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Streetcars (Trams)

San Francisco: “The Fuse Has Been Lit”

Posted on January 16, 2010 in Cuts, Fares, Frequent Networks, Mobility, San Francisco, Streetcars (Trams)

Updated Jan 16

The next round of San Francisco service cuts have been announced, or as commenter Ted King puts it, “the fuse has been lit.”  For local coverage see the SF Chronicle and Streetsblog SF.

Here are some of the most interesting points from the budget summary (via Streetsblog, not the Chronicle):

Although the budget hole to be closed is $16.9m, the service cuts are only $4.8m.  That’s impressive.  They achieve so much non-service savings by a whole pile of cuts to other things, designed to have wide but manageable impacts.  Labor takes a ping: not just 0.7m in “concessions,” but also charges for parking at the workplace.  (Since a huge share of the drivers report to work around 4:30 in the morning, many don’t have good transit options.) Continue Reading →

Karlsruhe: A Ride on the “Tram-Trains”

Posted on October 18, 2009 in Connections, Transfers, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams)

Sparked in part by a suggestion from a reader, I spent two days last month in Karlsruhe, a pleasant but not touristed small city in the southwest of Germany.  In rail transit circles, Karlsruhe is famous for inventing “tram-trains,” a vehicle and service type that can operate in the street as a streetcar/tram, but can also go onto standard railway lines, often shared with intercity passenger rail and freight, to go longer distances into the surrounding suburbs.  This means that the service you board in your outer suburb can flow right into the city’s core streetcar network, and  get you closer to your inner-city destination than the train station would be; thus saving you from having to make a connection.

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Transit in the Fast Lane: The Access Challenge

Posted on September 11, 2009 in Berlin, San Francisco, Streetcars (Trams), Vienna

When you’re trying to run quality transit in a mixed-traffic situation, and you have a street with two lanes of traffic in each direction, the best practice is for transit to run in the faster lane, the one further from the sidewalk.  We see this most commonly with streetcars, but it’s true of any mode of street-running transit.  That’s because the lane closer to the curb is often delayed by random car movements, including cars turning, or trying to parallel-park, or doing pickup and dropoff.  So long as the fast lane is separate from any turning lanes, it’s the lane where you’ll get the best travel time in mixed traffic.

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Symbolic Logic for Transit Advocates: A Short but Essential Course

Posted on July 29, 2009 in Basics, Language, Monorail, Philosophy, Portland, Seattle, Streetcars (Trams)

Part of our job as informed citizens and voters is to sift through the political claims that we hear and arrive at our own sense of what’s true.  I’ve been listening to such claims in the transit business, and sometimes making them, for almost 30 years now.  It occurs to me that one of the most important tools for evaluating these claims is something you probably learned in high school math and forgot.  (Yes, some of you remembered, but I’m really talking to the ones who forgot.  To those of you who just don’t like math, don’t worry if you don’t follow this next bit; just skim ahead to the example.  This IS really important.)

Here it is.
Consider a statement of the form “If A is true, then B is true,” [A –> B]
IF that statement is true, then:
  • The Converse, [B –> A] is not necessarily true.
  • The Inverse [NOT A –> NOT B] is not necessarily true.
  • The Contrapositive [NOT B –> NOT A] IS true.

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The Problem with Downtown Shuttles

Posted on July 14, 2009 in 3-newbasic, Basics, Frequent Networks, Oakland, Shuttles (Circulators), Streetcars (Trams)

A common misconception about downtown areas is that great things can be achieved by “shuttles” or “circulators,” short routes that just run around in downtown.  The problem with these lines is that they save time for the customer only if they are very, very frequent.  This is an issue that separates people who need only a symbolic service (such as a line on the map or a photo of the transit vehicle in front of the development they’re trying to sell) from people who want actual mobility.  [2015 update: I’d no longer use the term “mobility” here. I’d use “abundant access.”]

Frequency is really important, but it’s also really expensive.  Doubling the frequency of a service (i.e. halving the “headway” or elapsed time between consecutive trips on the line) comes very close to doubling its operating cost.  If you double your peak frequency (i.e. the highest frequency you run) it also doubles your fleet, which doubles your fleet capital cost, your ongoing mainteance cost, and the size that your storage and maintenance facility needs to be.  So it’s not surprising that we see a lot of downtown shuttle services that offer a line on a map, a photographable vehicle, and even some mobility for people who aren’t in a hurry, but that don’t really compete with walking. Continue Reading →

Streetcars: An Inconvenient Truth

Posted on July 3, 2009 in Mobility, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia
DSCN0337

It’s a big day for streetcars.  Portland has released its draft Streetcar System Concept Plan, an ambitious vision for extending the city’s popular downtown streetcar all over the city.  There are similar plans underway in Seattle, Minneapolis, and many other cities.

I love riding streetcars, and I don’t want to shock anyone, so let’s start with a warning: This article contains an observation about streetcars that is not entirely effusive.  It may provoke hostile reactions from some streetcar enthusiasts.  It would probably be better for my transit planning career if I didn’t make this observation, but unfortunately it seems to be true, and very important, and not widely acknowledged or understood.  So I’m going to say it.

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