On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, Stephen Richards wrote:

Have just been reading through the West London tram proposal. While I
am all for upgrading our transport system, I can't help wondering
whether building tram systems is the best value for money.

I asked more or less the same question - and made the same comparison to
busways - a few months ago:

http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl...oogle%2BSearch

(the thread's called 'Trams' and started on 2004-03-30, if that's no good)

I didn't get any really show-stoppingly good answers, but there are a few
things which stand out:

- Although a tram _may_ be more expensive (in terms of pence per
passenger-mile or whatever), a tram will have a higher capacity than a bus
route over the same corridor, so if you're looking at high traffic levels,
a tram may be able to provide a service that a bus simply can't.

- The cost of a tram isn't necessarily as much greater than a bus as you
might think; good figures are hard to come by, but what there is seems to
be within a factor of 2 of each other.

- There are soft factors: a tram is a fixed route, and has imposing
infrastructure, so it seems more secure; people thus trust it more than a
bus, which is basically some random guy driving wherever he likes.

- I came across something else recently (in that Maidenhead proposal,
actually): light rail (and so presumably trams) gets much more modal shift
than buses. That is, people will switch from cars to light rail who won't
switch from cars to buses. Presumably, this is about the ride experience
(and trams do tend to be much smoother and more spacious), and the
aforementioned trust issue. If you want to relieve traffic congestion, you
need modal shift.

The thing which bothers me about all this is that while you can make a lot
of theoretical arguments about the performance of high-quality bus routes
(using large, modern vehicles, fitted out with good furniture, exclusively
using prioritised bus lanes and busways, with relatively infrequent and
posh-looking stops and well-trained drivers - basically, a bus that looks
like a tram; what Clive calls Rapid Transit on Rubber Tyres), nobody's
really tried it, so there isn't any hard data. However, should the
Greenwich Waterfront Transit plan go ahead as it stands, we'll have
exactly that on our own doorstep, and we'll find out at last!

tom

--
Crazy week so far, which at one point involved spewing down the inside of my jeans! -- D