Tiny might make sense if they are running every 2 minutes and thus getting their capacity via frequency. However there is no reason to think they will do that. (if they were running anywhere near that frequent overhead wire would be a lot cheaper than a battery on every tram)
The main operating cost of running a bus line is the salary of the bus driver. It dwarfs vehicle maintenance cost and petrol. The VLR has the ambition to run autonomously eventually. Autonomous buses are quite a bit further into the future.
Not really because buses get stuck in traffic all the time because there’s a point where they need to share roads with cars. Once you spend the money on segregating buses entirely, you’re at the same level as the tram line.
Also, because of the expensive infrastructure that can only be used by trams, there’s a permanence there that prevents future politicians from ripping it out to put more cars on for a quick political win with drivers.
Going back to point 1: having a line means that any route needs to be properly planned because you never have an escape hatch of “just stick them on the road.” Example: where I live, the council installed a bus lane and a cycle lane. Where it pinches in (planning fuck up), it dumps all the traffic into a shared route with 2 roundabouts and 5 exits, each with an insane amount of traffic coming to or from them. Buses that are forced to use that route are always late. It takes me just as long to drive as it does to take the bus, faster if you factor in me waiting for a late bus.
The solution to that is dedicated bus lanes, which are quite common in some cities. Usually they allow taxis and emergency vehicles as well.
Trams here in Berlin share the street with the cars on some streets. So, it's exactly like a bus that can get stuck in traffic (and they do). Dedicated tracks are also common but they take up a lot of space and it's expensive infrastructure to install. Mostly trams are limited to the former East Berlin, though they've started to spread to some parts on the west side.
With electrical buses and bus lanes, you get most of the advantages of trams. There are probably still some advantages to dedicated tram lines. But they are expensive to install. I'm not sure it's worth the investment.
> Also, because of the expensive infrastructure that can only be used by trams, there’s a permanence there that prevents future politicians from ripping it out to put more cars on for a quick political win with drivers.
A few things to further this:
- I’ve seen bus lanes get ripped out and moved around, you can see where the paint was cut off.
- Taxis use bus lanes, usually.
- People use bus lanes illegally if they’re not enforced with cameras (political cost of installing the cameras).
> Also, because of the expensive infrastructure that can only be used by trams, there’s a permanence there that prevents future politicians from ripping it out to put more cars on for a quick political win with drivers.
This is definitively not true. It's something people said about the Washington, DC streetcar and it turns out they are about to remove the streetcar in order to replace it with buses:
I would have hoped it was clear that I never stated infrastructure was never ripped out, since there have been numerous examples of this happening, including my own home city. I’m merely making the point that tearing up tram lines is more costly than simply paying someone to cut paint lines off the road. That plus the initial investment creates an inertia against undoing it, though nothing prevents politicians pissing public money up the wall if they’re determined enough.
The Nottingham tram, not far from Coventry, usually only shares road with cars in the city centre which is mostly pedestrianised. So mostly avoids commute traffic.
Quite a few do, and the point remains that sharing or not sharing the space with cars isn't a feature that distinguishes trams from buses. You'll can - and do - have dedicated rights of way for both, and you can - and do - share routes with cares for both.
I know of no bus routes that completely separate from cars beyond a strip of paint. I also know of no countries that give buses automatic priority over cars outside of bus lanes.
> Not really because buses get stuck in traffic all the time because there’s a point where they need to share roads with cars.
Like many tram lines, CVLR is being laid in-road and not segregated. In fact, while not mentioned here, the it's 15 m turning radius is so important is because it's planned to traverse roundabouts in-lane.
I didn't really mean that they needed higher capacity. If they had the passenger volume to justify such high intervals, they'd already have real trams.
But rather, this is giving up the benefit trams have over buses, without gaining any new edge to replace it. So why is it a good tradeoff? And why now, not 20 years ago?
The autonomous driving angle is the only idea I have.
Bus Rapid Transits can operate at frequencies of about 10 seconds per bus. Obviously they're highly parallelised to achieve that and have special infrastructure to enable it like dedicated stations and pedestrian access, so it's not just "a bus", but bus-based systems are how many of the very highest-throughput public transportation lines function, with up to 35000 people per hour per direction with three digit numbers of buses per hour.
For comparison, the most frequent London underground service is 100 seconds per train and the system moves about 50k passengers an hour (based on a 21% increase representing 10k passengers, I couldn't find a direct figure), presumably that being both directions.
Probably the Rio de Janeiro one. The BRS Presidente Vargas corridor has a peak frequency of 600/hour, according to this site [0]. Pretty impressive IMHO.
BRTs corridors often have dedicated stations with passing/bypass lanes and dedicated pedestrian access, but in the same way that subways and light rail are just a ton of trains down the same track, pretty much.
I don’t know if two minutes are possible, but in Berne, Switzerland, the bus line 10 runs every three minutes. Parts of the loop have dedicated bus lanes, but it‘s probably less than a third of the distance.
That is in the article. The intention is a frequent, arrive and go service. Maybe every 2, 5, 10 minutes, whatever the actual details will be, that is the goal.
