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| Re: What is the fastest speed of a subway train? (904165) | |||
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Re: What is the fastest speed of a subway train? |
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Posted by AEM-7AC #901 on Tue Feb 23 19:58:00 2010, in response to Re: What is the fastest speed of a subway train?, posted by Easy on Tue Feb 23 15:19:34 2010. And I wonder if Atlanta had built their system 20 years later would they have opted for a primarily light rail system?MARTA lucked out given that there was very little competition for FTA dollars, which allowed them to get rather high matches from the Feds for its construction. Given what we know now, MARTA would have definitely been built as a light rail system, but I'll be hesitant from speculating on the nature of what would have been built. Whether it would have developed as a ramped up streetcar (Phoenix) or a pre-Metro with an underground downtown tunnel (Seattle) remains to be seen. Heavy rail seems like the better long term investment. I'm biased as a Stadtbahn-lover, so I'll get that out of the way first. A lot of light rail systems are built as half-baked compromises to meet varying political and financial concerns, so corners are cut in terms of construction, and you end up things that may end up eating away at ridership. The main advantage that a heavy rail system has is that the unobstructed right of way allows for higher maximum and average speeds and more direct routings, but there's nothing preventing a light rail system from taking advantage of such methods to improve the speed and reliability of the service. The problem is that nobody is willing to pay for such methods financially or politically, and there needs to be some degree of transit oriented development and economic growth to create demand for ridership. A heavy rail system connected to a bunch of office parks with at grade crossings and street running ROW with no priority will suffer from the same problem as a light rail system, while a light rail system constructed to achieve high average speeds with the most direct alignments possible can achieve near heavy rail levels of service. |
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