in the centre, we understand that. But it's wise to get what you can, rather than wait for ever for the perfect system (SAS, anyone?). And as noted, Metrolink is *not* mostly onstreet. The systems in the UK that do have a high proportion of onstreet are Sheffield and to a lesser extent Nottingham. As for the argument that he city centre tunnel section of the Tyne & Wear Metro 'caused its failure', I find that argument incomprehensible - the system isn't a failure, and it is good that they did succeed in getting the central tunnel section built. The Birmingham system is a disappointment but of course only the first phase has got built so far. But I totally disagree with the proposal to close half its stations - one of the merits of light rail is that it can have closely-spaced stops for maximum passenger convenience - the idea being to attract people from cars, not to provide a suburban rail service. O.K., it slows it down, but it's still a lot faster than a bus, and British provincial cities are quite compact urban areas anyway, so the overall journey times are pretty acceptable even from othe outer termini. For me, the best kind of rail rapid transit system is one that exists, and the worst sort is one that never gets built. |
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