The Modern Tram Has Gone Off the Rails.

today's video will be unusual we'll talk about trams how they came to be what they are today and how we can avoid weird things like this and this [Music] at one point the tram or streetcar was the most common public transport mode in part because back in the day there were that many modes of transportation it was either horseback walk up hills both ways or get the streetcar but times change and over time the streetcar has been outmoded these days we have buses Suburban trains metros and cable cars and so the niche that the tram fits in has grown smaller and smaller but hold on for a second what is a tram a tram or as they call in some Cities A Streetcar is a lot like a bus on Rails though of course the tram came before the modern bus though both were preceded by the Omnibus which was basically just a horse carriage back in their Heyday trams had a very simple design Two Wheel sets known as bogeys and a passenger compartment on top with stairs allowing people to climb up to that high level passenger compartment which is why we often call these vehicles High floor trams this basic design was used for like 100 years though other designs did exist like articulated trams which added more capacity with a bend in the middle supported by an extra Bogey and double decker trams like the ones seen in Hong Kong which actually rest on a single bogey High floor Trends with two bogeys do still exist although their days are numbered these trams were however the origin of modern subway cars and articulated trams actually got a second life first with German Subway Surface systems and then with City train systems the world over from Kuala Lumpur to Rotterdam to Los Angeles to Istanbul Calgary and many more I have an entire video on city trains so if you're curious about them check that out up here now with all this talk about trams the question is where did they make sense and I think the simplest answer in classic RM Transit fashion is it depends you see in the world's Legacy tram networks things worked a lot like a bus Network you had a lot of small stops small trams and interconnected Roots there was a web of timelines and so it made sense to provide an array of travel options it wasn't just a to B and C to D but also a to c and maybe sometimes to D during rush hour periods trams were mostly run in the middle of streets and people would walk out into the street to get on board this actually still happens in some places in classic tram and streetcar cities like Berlin and Toronto now this model worked really well while these street cars were the kings of the street but naturally as cars came into the equation things got much worse if A Streetcar had a problem it could block traffic as well as other streetcars although having so many interconnected routes meant that streetcars could often divert via other streets which is probably a big part of what cemented that design for older streetcar networks that didn't have a ton of dedicated Lanes ultimately though with cars all over the place the model worked a lot less well of course some cities like Toronto are still trying to make it work it's not going to work guys come on enter the bus with which is often framed as a nefarious tool designed to dismantle the streetcars but it's not quite so simple buses were promising when they were starting out systems could save a ton of money not rebuilding and replacing old degraded infrastructure which meant street cars felt a lot bumpier than you might imagine but this could also piggyback on the new road networks built for cars allowing them to go all over the place buses also had a flexibility that was particularly attractive to an age of Transit planners used to having vehicles which were stuck on Rails and most of all because they were new and the streetcars they were replacing were not passengers were on board getting on a new shiny thing buses did have some serious issues which became apparent though they couldn't move as many people and they had to be replaced quite regularly as their many moving Parts wore out but then trams changed everything France started going crazy with building modern tram systems in the latter half of the 20th century but these were not the trams of old the new way of building trams in France which Marco Kitty calls the modern European Tramway kind of transformed the way trams work and even today when you look at two tram systems you can easily tell which one is an met and which one is a legacy tram Network the new tramways were called tramways because well France so trem and also because they didn't really operate on streets like streetcars they operate on tram waves these were their own almost entirely dedicated right of ways which might operate next to streets or within a street right of way but weren't entirely tied to the street grid these tramways would use new trams produced by companies like Alston that were much larger and had significant low floor sections these were made possible by more complex designs which put the vehicle around rather than on top of the bogeys similar to how trains on the tube in London work Jago Hazard actually has a great video on that these vocals were more expensive harder to maintain and not really optimized for capacity but that wasn't really the point these new vehicles were accessible and they blended into modern streetscapes and public spaces like giant caterpillars weaving their way around they'd also feature large stops which would feature lots of shelter sometimes ticketing and even sometimes level boarding like on the subway system the networks themselves were also laid out in a completely different way gone were the many interconnected Roots operating small trams on tons of different service patterns and branches what replaced them was sort of like a lightweight version of a Metro network with a few major high frequency routes with larger Vehicles bigger stops that were less often and connections at Major transfer points now the idea of the modern European Tramway is really good in smaller provincial French cities the Tramway would be the backbone of the public transit system with quiet higher capacity electric vehicles while in Paris these routes could replace the busiest bus routes which were incredibly crowded but not crowded enough to get out the tumbling machines and with that the French had struck gold the Met was a real success and Alston has sold trams all over the world for European style tramways over 20 systems have been built across France and internationally from Shanghai to Sydney and Rio de Janeiro to Dubai and change wasn't just coming to France the tram train idea originated in karlsruhe Germany I actually have an entire video about that system so you can check it out up here would allow trams to operate on more conventional Railways with high voltage electrification and more complex signaling this allowed tram systems to spread from Urban centers farther into the suburbs than ever before and even sometimes leapfrogging into the next town over other European cities started building Tunnels for their very subway-like light rail or pre-metro systems which often ended up turning into full metros short strategic tunnels that help trams avoid the most congested intersections and the busiest areas of cities also started to become popular but then the problems came the trams of European cities were very attractive and they at least should have been cheap because they don't require a ton of tunnels or Bridges so cities around the world started building them sometimes because they were a good solution but sometimes just because they were getting on board with the European tram craze having a tram in your city running down a redesigned Boulevard became a bit of an Urban Design right of passage the train companies of course were on board every train company the world over was making trams and they were happy to sell these trams thanks to the Myriad of different systems trams were running on across Europe they could do more than ever they were a great Swiss army knife type of product Oh silly North Americans you want to use trams as the main form of public transit in your city which has millions of people well we might just have the vehicle for you these two factors cities obsessed with having their own tram or light rail systems often for rather aesthetic reasons and companies which were happy to sell trams that were in demand led to a lot of Transit projects that use trams when they probably shouldn't have in the case of this video a tenuous Trio of tram typologies if you will now to be perfectly clear before you write a comment yes these projects are good because Transit is good but they could have been better which would have also been better for everyone Nuance is great the first I want to talk about is the brand new Redline in Tel Aviv which uses coupled up trams from China's crrc who despite the limited number of trams in China has gotten in on the tram action in the rest of the world the red line is quite interesting it features a large underground segment that even has platform screen doors which are a nice touch on any rail system and Tails on either end of the tunnel that operate like tramways the problem here is really one of geometry the central tunnel the most important and expensive part of the entire project has its capacity limited by the surface tails in theory a tunnel can handle a tram or train even more often than every 90 seconds but a surface Tramway cannot because the red line doesn't have an array of branches like say the Paris rer the tunnel will never be used to its full potential and capacity is also limited by the tram Vehicles themselves capacity on a transit system is a function of how many people each vehicle can hold and how often the vehicles can come and trams are bad for high capacity metro style use for several reasons for one they have much of their internal room taken up by bogeys meaning that you have seating in places where it would probably be better to allow people to stand people like to stand often on Metro systems because they're not riding for all that long and it allows for more space and higher capacity the vehicles also have less and less well spaced doors which are really important to the frequency part of the equation a 30 meter tram will often have three or four double doors whereas a modern subway car might be just 18 meters long but have the same number and because with a low floor vehicle you have to put doors where the wheels aren't you find that the spacing of the doors on the tram is also much more congested with this design leads to is a lot of crowding inside the vehicle near the doors with less people traveling further into the vehicle into the narrow aisles fitted above the bogeys this is made even worse in Tel Aviv because the end segments of the vehicles don't have doors on them all these design features mean that the vehicles take a lot longer to load and unload than subway cars would and this means they can operate as frequently as they otherwise would be able to that means you have to have longer trains operating less frequently which means larger more expensive underground stations and just a worse environment overall a system like Tel aviv's Redline costs more but delivers less nice platforms to endorse them Calgary is also buying into the tram hype the city has an existing City rail style system with a unified Fleet of modern rail cars that are quite spacious and operate in a number of subway-like and railway-like environments but of course for Calgary's third line which will be very similar to the existing lions in a number of different ways the choice was made to use trams instead despite the fact that the vehicles aren't well optimized for this type of service and will provide lower capacity at a higher cost this also forces the city to expand its flake to include a new type of vehicle that will require different parts and a different set of staff to maintain them this is without even running in any truly Urban environments that this type of modern low floor tram was designed for I've heard this decision justified by train companies don't build High floor trains anymore but given their Simplicity they're literally just two boxes with a bend in the middle and three bogeys I am skeptical of this especially because there are already tons of system is using these types of cranes including Calgary itself is the city going to simply just rip out the Lions when its current Fleet is at end of life I think the reality is more like train companies would really like to sell you on a product that they're selling to all kinds of other systems and have another system that they could sell into so of course they're going to push you in that direction in reality I think Calgary's main problem is that they've only ever bought trains until now from a single manufacturer so of course if that manufacturer says oh we'd rather you move over to the other product platform the city is going to take it pretty seriously sometimes I also hear but the stops look nicer in an urban context and of course this is true a shorter curb style boarding platform looks a lot nicer than a taller one but it's just not something I would trade for a uniform Fleet higher capacity and less operating expenditures Aesthetics just shouldn't drive such important decisions and at the end of the day they don't even matter that much when most of your route isn't on the street and you're you're going to be coupling together multiple trims in a way that really gets rid of the attractiveness of the French model Sims like this that are also meant to be cheap also end up being more expensive because the low floor vehicles are more expensive to purchase and to maintain while at the same time station and other infrastructure needs to be built oversized because of the inefficiencies of the tram style Vehicles a system like Calgary shows that Rolling Stock manufacturers and Trends shouldn't be driving planning policy and that functional requirements should take precedence over aesthetic preferences and then there's Ottawa ottawa's LRT system is something I've talked about to death but the long and short of it is this Ottawa chose to use trams rather than a Metro because it had originally planned to have some level Crossings in these Suburban parts of its system which is actually a totally reasonable planning decision but when you also want high capacity and basically your entire line runs off screen the obvious answer is not a tram but a city train they'd be higher capacity easier and less expensive to maintain and you can take your pick of rail manufacturers to build them all stem Siemens Cap crrc all of them build city trains however you slice it at one point after a number of tragic Crossing collisions Ottawa decided to remove all of the level crossings from its system plan but when the right-of-way on your transit system changes you need to look at changing the vehicles and Ottawa did not giving us the tram Subway a system like Ottawa shows you that the transit Vehicles you use should match the operating environment now we can't change the past and if I had to choose between the transit these cities have and our building and no Transit I'd choose the tram Trifecta every single day but I think if we all had a better understanding of the history of Transit as well as the Ebbs and flows of its Trends we'd have better transit systems better planning more Riders and thus more Transit and that's all I ever really want oh [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 491,941

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning, tel aviv, ottawa, calgary, tram, streetcar

Id: 4OdfjobCLIQ

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 23 2023