Your Small City Can Have More Transit | Helsinki

a comprehensive transit system contains a number of different Transit modes which serve different types of trips and different types of places in today's video we'll be talking about how one small European city uses various different Transit modes to serve different types of trips and different parts of the city as well as how your city should go about it this is all again despite the fact that this is a small City and yet it uses basically every Transit mode Under the Sun let's discuss [Music] oh [Music] last week I talked about Valencia and its weird Metro and what other cities might be able to learn from it and people seem to enjoy it now a lot of the time making full explainer Style videos like I've made for Tokyo or Hong Kong doesn't make a ton of sense for smaller cities there's just not a ton to explain however if you live in a small City and think there's an interesting story to be told about its transportation system and hopefully have some pictures or video of said system that I could show in a video reach out via the form down below and maybe I can end up making a video about your city today though we are talking about Helsinki in Finland which is quite a bit smaller than Valencia and is actually a really great case study in using different Transit modes for different jobs these are really Tools in a toolbox I've made videos before talking about how different Transit projects have used different modes often inappropriately and I've also done videos talking about how you could best use different modes especially in big cities like Paris but I think a video about a small City like Helsinki is great because it can show you that even a small City can use a bunch of different Transit modes operating independently but integrated with one another now let's actually talk about how different trips can be served in a Transit Network short neighborhood trips tend to be best served by bus or in higher demand places by tram of course like everything I'm going to say in this video what I'm sharing here is mostly the 80 best use case there's always going to be some circumstances where one city or another has a reason or maybe not a great reason for using a different Transit mode in a strange way now the reason trams and buses are so good for operating a local neighborhood style service is because they're really designed to operate on street and board from small platforms or the sidewalk now what's the advantage between trams and buses well of course trams offer lower operating costs per the number of passengers who can move so if you have a lot of passengers being moved by buses trams could probably do the same thing more cost effectively because they require less drivers for the same amount of capacity and also because they're more or less immune to fluctuations in fuel prices and to become because they are more reliable and tend to last longer so you don't need to replace them as often traps are also a good option for roots with established ridership and stable development if you want to replace buses with trams that's the type of environment you're probably looking for now I should say that modern low floor trams tend to have low average speeds because of frequent stops and again this is why they're good for that sort of local service that you're so used to seeing trams operated on but you might be asking what about tram trains in places like karlsru which I've talked about in a previous video well tram trains are a great example of where these traditional definitions do break down but it's also an example of how you should probably be optimizing your Transit mode for the prevalent operating environment that a vehicle is going to be operated in so in the case of a tram train the real problem is often that you have a lot of tram track and maybe some Suburban areas or rural areas that you want to connect to that greater tram Network or because you have two tram style operating environments separated by a long stretch of well nothing since trams are complicated at least compared to regular trains if you don't actually need the tram operation part you'd probably just use a regular train and as I mentioned before if you have a huge tram system in your city or a huge bus system if you're a smaller City it doesn't necessarily make sense to invest in a different mode if it's only for one's short extension the economies of scale will still be on the side of using that prevalent mode for all kinds of trips and there are also potentially benefits Beyond just keeping the mode the same things like being able to have more seamless transfers because people don't need to change vehicle when they get into the city center for a local trip I should also say that interlining tends to work pretty well with trams and that's because building switches between different Tram routes is natural since you're probably going to have less maintenance facilities than you have Roots but also because building switches on a Surface alignment probably in the center of a screen isn't all that expensive in Helsinki you really see all of these different elements of an ideal tram Network coming together and if you're curious the tram Network in Helsinki is meter gauge like Valencia and like a lot of other tram systems in Europe but perhaps unlike some more modern systems that tend to use standard gauge Tram routes operate through the dense central neighborhoods of the city with stops every couple hundred meters or so which is actually longer than you see typically in some cities like Toronto but actually quite optimal in my personal opinion for a tram system that's because even compared to buses tram stops do tend to be more expensive since you probably want to put in some nice next vehicle screens a large canopy and the like something which some cities like Toronto don't really do now in the example of Helsinki and in the examples of lots of different tram systems there are of course some routes which travel further from the city center and that's usually to adjacent neighborhoods along important or high density or high ridership corridors these sort of roots make a lot of sense and they exist for the reasons I mentioned before when you already have a big tram Network extending a little distance from it to serve an important neighborhood is totally reasonable and at the same time such routes usually still only travel at most a few kilometers from the city center another nice thing about trams especially if you're a city that has a lot of trams they tend to not be super expensive to extend and so a great model of development can be slowly extending a tram line out as a new area is developed to provide Transit service there right from day one which helps people establish Transit as a key part of how they get around and again in cities that have a lot of experience building and maintaining tram systems extensions usually aren't super expensive and because fleets on tram networks tend to be more pooled than you see on a Metro System it can be a lot easier to kind of batch your upgrades so you'll have smaller more incremental upgrades to your vehicle Fleet that's something Helsinki has actually done a pretty nice job of in the years since I last visited I acid turns out Helsinki is also augmenting its existing tram network with a new Express tram line with a much wider than usual stop spacing known as the yokari light rail which is intelligently being built to the same standards as the traditional tram Network for swim economies of scale and it's actually being built quite affordably now this tram line is actually going to replace one of the busiest buses in Helsinki which kind of encircles the city center and connects to a lot of discrete Transportation hubs Metro stations and train stations replacing a busy bus route with a tram route in a city the size of Helsinki is a super reasonable option and if you actually look at the documents for this project they specifically refer to it as improving the level of service basically the ride quality and service quality over the buses that were previously operating on the route which it also of course obviously has a major capacity advantage over this reminds me a lot of the tavar Bonin in Stockholm and is actually a really reasonable way to use trams or light rail in a city since well as opposed to say line 5 in Toronto most trips on the route are likely to be fairly short since longer trips would be be more direct by other means since the root overall has an Arcane shape going East-West would be faster via the metro and going north south would be faster with a Mainline train now we have talked a lot about trams but what about the Metro well broadly speaking metros are designed to move as many people in their given space as possible they're also usually designed to move people quite quickly and over medium sort of distances usually of at least a few kilometers and quite critically at a high frequency this is why virtually all Metro systems have high floor trains that allow for a flat floor that gives you more internal passenger space but also more circulation and lots of doors to allow people to board and the light quickly this is again a representation of how the actual design of the physical vehicles and Transit infrastructure impacts the type of service that they're best suited to operate now in a lot of modern Metro systems Helsinki included in this trains are quite large in Helsinki specifically is around 3.2 meters wide and this is largely because running at such high frequencies in dense Urban centers usually require requires a lot of viaducts or more likely tunnels the more fundamental term for this is grade separation which I talk a lot about on this Channel full grade separation in the simplest terms I can put it in simply means having a root that doesn't have pedestrian or Road Crossings of your Railway or buses if you're kind of weird that is unless you're in Chicago or Valencia which have strange Metro systems that do have grade Crossings though only really in the suburbs were there many branches operate at lower frequencies now great separation is great but at the same time grade separation makes stations more complicated as you need to provide additional levels to stations where passengers can circulate and move from one side of the station to another if it has side platforms as well as often featuring fare Gates where people can validate that they actually paid which you'll know if you've watched this channel for a while is that some Metro systems actually don't use Fair Gates and helsinki's is one of them and this can actually be used really intelligently to reduce the cost of stations by allowing people to go straight from surface to platform or Surface to Concourse to platform often eliminating an entire underground or elevated level to a station and saving money that being said grade separations costs that stations can't entirely be eliminated and that's for good reason in modern systems there tends to be much more of a focus on accessibility and that means featuring elevators and hopefully also escalators for people of different levels of ability because stations tend to be complicated and more expensive and because metros try to achieve fairly high speeds you tend to see wider stop spacings often around one kilometer in newer systems an interesting thing about metros is that I think they're often a really compelling option for cities that have difficult geography Helsinki being one of them with all of its islands and peninsulas and whatnot such geographies tend to be hard to design Transportation Solutions around and thus if you're going to be building a tunnel you want to use it to its maximum capacity and a Metro is usually the way to do that if you're going to say build underwater tunnels like you see in parts of the western portion of helsinki's single East-West metro line then you probably want the capacity of Metro to fill those tunnels up at the same time the more restrictive design requirements that you often see with Mainline trains things like overhead power wires a large number of metros use third rail Helsinki included as well as physically larger trains that take up more space requiring bigger tunnels and which need to make wider curves which again require more tunneling coming back to the issue of grade separation it's powerful but it does have its price literally viaducts and tunneling are not cheap and so you tend to see Metro systems have a lot less branching than you might see with trams because planners tend to want to use each kilometer of track laid to its maximum and that tends to discourage the type of heavy branching that again you might see on something like a tram system at the same time the high frequencies metros operate and the dense environments they operate in mean that branches which would often require flying Junctions where one track hops over the other are really difficult to build underground or in central areas and you can actually see that in the Helsinki Metro where the Eastern portion of its one route is Branched but the branches happen basically entirely on the surface with some small paneled sections now I do have to talk a little bit more about helsinki's Metro before I move on to another mode and I want to give you some interesting details for one I think Helsinki is probably one of the oldest modern single line Metro systems out there this is originally opened in the 1980s and still really only has one root even if it's kind of branded as two the route now operates 35 kilometers East-West on track that is pretty similar to Finnish Mainline track broad gauge that being said the Helsinki Metro is set to expand with a new Western extension that's already under construction and an Eastern extension of its northern Branch the system was also super intelligently designed to enable a future north-south line with platform space left for it under one of the city center stations this type of approach isn't completely unheard of but is more rare these days and it's really smart IT enables a future metro line to be built at lower cost even if the initial line is a bit more expensive the last major mode I want to talk about in this video is Mainline Braille which is useful for a ton of different types of Journeys from Suburban to long distance Intercity as I mentioned before generally Mainline rail has wider curves than larger trains and while that might be a disadvantage in an urban rail service it's a huge Advantage for a lot of other types of services because it allows for high capacity while still having high speeds and a lot of comfort Suburban rail is unsurprisingly a really good option for longer trips into the suburbs for one because of the high top speeds which are often double that of what you'll see on a Metro but also because since Mainline rail tends to have stations with larger Footprints because they're above ground often in lower density areas you can do things like have bigger stations that have bypass tracks allowing for express service something that isn't common on metros but is really common on Suburban rail around the world the larger size of trains also allows for more flexible design with more Comfort which along with speed and the tendency for airports to be located some distance outside of City centers is why so many airport rail links around the world tend to be built to Mainline rental standards and that's especially the case in northern Europe where I think Copenhagen is the only real major city that actually takes its Metro all the way to the airport now Helsinki as you might imagine because this video is about Helsinki as well as Transit modes does have such a Mainline Rail Link to its airport but it's very weird served why is it weird well because it was built as a loop essentially between two radio rail quarters that travel out to the suburbs or at least will travel out to the suburbs in the case of the Western Branch and that actually means that you can take one train line to the airport and a different line from the airport which I think is kind of fun if you're into trains Helsinki also built this rail line known as the ring rail a very sensible name with provision for future stations which you can really clearly see on satellite views but which is also just really smart forward thinking that you also saw with the Metro now while Mainline rail is useful for a lot of different Services the large scale of the infrastructure and the often poor optimization for capacity tends to make it much harder to justify new corridors in dense Urban centers however that's not to say that such corridors are never built they are sometimes and in a lot of cities and espan or rer Style Network is built where a small section of tunnel usually in the city center is used to link two large Suburban rail networks that travel out into the suburbs the cost of that track is incredibly high but since it allows for through running and a lot more connectivity it's worth it stepping back from talk about specific modes when I look at a Transit plan and there are all kinds of different routes being served from long distance Regional to local Urban routes and they all plan on using the same technology I tend to be fairly concerned in North America this is sometimes Justified as being good enough but our Transit here in North America and in a lot of places around the world is not good enough and that really shouldn't be an excuse for a one-size-fits-all Transit solution using one mode of transit to serve most or all trips in a region is a simplistic and minimal way of building Transit it sacrifices making each trip as good as it could be by trying to serve every trip in the same way that might mean a slower and consistent service for a regional scale Journey or a long walk to the stopper station for a more local one which might make taking especially long or especially short trips on Transit not so attractive using different modes to their best to serve different types of trips is something a lot of smart cities do from Paris to Amsterdam to yes Toronto Philadelphia and San Francisco and it's actually something almost every city did historically nowadays with Rapid Transit it often feels like it's an either or between brt Subway or Light Rail and based on what we've been building it's a lot of brt and Light Rail even huge cities like Dallas Houston and Phoenix don't even have Subway systems or even Suburban rail systems despite their suburban sprawl and this is often justified by saying that the cities aren't large enough or don't have large enough transit systems to support multiple different modes but that's just not true Portland which essentially uses light rail for its entire higher order Transit network isn't dissimilar in size from Stockholm despite the fact that Stockholm has trams Metro Suburban trains and everything in between and a city like Salt Lake City is similar in size to Helsinki a great City where you can see all this put to work you have a tram Network a metro line that serves routes that would be hard to serve with Mainline Braille extensive suburban and Mainline rail services and and Intercity rail for even longer Journeys thanks for watching and try to be a little more like Helsinki [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 124,577

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

Id: QZdsivODBh8

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 01 2022