Relative advantages/disadvantages of different mass-transit technologies

Suppose you’re trying to design a new public transportation system for a sprawling metropolitan area. You have a choice of several different modes and technologies:
High-speed rail – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail

Commuter rail or “heavy” rail --(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_train

Subway/Metro – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro

Light rail – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail

Monorail – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monorail

Trolley/tram/streetcar – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram

Automated guideway or “peoplemover” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_guideway_transit

Buses – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus
What are the relative strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages, of all of these? In terms of cost-per-mile to build, cost-per-mile to operate, speed, efficiency, flexibility, and likelihood of people to actually choose to ride the system? Probably, within a major metro area, you would choose to combine several different technologies for different purposes, but which would you use for what?

Nobody knows?

I can tell you about some of them, although I am not an expert. But my son is a transportation engineer and I have had long discussions with him.

I am not sure what is meant by high speed rail. Heavy rail has two disadvantages. It almost always involves using existing rail lines (there is no reason to even think about it otherwise). The equipment is very expensive and if you are running on rail lines that are still in use, you must follow railroad rules which adds considerably to the expense. I in fact use such a line regularly and one consequence is that while the downtown station is high platform, the other stations are not since the rest of the track is used by freight trains that are too wide. The old equipment used hinged platforms that swung up to expose steps but the 1995 renovation gave us cars that had level doors in the middle and steps at the end. For me, this means that on the very crowded rush hour trains, I have to spend most of the 9 minute trip fighting my way past the SRO crowd to get from the middle of the car to the end where I get off.

Light rail. If you have the right of way, this is in many ways ideal. The best is old abandoned rail track. Usually, such track does not go where service is needed. However, for the same reasons as for trolleys, the cars are usually too expensive.

Trolleys (trams, streetcars) are expensive to build. They needn’t be. In the late 20s the presidents of a couple dozen American streetcar companies got together at a conference and agreed to design one trolley that they would all buy. Now known as PCC (for Presidents’ Conference Committee) they were actually designed by a committee and proved spectacularly successful. It wouldn’t surprise me if a hundred thousand were built. It wouldn’t surprise me if some were still in use, somewhere in a third world country. But nowadays every company that runs trolleys wants their own design and that adds enormously to the cost. Everyone buys on the wrong side of the learning curve. Other disadvantages are cost of building the track, putting in the catenaries (overhead wires) and the fact that they generally run down the middle of the street so motorists have to be trained to stop when the car does. I love them, but the disadvantages probably outweigh the advantages.

Subways. Well, once you have them they are a tremendous asset. They are very expensive, especially if you tunnel. If you cut and cover it costs somewhat less, but is very disruptive, especially to downtown traffic. There is also something of the one-off problem, but that is usually less serious. When Montreal built its subway, they decided to follow Paris which was moving into rubber tired subways. They use twice as much power as steel wheels on steel rails and the complications of the bogeys have to be seen to be appreciated. They have side guidance tires as well as emergency steel wheels and steel rails. They also followed Paris in having platform gates, quickly removed and now gone in Paris as well.

Monorail. I cannot imagine why anyone who has seen and ridden Vancouver’s sky train would ever consider monorail. Switches are very complicated and the sky train doesn’t block the sky any more than a monorails. Maybe that sort of system (which runs in a subway downtown) is overall the best compromise of price, utility and esthetics for moving large numbers of people over a route that is not affected by traffic.

People mover. I don’t anything about this, but I expect that the expense is much greater than the utility.

Busses. They stink! I mean that literally. They smell of diesel. They get stuck in traffic. If you could have reserved HOV + bus lanes on city streets (Montreal has a couple of such, rush hour only), they can be pretty effective. One thing you didn’t mention were trackless trolleys (more usually called trolleybusses). They are a lot cheaper than trolleys both to build the system and to buy the vehicles. Driving them seems to require a bit more training (to avoid dewiring), they can’t pass each other (not, IMO, a serious problem), and cannot easily leave their routes. But they do pull over to the curb to take on and let off passengers. And they don’t stink. Also there are dual mode busses that can use electricity when there are catenaries and diesel when not. When the town of Fribourg in Switzerland had to extend their trolleybus routes to some new suburb, they first proposed to change all the routes to diesel. They didn’t want the expense of putting up catenaries. People protested (I happened to be living there at the time) and they eventually bought dual mode busses. Seattle also uses dual mode busses. For years, these ran on electric power in a downtown tunnel (now closed for some reason, which I was told but have forgetten) and diesel outside of the downtown. They had special inverted Vs that automatically guided the trolley poles onto the wires. I spent some time one day watching this operation from above.

As you see there are many tradeoffs and that is why all these solutions are used in one place or another. The question really cannot be answered in abstract. Every situation is unique and has its own best solution. (But you can pretty much guarantee that the politicians will not choose that one; they will choose the one that benefits them personally best.)

Everything, and I mean everything, depends on the density of the population, the population distribution, the population gradient (how it shifts from dense to open), the patterns of employment, and its density, distribution and gradient, and how the planner expects all these to change in the coming generation or more.

The pluses and minuses of any individual technology can only be discussed in the light of what they are intended to accomplish.

I don’t see how any decision can be made for a mythical city. This is almost more of a philosophical debate.

This one is important, in figuring cost per passenger-mile.

Here in Minneapolis, we recently opened a new light rail line. It has been wonderously successful. Ridership is double or triple what was expected. Houses and especially commercial land near the stations have gone way up in value.

But surveys of passengers show clearly that people think the light rail transit system is somehow ‘different’ from the bus transit system, and many of them would never even consider riding on buses. So that ought to be considered when planning future special freeway lanes for “Bus Rapid Transit” – it seems to show that this wouldn’t work very well. But our highway-loving state Dept. of Transportation ignores these studies, as they do most research.

I believe the common definition is 140mph-plus operation, with either dedicated tracks or right-of-way past slower traffic. It’s extraordinarily expensive, but carries huge numbers and can compete with air traffic

Britain has built several new networks which are a combination of light rail & trams - using old rail routes and other spare land where available, and able to run into city centres or to snake around modern development on lightweight viaducts. And typically the road layout is changed to either give the tram a dedicated route, or to ensure it has priority at lights.

Not modern ones, even those that still use diesel (as opposed to natural gas or other power sources).

t-bonham@scc.netb is absolutely correct that for some reason people far prefer rail-based solutions to buses. I know I do, and I can’t tell you why.

England’s dalliance with light rail appears to have stalled. There are many schemes in the pipeline which have failed to get government funding (e.g. in Merseyside and Portsmouth and extensions to Manchester’s existing Metrolink system).

I had a lot of involvement a couple of years ago in the administration behind a proposal to convert an existing heavy-rail line between Manchester Victoria and Rochdale via Oldham to light rail. It sounds like a good idea but a great many of the goodly people of Oldham, Rochdale and places in between such as Shaw didn’t seem to think so. I know: I had to appear before a hostile crowd at Oldham Town Hall and explain the procedure to them. Good news: five or six trams an hour, direct to the centre of Manchester compared with two trains an hour. Also, more accessible stations - the marvellously-named Oldham Mumps is in a shocking location. Bad news: longer journey times because there will be more tram stops than stations. No connection with the rest of the rail network - they’ll have to change modes at Manchester Victoria when they go to places like Blackpool, and they will have to buy two tickets as there is currently and bizarrely very little in the way of integrated ticketing in Greater Manchester.

Phoenix, Arizona is in the first phases of constructing a light rail corridor from downtown and a little north then to the airport and beyond into the east valley. It will be at grade level which presents its own nightmares as Phoenix has one of the highest rates of red light running in the US but more important it will be fighting a city (non) designed around individual transport for the past 60 years without the population and business concentrations that might make rail more profitable.

There is a advantage on modes that use alternate routes, which mainly mean rail.

Also rail based transit communting time usually goes down as more people use it, while road based transit communting time usually goes up. A big oversimplification but usually works for most applications.

Rail is inflexable, can’t be easially shifted (if at all) to changing trends in population (who tend to move away from railways)

Also you have some places which have aeral tramways which seem easy to construct when there is a physical barrior to ground based transportation (examples range from NYC tram to Roosevelt Island, to one of my fav. the ‘Town Lift’ in park city (from the city to partway up the ski slopes).

True, but this can be good. Businesses & developers are willing to invest more money in property along the rail lines, because they can count on the rail staying there. Unlike bus lines, which the transit authority can reroute or discontinue whenever they wish.

Not true here in Minneapolis! Developers are building expensive new condo units all along the light rail line. And they are selling quite well. And houses nearby have gone way up in value.

Many people here seem to want to live near the light rail.

San Francisco runs about two dozen PCC cars plus a bunch of Peter Witt cars from Milan and a growing collection of oddball antique cars in daily service.

San Francisco has a large fleet of these. The newer ones are able to automatically dewire and move around obstructions. They’ve got at least enough internal battery power to move a block or two at a time, which comes in handy if there’s an accident ahead, or more often, someone’s blocking the road with a moving or delivery truck.

You’d mentioned buying or building systems on the wrong side of the learning curve. San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is a great example of that. For whatever reason 30 years ago, they built a private right-of-way on a unique rail gauge (Iberian Broad) that nothing else can operate on. It cost around 250 million per mile to build the latest extension.

Yes - didn’t the treasury basically pull the plug on Leeds’ plans recently, by insisting they consider ‘improved’ bus services, thus missing the whole point?

The ticketing isn’t an indication of benefits of particular modes of transport, but rather of poor implementation (I don’t think I need to tell you that, though!) Mind you, I though most onward journeys from the Oldham loop would involve connections at Victoria anyway. What is the current situation with the Metrolink extensions? Are they going ahead?

See this site: http://www.newtrains.org/pages/354049/index.htm

I just threw that in for the sake of completeness. I can’t really see much use for HSR for transportation within a metropolitan area. Then again, I’ve heard that nowadays many Americans commute more than 200 miles to work.

:confused: Why not? What’s the cost differential between building new heavy-rail and light-rail lines?

Well, as you might expect, I was actually thinking in terms of my own city – or rather, my own metro region, the Tampa Bay area. I just wanted to frame the thread in terms accessible to Dopers who don’t live here or know a lot about the area. The Bay area includes both Hillsborough County (Tampa) and Pinellas County (St. Petersburg, Clearwater, and literally dozens of little towns), plus (arguably) the adjacent urbanized areas of Pasco County (New Port Richey) and Manatee County (Bradenton). No one, AFAIK, has ever tried to devise a mass-transit plan for the whole area. There have been some efforts at the city or county level:

A streetcar line recently was built in Tampa, connecting the downtown Convention Center with the Ybor City entertainment district, and running past the St. Petersburg Times Forum (aka the Ice Palace – where the Lightning plays hockey) and the Florida Aquarium. But, in its present form, it’s really a toy for tourists, and gets no commuters off the highways. See http://www.tecolinestreetcar.org/.

There is a plan – has been a plan for many years – to build a Hillsborough County light rail line. Tax-phobic county commissioners have always blocked the idea from even being submitted to the voters. See this site: http://www.davidpinero.com/rail/

The Pinellas Mobility Initiative is considering a monorail system for Pinellas County. See http://www.pinellascounty.org/mpo/maps/PMI.pdf (N.B.: The “trolley” routes on this map are actually buses made to look like streetcars. :rolleyes: )

There was a plan for a Florida high-speed rail line connecting Tampa, Orlando and Miami. Governor Jeb Bush has always been dead against it. The project was mandated by a constitutional amendment in 2000, but that amendment was repealed in 2004. Activists are still lobbying for it. See http://www.floridabullettrain.com/; http://www.floridahighspeedrail.org/servlet/com.hntb.flhighspeedrail.web.FreeTextManagement?cmd=start; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_High_Speed_Rail. Some versions would extend the line across the bay from Tampa to St. Petersburg, so I suppose it could be used for local commuting, if the commuters were willing to pay a high premium.

For progress on Metrolink extensions, have a gander here. Although the government is using positive language about them, I suspect that the costs will prove to be prohibitive and none of them, except the one to Rochdale, will ever get off the ground.

Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive (GMPTE), the public body responsible for the local transport in a large part of the north-west of England, is notoriously averse to joining the Railway Settlement Plan, the scheme which apportions the revenue from ticket sales throughout Great Britain’s heavy rail system (i.e. what used to be British Rail) so that effectively puts the kibosh on any sensible ticketing policy (unlike Merseytravel, its counterpart on Merseyside, which allows various combinations of ticket for use on buses, national rail and Merseyrail, the “independent” local rail service).

It’s been a while since I was immersed in all this nonsense, but I believe you used to be able to get trains from Rochdale and Oldham direct to Blackpool, Southport and Liverpool without having to change at Manchester Victoria. With the Oldham Loop converted to Metrolink, Oldhamites and Rochdalers will have to schlepp their luggage, whippets, black puddings and clogs up and down the stairs at Victoria (taking care not to end up in the Manchester Arena by mistake).

[Aside: when first started using a word-processor in 1995, the spellchecker always suggested “rectal” for “Rochdale” - not far off!]

I have no idea of the relative construction costs of light and heavy rail, but my guess is that there is more infrastructure required for a heavy rail line than a light one although, as Dubliners will tell you, the construction of a street-running light rail system can cause absolute havoc for several years, which must elevate the costs. Incidentally, I always thought that Dublin’s LUAS would be a tremendous white elephant but every time I go to Dublin it seems to be doing a roaring trade. If only they would connect it (or, better yet, the DART) to the Airport. . . .

Several have said “For some reason people prefer rail based systems over busses” and I can speak to that. I rode Denver busses regularly through college, and a few years later spent several months in Vienna (Wien) where I experiencec public trasportation using many modes.

Busses operate at the mercy of other traffic, and traffic lights. Because stops are cheap to build, just put up a sign, and maybe a bench or shelter, there tend to be lots of them, which further slows the trip. As a result they are always (much) slower than driving in a car. The whole time you are on a bus, you are watching cars speed past you, constantly reminding you how much time you are losing by taking the bus.

The fact that Busses add to traffic, and because they are un popular causes them to be scheduled fairly sparsely…maybe every 30 minutes at peak times, and 1/60 minutes off peak. In some respects it is a vicious cycle: Nobody rides the busses because the schedual is so sparse, and since riderrship is so low, why run more busses?

These factors cause a secondary problem, in that it is nearly impossible to keep a long bus route running on schedual. Meaning that riders often wait lots of extra time, and/or miss connections. Even when the lines are on schedual, the sparce schedualing means that even a single connection can add up to an hour to a trip.

“express” busses get around a lot of theses issues, and are in my experience (denver in the early-mid 80’s) much more utilized than “regular busses”,

Rail systems with dedicated ROW (meaning other than on-street trams) operate without regard to traffic. Stops are fairly sparce, meaning they don’t waste much time. IME (Vienna) trains arrive frequently, perhaps every 4 minutes at peak times, and every 10 minutes off peak. Even if you have to make two connections, this adds only 8-20 minutes (at most) to a trip across town.

As for trams (streetcars) The European cities where I’ve ridden them have additional lights at intersctions such that the trams get priority over car traffic. This seems to be fairly effective at keeping them moving.

One thing not yet addressed in this thread is the synergistic effect of the various forms of public transport. A subway, or light rail, system won’t be effective if there is not an effective network of other transportation to serve the stations. These “feeder” systems will be much more useful if there is a faster (subway) system available to ease longer trips. The systems in a large city will be be utilized to a greater degree if there are systems that serve outlying areas effectivly. (trains, shuttle busses, HSR, etc). “Park and ride” lots solve the problem at only one end of the trip. If you can’t complete your entire round trip back to the P&R using only public transport, then you will drive.

With this in mind, I can’t think of a city that would be well served by any single technology. You probably want at least 2 systems, and better three, that cover the range from “slow-cheap-widespread” to “fast-expensive-rare”

Doesn’t anyone have any actual figures on, say, the cost to build a mile of monorail vs. the cost to build a mile of light rail or streetcar line?

I don’t know. I will try to find out. But the only reason to use heavy rail is that you have to follow railroad rules. Everything (including labor) is cheaper if you don’t.

I certainly would much rather take an electric vehicle over a bus and it is not just a question of busses being in traffic and thereby slower. In Toronto, the trolleys mostly run on city streets and only a few stops have passenger islands, but there was a hue and cry when the TTC wanted to change to busses and they didn’t. In Philadelphia, nearly all the former trolley lines have been converted to busses. The principle exceptions are the subway-surface lines that run in the subway tunnel (on a side track) downtown. But the authorities have promised to put trolleys back on the #23 line (Germantown Ave) and the catenaries are still there. On the other hand, the residents along Girard Ave. protested the idea of putting back the trolleys, but that seems exceptional. In Montreal, the last trolley ran in 1962. And in Manhattan, all the trolleys were removed in the 40s because LaGuardia thought busses were more “modern”. There is a proposal to put a curb running trolley on 42nd St, but I don’t expect to live so long. They would have to absolutely guarantee no parking. In Boston, I believe all the trolleys are subway-surface. They also have some trolleybusses.

The question of usage is important. So is the related one of frequency. My son, a transportation engineer, says they estimate that doubling the frequency results in a 40% increase in ridership. But it costs 100% increase in operating costs (nearly) and therefore one of the first things a transit system does when it has to reduce costs (which is always) is to reduce service. In many European cities, there is a lot of political support for public transit. This is not true (outside of NY, where I read during the recent strike that 80% of workers use public transit to work) in North America.

Just make sure you learn the lesson of North Haverbrook.

Buses are the easiest to implement, needing the least amount of infrastructure and having the greatest flexibility. I can see them being used widely and when the single largest routes are identified (as from the center of a major suburb to the center of town), the buses on those routes can be replaced with commuter rail. The density of traffic on a specific route has to be fairly high (or has to be reasonably anticipated to get fairly high in the near future) to justify the cost of any rail system.

You can also configure bottleneck highways with reserved lanes. Montreal’s south side is served by several major bridges, including the Jacques-Cartier (which is five lanes wide and has overhead traffic lights, allowing the direction of traffic to change, so there are more inbound lanes in the morning and more outbound lanes in the afternoon) and the Champlain (three lanes on each side, though an outbound lane is separated off with pylons in the morning, reserved for inbound buses, and an inbound lane is separate off in the afternoon, for outbound buses).

Hmmm… why is this so? It seems like the kind of project almost any politician, left or right, can get behind (and name after a similarly-political predecessor). Of course, he may have been worried that it would damage the economy along the interstates down to Orlando and Miami.