The Greatest Debate in Transit History?

high floor trains low floor trains everything in between i've talked about this a lot on my channel but i've avoided diving into one of the greatest debates of our generation okay i might be projecting a little but if you like transit you're in on this debate are high or low platforms better find out in today's episode of rm transit [Music] platforms are really important to various transit services from brt to trams to various different train services you almost always have some sort of platform that passengers use to wait for and board onto vehicles but the question is natural what should those platforms look like should they be high or should they be low to be completely clear what am i talking about when i say high or low platforms i keep doing this i just can't help it high or low this is actually more of an open question than you might think and it's really there's quite a debate on it i'm going to give you my opinion in this video but if you have a different way of classifying things leave a comment down below and tell me what you think now before i actually talk about the height of platforms i'm going to give you one of those valuable facts that will help you a lot when you're talking about railways in particular and that's a baseline for measurement that's often used when talking about trains platform stations pantographs catenaries all of the above basically the baseline is the top of the rails so you'll often hear people say atr or a top of rail or things like that and what that refers to is literally just the height of the top of the rail basically everything else from the catenary height to the pantograph height to third rail height all of these things can be measured and that's helpful because we know that the wheels of the train will be sitting on the top of the rail as it turns out also worth mentioning platform height tends to be the same as train floor height not always such as if you're in toronto but often there are also tons of dynamics with regard to like trains that have slightly different heights to try to better adjust to sinking or changing infrastructure but i'm not gonna dive into that in today's video anyways there are three main categories of platform heights in my personal opinion very low low and high i didn't want to do low medium high because i feel like it's more like very low low high you know very low platforms are what you typically see on tram lines and they tend to be 30 centimeters or foot something like this above the top of rail basically pretty comparable to the height of a curb just above the rail which is why you'll often see trains that board from curbs or slightly modified higher curbs now low platforms in my eyes tend to be up to three times higher than very low platforms so up to about three feet high it's about this i don't know if that's gonna be a frame but you know three feet 90 centimeters almost a meter the last category high platforms is going to be a meter and up for four feet basically to be clear there aren't really set standards for this and the term high low doesn't really get used to specifically refer to different systems i mean we can say this system has a high platform and this system has a low platform but there's no widely accepted standard as far as i know basically different systems tend to measure just their exact height above the rail for their platforms and what you'll see is that a lot of systems have just slightly different numbers there's a lot of systems with 40 41 42 43 inches above the top of the rail and what that means is that trains actually are quite specialized to different systems this is one of those things that you might not think about when you're talking about what makes this subway system different from this subway system but the height of the floor of the trains is actually quite often one of those things now for all of you asking why does the height of the platform even matter i'm glad you asked the first thing determined by the platform height is the type of trains you can actually use on a line since you need trains that can be safely accessed by passengers from whatever platforms you have now as i discussed in previous videos like my one on double decker trains which will be up here i think having a floor which is above the bogeys or the wheel sets of a train is often a preferred design and it's one of the most common ones you see out there the reason for this is that the construction and dynamics of such a vehicle just tend to be simpler because of the location of the wheels relative to everything else on the train you have a passenger cabin on top of the bogeys and some minor auxiliary equipment on the roof and then some of the larger things hung underneath the train it's really perfect to be honest since high platforms essentially always require high floor trains or at least trains with high floor for part of their length where people are boarding and deboarding we tend to refer to high platform trains and high platforms somewhat interchangeably and this is mostly okay except for a few exceptions that i'll mention later one of the big benefits of a high floor train is that the floor can be completely continuous and unobstructed which gives you more flexibility for moving seats and other things around within the body of the train but it also gives you more width which means potentially a more accessible train design with lower floor versions of trains you often have bogies or wheel sets which need to slightly intrude into the interior of the train what this can mean is that there's often steps or ramps towards the end of the train or there's literally cutouts from the train body where the bogies are fitted depending on just how low the body of the train is the main issue with this is that when bogies kind of intrude into the train body you can't place doors at such locations since the bogies are at the edges of the train and what this means is that low floor train designs tend to limit your door locations much more than high floor train designs and this is why you'll see most metro systems use some form of high floor train and since the trains are high floor so are the platforms now despite all of my ragging on them low floor trams and trains do have their benefits for one it's legitimately simpler to make the transition from a curb to a low floor tram or from a low floor station to an adjacent street simply because there's just no major height difference low platforms can also be incredibly cheap because they don't require a ton of structure in fact some of gotrans original platforms were literally using railway ties and just asphalt like you know the material used on streets so so cheap but that's what you can do when you can accept a low platform for countries that have wider loading gauges or a lot of freight traffic like here in canada or in the united states and some other places around the world low platforms are also often preferred because they provide more clearance to freight trains that's not to say that there aren't alternative solutions like gauntlet tracks and the like maybe i should make a video on gauntlet tracks let me know down below but basically simplicity is always going to win out so if you can avoid having to make your railway way more complex it's probably worth it and differences in platform height are actually one of those things that can be adapted to that said and this is an important thing to remember that people often forget there are train types of basically every category in both the high floor and low floor category so platform height is not necessarily a limiting factor to put this into perspective there are high floor and low floor trams there are high floor metro trains and low floor trams that we're using on metro services okay this one it's a little rough that said and stay tuned for a video about this in the future the london underground deep level lines well they actually have fairly low platforms so there's actually an interesting case there that i will discuss in a future video continuing on there are definitely high floor and low floor regional trains and yes there are high floor and low floor high speed trains something that people often forget i see it kind of all the time in discussions about high speed rail you need high platforms not true all of that said i do talk about the differences in some of these different vehicles in other videos for example i talked about the benefits of high floor light rail in a video up here another issue that often comes up is accessibility which is a super important thing for transit platform heights and train heights play a huge role in this because if your platform and train floor height are the same people can seamlessly roll in and out or just simply step in and out of trains if there's a major difference in the height of the platform and the train it can make getting on and off a train a real pain you sometimes need ramps or you need to make large often unsafe steps another element often brought up with regards to platform height and accessibility is the need to climb stairs to get up to a platform in some systems particularly in north america you have trains that would be high floor but which served low platforms or sometimes also high platforms for example the light rail in denver continues to order high floor trains despite having low platforms and inside those trains you'll have steps that you climb up to enter the main passenger area for longer distance trains you'll see swing downstairs they can basically swing up and form a flat floor that allows people to board from a high platform or swing down and provide stairs that people can climb up into the train now this creates a significant mobility barrier because in the case of high floor systems you need to provide some sort of mini platform like a very small platform where someone with a wheelchair can roll up and board the train level with the high floor and in longer distance systems you often see wheelchair lifts deployed at stations which can be unreliable and at the end of the day i don't think people with mobility impairments should have to use some special service or anything like that everyone should be able to board the train at any car easily i think that's really critical for high quality passenger rail now with high platforms becoming more and more the norm around the world there are people who ask whether they are truly accessible and i would argue for a lot of systems it's not a huge issue if your system is fully or highly grade separated for example a lot of regional systems high speed rail or metros the high platform height doesn't really matter from an accessibility perspective because you're likely already going to be using a lifter elevator to get to the platform and so the slight difference in height isn't a big deal in some cases though with light rail or regional rail systems passengers sometimes need to approach a station from ground level and climb up some stairs or take a ramp and this isn't ideal that said such stations are still fairly accessible because of their permanent nature the wraps they can provide can be high quality and they can also provide high quality lifts there's also another option which is trenching down the tracks basically lowering the tracks instead of raising the platforms so that the difference between the top of rail height and the platform is the same as with standard high platforms it's just that the platform itself is level with the ground and the tracks are slightly below it another sub-optimal form of retroactive platform height tomfoolery is with go transit and the london underground who thought those systems had anything in common both of these systems have mini platforms or platform humps which provide accessibility but only for a portion of the train which isn't an ideal solution but it does work and it's better than nothing better than nothing is not great though as i've said many times now all of this matters because once you pick a floor height it is a royal pain to switch it especially if you're making a drastic change in height from say low floor to high floor since trains and platform heights go together it's a major logistical challenge to convert all of your platforms and convert all of your trains if you have high platforms it's not necessarily true that you can easily board low floor trains from them and so some agencies have ordered trains with multiple door heights for these sort of situations that said multiple door heights is a real nightmare for accessibility because if a passenger boards at a low floor station and needs to get off at a high floor station that requires an internal lift within the train which is not that common in north america you see this dual height approach both in new jersey and montreal and in california with the new caltrain trains caltrain trains oh my goodness what i will say is that the caltrain trains do this much better because they provide full-size doors on both the upper and lower levels of the train which is nice the new jersey and montreal trains are a lot less ideal because they provide sort of half height doors and less of them and so for a high quality service you really need to take the caltrain option and if i'm honest you really need to just standardize all your platform heights because it is way too confusing to have people having to go up a level or down a level based on what station they're at there are other weird in-between cases as well the pre-metro in brussels actually features low floor platforms because the tunnels for it are currently used by trams the tunnels are designed for metro use in the future hence pre-metro and so the actual station platform is high level but the low floor portion is basically done as a cutout from the high level platform where people climb down some stairs or take a ramp to get to that low-level boarding platform another interesting example is toronto's app express line which has both high-level platforms for the up express and very low platforms for go transit including with the mini platform i mentioned earlier basically how this works is there's a high platform and then right next to it there is a low platform this isn't a terrible solution but it creates incredibly long stations i think roughly 400 meters long and that isn't great because if you get off at one side of the station and need to go to the other it's a very long walk now you want to know my pick and here's what i'll say there are no correct answers with so many issues in transit and even though i sometimes frame things as being right or wrong because i do have preferences and i'm going to express them to you because this is my youtube channel the truth is that there's rarely a correct answer that said i personally generally lean in direction of high platforms they make for fine accessibility in almost every case and much more importantly they allow for much simpler vehicles which can reduce operations costs reduce maintenance costs reduce acquisition costs and just lead to better vehicle designs with more doors and more flexibility in terms of internal layout which can be great for just creating more pleasant transit experiences that's especially important for regional rail systems take the moscow central circle for example the trains it currently has have two doors per car but with the massive traffic using that line moscow might eventually want to convert those two trains with four doors per car or even three doors per car with a low floor train that becomes tricky because you're limiting how much space you have between the wheels of the train to add additional doors and because the doors would be closer together there is less ability for people to enter the train easily when the doors are open so in the case of a lot of regional systems i think going for high platforms makes a ton of sense because it gives you that flexibility in the future to buy more metro style trains and increase your service frequency more easily that said in the case of trams yes in many cases low floor does make sense but i think the important distinction to make is whether the tram system is serving as sort of a regional level system as you see in many north american uh light rail networks or whether it plays a complementary role to longer distance faster rail services like in many european cities in european cities i think low floor trains are fine because the limitations of them are acceptable because if people need to go somewhere fast or if you need high capacity you have the main line railways in the north american context i think high floors make more sense because the speed capabilities which are typically higher for high floor cars because the equipment can be under the train creating a better center of gravity are a big benefit the increased capacity and the like the simplicity of maintenance all of these factors added up make me feel like in north america high floor just makes more sense broadly that said your platform system isn't the be all and all of your train system and designing a great service for either low or higher platforms is totally possible the important thing to consider is what to do when you're building a new system or new line for example i've talked a lot about how i think calgary's greenline lrt the third lrt line in that city should use high floor trains not low floor trains so that's it the answer to the great platform height question is it depends i know it's not the most satisfying answer but it's a very honest answer if you have a new system you should probably build high platforms but otherwise just stick with what you've got thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 16,354

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, subway, metro, regional rail, go transit, platform, station, train platform, skytrain, vancouver skytrain, toronto subway, ttc subway

Id: ePPeu4vcnoM

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021