What the US Gets Wrong About Trams

we build a lot and I mean a lot of trams in North America but we don't call them that trams in North America are basically universally referred to as Light Rail even though that can mean a variety of different services from vehicles that operate in mixed traffic on the street all the way up to Metro systems with grand stations but despite all of the trams we've built I would argue that we still haven't got the basics right and instead over and over again we've built one single thing minimum viable tram before we talk about what North America gets broadly wrong with trams we should first talk about how the ideal tram system actually works actually verbalizing where trams make sense can be kind of difficult my go-to explanation is that a tram is basically a nicer bus it makes a lot of sense in denser environments where you're going to have a lot of demand for shorter local trips and where the capacity limitations of a bust would make them quite expensive to operate both in terms of The Operators themselves but also in terms of having to replace the buses every 15 years or so but if you're just trying to make the case for trams to the average person then I think not just spikes and others description of them as a walking accelerator is actually really good most of the time a Tramway makes sense for a trip that you could conceivably walk not necessarily comfortably and not necessarily all that quickly but you could walk it these aren't trips across your city unless your city is really small these are neighborhood scale local trips I constantly praise Paris for its incredibly well conceived Transit Network and I think its tram Network in particular is a perfect explanation of the type of services that make a lot of sense with trans the network isn't actually fully connected so you're not meant to ride a very long distance from one tram line on to another rather the trim is a great way to cross your neighborhood or connect to another mode of transportation to take you much further faster in both cases it probably replaces the sort of trip of a distance that you could reasonably cycle or walk now it's not really a surprise that I have a lot of praise for paris's tramways since France did really invent the modern iteration of the Tramway like almost every other place in the world many French cities ripped out a large portion of their trams in the mid 20th century but from the 1980s many cities and towns across France built new modern tramways with vehicles from Alston because France which I would distinguish from previous traditional tram networks in that they're very Corridor focused rather than being a big interconnected series of buses on rail that you see in traditional tram networks that survived like Toronto Melbourne or Budapest the France has basically been taken around the world and it's Marco Kitty refers to as the modern European Tramway now unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly we don't actually build modern European tramways in North America because somehow while places as diverse as Morocco turkey and Australia have been able to import the modern European way of doing trams we in North America have not and it all starts from the vehicles it's truly astonishing how many different unique vehicle designs exist just in the French Tramway systems and that's without even looking to various neighboring countries who all have their own unique tram Aesthetics but almost universally in North America are trams range from oh that's ugly to meh part of the problem here really is just that the variety of aesthetic designs is lacking in the United States almost every single light rail system uses vehicles from Siemens which basically all look the exact same short of some changes to the paint Scheme and interestingly even vehicles from other companies have actually adopted sort of the same aesthetic which is kind of a weird example at the same time in the United States virtually no systems adopt the 100 low floor tram design that's common in Europe and so there are steps in an elevated platform at the ends of a trail coal were the operator's Cabins this is known as a 70 low floor design and it's not really in line with what the rest of the world uses at least not in the last 20 years now it might actually be helpful over 100 low floor vehicles for capacity reasons but the reality is that American light rail systems almost all don't move enough people to actually make the argument that they need additional capacity from a certain vehicle design for example Toronto's King streetcar which does use 100 low floor vehicles and is just 12 kilometers long moves roughly twice as many people as would removed by Phoenix's light rail system which has longer trains and a route that is four times longer and is the main form of higher order transit for all of Phoenix now in Canada and in a select few play places in the United States fully low floor vehicles or 100 low floor vehicles are now being used or at least considered but still there are a lot of hiccups with the design as well as just questionable decisions for one compared to other countries the vehicles used in Canada almost universally have less doors and what this means is that it takes longer to board and debord passengers at each stop and makes the operations slower the design quality is also just worse some systems do incorporate some degree of color into the design of the vehicles but in Toronto a city not exactly known for being all that colorful especially in Winter our trams are gray multiple Shades of Gray but gray the physical design also just isn't all that creative it looks modern but it just isn't anything super special and that's despite the fact that all of our Light Rail lines are pretty new by comparison again other countries use all kinds of different designs some of which are older and yet still look more modern than our newest designs some of the newest ones are even incorporating unique lighting features the Interiors also aren't all that much better with much less varied design and just lower quality finish finishings than you would see in Europe the way finding is also worse as well because in North America we seem to insist at least outside of the major cities on being 20 years behind what other places in the world are doing not just Europe either now all of this might to some extent be because of the extreme consolidation in the industry at least in the U.S where a lot of the light rail systems until recently were being built with Siemens providing trains for the vast majority of them in Canada we are starting to see a couple different players presenting modern low floor light rail vehicles and interestingly the new vehicles being proposed for new light rail projects in Calgary and Edmonton are from new manufacturers to the 100 low floor light rail vehicle space in North America and actually look nicer than our traditional designs One Design is from Hyundai which has a full double door at the front of the vehicle which current lrvs in Canada do not and another design is from calf and has two doors on each intermediate segment which is more doors more better what's also sort of strange but perhaps not surprising is the disconnect between vehicle design and service design obviously this sort of notion of a disconnect already exists when you're operating metro style services with trams in multiple cities but it actually runs deeper than that because for example all stem seems most interested in selling a design that in Europe is used basically entirely for tram train routes but for all routes in North America the design of the citadist spirit which I'm specifically referring to has larger segments and a design that's overall oriented towards higher speed which actually may make a lot of sense on some routes in North America but at least on the roots it's actually being used on it's quite hit or miss and it's being used for some lines in Ontario that operate nearly 100 in the middle of streets and which would have made more sense with traditional Vehicles which Alston does sell internationally to places like Rio de Janeiro and Sydney I also kind of just think their trams look better than the ones we got in Toronto what's weird is that as I mentioned a lot of systems in North America do operate on what we would call rail corridors for a large part of their route and thus would benefit from a more tram train style vehicle I talked about those in a previous video up here and you don't really see this differentiation whereas in Europe trams which are meant to operate in rail corridors tend to both enable higher speeds but also often have seats that would look appropriate for a Mainline train which reflects the additional comfort that passengers probably want when they're taking a transit route which is long enough to require going off straight and going into a rail quarter but it just seems to kind of fly over our heads here in North America the rights of way are also another big place where you do see differences from Modern European tramways versus whatever you want to call what we build in North America in most cases in Europe a Tramway either operates mostly alongside a street but separate from it or as a tram train that operates in traditional rail corridors between operating in sections of Tramway as I mentioned before with elevated and tunneled sections being the exception and not the norm unlike in North America where they're actually very common in North America the insistence use trams rather than true Mass Rapid Transit leads to a lot of weird habits where lines are either very heavily separated but not entirely separated from traffic or alternatively hardly separated at all there's not much in between and this is at least in part because of a tendency of many planners to see measures which prioritize Transit as being measures which get transit out of the way of cars when it's sort of the reverse this is a particular problem for North America because in Europe the type of road that you would call a Strode here in North America is far less common but in North America these types of streets are plentiful unfortunately even in places where we want to build a tram which is sort of a problem in the first place and strodes tend to be the places where trams get backed up because they don't have good signal priority get caught in congestion or even get into accidents the combination of roads which are wide incredibly really fast moving and heavily trafficked as well as the institutional deprioritization of Transit meaning that grade separation should probably be much more heavily used in North America and this is part of why in many cases I think if you're going to be doing that many grade separations anyways a system more like an automated light Metro probably makes sense in North America as I talked about in a recent video and to be perfectly clear this trend isn't just limited to here in North America it's also something you're seeing in a place like Auckland New Zealand where they're talking about building a new light rail route but that will be heavily tunneled you see the difference in approach here is that a lot of North American systems interactions with traffic are seen as the exception whereas in Europe grade separation is seen as the exception and it's used in strategic places to get trams out of traffic or get them around tricky obstacles a little bit of grade separation makes sense because it's not too expensive and it can massively speed up trams but the amount we use in North America doesn't really make sense because you're so close to having a much higher capacity but just not quite there now because of the wide streets and the avoidance of interacting with traffic here in North America which isn't necessarily a bad tendency we often choose to design our alignments like these street cars of the past something which at least unconsciously seems to influence a lot of our decisions about light rail it seems like in Europe there's more of a collective memory that many tram systems were ripped out because they had some serious planning and operational issues but in North America we're really set an intent on replicating what we did in the past and what this means is that we rarely get to take advantage of the beautiful Urban Design choices that you see in modern European tramways that make the system so special like running from one street to another and Crossing from one side of streets to the other or into pedestrian plazas to directly deliver passengers to their destinations rather than having them be dropped off in the middle of a road which is probably not nearly as wide as the roads in North America where people are going to have to wait for a couple minutes to cross three lanes of traffic in many cases in Canada this is a particularly problem attic Trend where our earliest Light Rail systems were inspired by and operate a lot like German stop Bond systems with dedicated rail right of ways and near total prioritization over car traffic when compared to our more modern Light Rail lines which for the most part seem to be trying to emulate the slow and unreliable designs of the Toronto streetcar Network operating either in the middle of the street or in a tunnel and not taking advantage of better potentially less expensive and faster off-street rail corridors where they might exist this results in costs which are often nearly as high as Subway Lines but with way less capacity and lower ride quality basically in North America we're building an entirely different thing from what other parts of the world are and what's even more annoying is that here in North America a lot of the right-of-ways we operate on are also just kind of ugly in Europe tram tracks are quite often surrounded by attractive pavers or even Cobblestone and sometimes green track whereas here in North America exposed concrete or even a hybrid in embedded rail Corridor looking thing in the middle of the street is far too common in Europe and the rest of the world for that matter inserting a modern Tramway also is about transforming the streets into a pedestrian-oriented space for example George Street in central Sydney was beautifully pedestrianized when the Sydney Light Rail was installed but often in North America we don't even narrow the roads and we promise to drivers that they'll be widened so that they keep their original number of lanes and this isn't just because of the car Lobby if you have conversations with planners or go to public meetings and events around Light Rail projects you'll often hear that light rail isn't really meant to compete with cars it's meant to offer a different option often because those designing it aren't confident that it will be competitive for many trips until they want to still have the option to drive themselves that they design both the alignment and the physical design are sub-optimal alongside the resistance to changes in the street layout probably means that North American light rail has a much harder time driving the changes in land use that you'd like to see along with higher order Transit because much of the time developments and properties are separated from the transit by multiple Lanes of high-speed traffic on strodes as opposed to being directly adjacent or perhaps even having the trams pass through other properties on their way from one street to another with developments built up around the transit something which is actually fairly common in Europe this pattern continues to the stop design or perhaps station design you might want to call it because sometimes the stations are way more Grand than you really need for tram while at other times they feel completely uninspired and more like a bus shelter in other places while stops are typically not massive they usually are distinct and have a nice design that's representative of the fact that the tramways present a higher level of service than say a bus and that is legitimately a higher level of service in places like the Gold Coast in Australia just south of Brisbane you actually see that there are modern European style Tramway called g-link I Love g-link Actually operates 24 hours a day at least on weekends which is so useful for people who want to use transit to get back from a bar or a party something which virtually no systems in North America do even though we could do it now all of these issues are really issues of questionable implementation and I think perhaps the thing that symbolizes this best is when you look at the overhead lines that power the vehicles despite the fact that this is a purely functional element in North America the power lines are so often ugly and overbearing when compared to Europe where they're sleek and minimal these little things add to the sense of chaos and poor design that I think makes these tramways less likely to have the transformational impacts that we'd like them to but I do think there's hope now we do need to be practical about some things our land use doesn't really tend to align well with trams in North America neither do many of the corridors that we end up building them on and in such cases we should be looking for Transit that is better suited to the tasks that we're laying out whether that be a Subway a light Metro or Regional Rail or even buses for that matter but this also means building truly modern trams in places where they make sense high density districts where many people already don't own a car and de-prioritizing cars is a serious possibility in the future a great example of this would be Jersey City on the waterfront across from New York City Jersey city has all of the ingredients that would make it perfect for modern Tramway but its Light Rail just isn't there the alignment is okay but the stops and the vehicles aren't all that attractive and the surface is abysmal it was again every 20 minutes when I was there but the good thing for Jersey City and a lot of our systems is that Transit can be incrementally improved we just rarely do it in North America there's no reason that the poor design decisions and Investments we made in the past are reasons why we can't improve things in the future for example corridors can be rebuilt when the infrastructure requires it to have better Street design and better materials on the right-of-way it's also possible to completely rely in portions of a route to better serve high density development or provide a faster service and when the time comes to upgrade stops or buy new vehicles we can make it a priority to require modern features like nicer digital wayfinding more comfortable seat designs and just a better more modern design that makes Transit the premier way to get around the city these things won't necessarily cost us substantially more money we really just need to ask for them so indeed what we really need to stop building in North America is minimum viable tram thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 217,468

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning, tram, light rail, tramway

Id: y2qFTAVQBCs

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 25 2022