News   Mar 28, 2024
 1.2K     2 
News   Mar 28, 2024
 609     2 
News   Mar 28, 2024
 896     0 

Trackless Trams (BRT/LRT hybrid or alternative)

afransen

Senior Member
Member Bio
Joined
Apr 22, 2007
Messages
7,406
Reaction score
8,328
This popped up in my feed recently and thought I would share:

Trackless trams may be the best alternative to light rail

The idea being to provide a very rail-like user experience in terms of ride quality and boarding (and higher capacity than BRT with 300-500 passenger vehicles) with lower infrastructure costs. One interesting idea with this that you can't do with LRT (or not easily) is have a mixture of services sharing a corridor, perhaps mixing express and local service with the ability to overtake at stations, etc. Most seem to be optically guided which might not be ideal in climates that see a lot of snow but I'm guessing other techniques could be used such as magnetic tags in the roadway. Might be something to consider for the suburban LRT/BRT lines in development in the region, without overcommitting to surface rail investment. Once volumes start reaching 10k passengers per hour or greater true grade separated rapid transit (elevated or underground) might be considered.
 
This popped up in my feed recently and thought I would share:

Trackless trams may be the best alternative to light rail

The idea being to provide a very rail-like user experience in terms of ride quality and boarding (and higher capacity than BRT with 300-500 passenger vehicles) with lower infrastructure costs. One interesting idea with this that you can't do with LRT (or not easily) is have a mixture of services sharing a corridor, perhaps mixing express and local service with the ability to overtake at stations, etc. Most seem to be optically guided which might not be ideal in climates that see a lot of snow but I'm guessing other techniques could be used such as magnetic tags in the roadway. Might be something to consider for the suburban LRT/BRT lines in development in the region, without overcommitting to surface rail investment. Once volumes start reaching 10k passengers per hour or greater true grade separated rapid transit (elevated or underground) might be considered.
1 word: Gadgetbahn. The greatest benefit to BRT is the ability to use existing fleet and not having to commit to new rolling stock, and also the ability to use mixed operation of routes. You can have a standard bus route that then goes to a BRT lane. As a result BRT is incredibly flexible. Trackless trams don't provide any of those benefits. Its just light rail but cheaper* and less capacity. As for the asterisk, its difficult to say its cheaper. The only place where it saves money is if you're going to convert an existing lane to transit only, then yes it is cheaper, but usually the biggest cost to LRT is property expropriation and widening the roadway. In this scenerio, Trackless Trams offer basically no real benefits other than the ability to destroy it cheaply if your route fails.

In other words, Trackless Trams are a waste of time, nothing to see here folks.
 
Provided that the experiment in Perth is a success, this could work for quite a few wide streets in the GTA - Lawrence East, Kingston Road, Steeles, Burnhamthorpe, Major Mackenzie... but the system working in Perth is a big "if". We should be looking to use Australia as a model instead of China, since the built forms of our countries are more similar.

Edit: And then there's the whole "winter" thing we have up here. Following painted markings is a good plan for about 8 months in the year, but how much will keeping the rights-of-way consistently snow-free cost? On second thought, we might as well just keep moving forward with all-electric buses.
 
1 word: Gadgetbahn. The greatest benefit to BRT is the ability to use existing fleet and not having to commit to new rolling stock, and also the ability to use mixed operation of routes. You can have a standard bus route that then goes to a BRT lane. As a result BRT is incredibly flexible. Trackless trams don't provide any of those benefits. Its just light rail but cheaper* and less capacity. As for the asterisk, its difficult to say its cheaper. The only place where it saves money is if you're going to convert an existing lane to transit only, then yes it is cheaper, but usually the biggest cost to LRT is property expropriation and widening the roadway. In this scenerio, Trackless Trams offer basically no real benefits other than the ability to destroy it cheaply if your route fails.

In other words, Trackless Trams are a waste of time, nothing to see here folks.
What property did Metrolinx acquire to lead to HuLRT costing $250m per km?

Meh, I don't think you can dismiss all innovation in transit as gadgetbahn. This is still clearly mass transit (no ifs ands or buts). The gadgetbahn critique is for transportation that tries to obviate the need for mass transit by proposing some quadi- or fully-private transit system, and crucially it needs to be a solution that either won't work in practice or has abysmal cost or capacity characteristics.

Here is a system is Medillin that uses a rail for guidance. Sure seems to work to me. Might also be a grade that rail could not handle.

 
Last edited:
Isn't this an autonomous electric bus with a 'high-tech' suspension? I don't see what this adds to the equation. Eventually our buses will be electrified and may be autonomous once the tech exists. Add bus lanes and voila - the same thing ?
 
A major cost if you’ve automated the guidance is differential road ware. Turns out rails are really good at handling loads over and over in exactly the same place. So you have to build the roads used to a much higher standard, as you can see in the Medillin example.
 
What property did Metrolinx acquire to lead to HuLRT costing $250m per km?

Meh, I don't think you can dismiss all innovation in transit as gadgetbahn. This is still clearly mass transit (no ifs ands or buts). The gadgetbahn critique is for transportation that tries to obviate the need for mass transit by proposing some quadi- or fully-private transit system, and crucially it needs to be a solution that either won't work in practice or has abysmal cost or capacity characteristics.

Here is a system is Medillin that uses a rail for guidance. Sure seems to work to me. Might also be a grade that rail could not handle.

The costs are likely due to factors that aren't exclusive to Light Rail. Reminder that the waterloo LRT was built at 50m per km, yet afterwards prices skyrocketed. A more reasonable explanation is due to P3 related costs surrounding risk, as well as expenses related to construction in the winter months especially in this country. Its unlikely that Trackless Trams would be significantly cheaper.
 
Isn't this an autonomous electric bus with a 'high-tech' suspension? I don't see what this adds to the equation. Eventually our buses will be electrified and may be autonomous once the tech exists. Add bus lanes and voila - the same thing ?

Yes. Change enough things about buses/BRT or LRT and you get to this concept. Higher capacity than regular articulated bus at 18m (80 passengers), vs 32m or more, closer to LRT vehicle capacity. I suppose you can say that this is an upgraded, higher capacity BRT, without going all the way to LRT. I can imagine a situation where LRT gets squeezed in the middle between BRT and true grade-separated rail transit.

Yibin, China opened an 18km line in Dec 2019. It cost 1.13B yuan or 220M CAD. Of course, construction in China is much cheaper, but I think that ought to be illustrative. They implemented this for $13M/km. I guess we'll see with time how it performs, and what the roadway maintenance is like.

Article is in Chinese, but can be translated.
 
A major cost if you’ve automated the guidance is differential road ware. Turns out rails are really good at handling loads over and over in exactly the same place. So you have to build the roads used to a much higher standard, as you can see in the Medillin example.
Would also make it more challenging to operate in snowy/icy conditions of the GTA?
 
Yes. Change enough things about buses/BRT or LRT and you get to this concept. Higher capacity than regular articulated bus at 18m (80 passengers), vs 32m or more, closer to LRT vehicle capacity. I suppose you can say that this is an upgraded, higher capacity BRT, without going all the way to LRT. I can imagine a situation where LRT gets squeezed in the middle between BRT and true grade-separated rail transit.

Yibin, China opened an 18km line in Dec 2019. It cost 1.13B yuan or 220M CAD. Of course, construction in China is much cheaper, but I think that ought to be illustrative. They implemented this for $13M/km. I guess we'll see with time how it performs, and what the roadway maintenance is like.

Article is in Chinese, but can be translated.
I can see this working over there due to environment/governmental conditions and cheap labour. I have doubts for anywhere else. All things equal, I suppose one could make an argument for this tech on Finch instead of the LRT? Too many details needed to have a proper comparison. I still would expect LRT to be the better option. Interesting concept though and I love the innovating.
 
Normally when I say "they should invent" something a young person pulls out a phone and shows me where it is already in use. But they should deploy a system with an automated guidance function that controls not only the vehicle, but also the traffic signals in the vicinity. Combined with some of the features described here, such as a better suspension, it could provide better transit without radically altering the roadway. Now someone point out where this exists for me 🤫
 
Normally when I say "they should invent" something a young person pulls out a phone and shows me where it is already in use. But they should deploy a system with an automated guidance function that controls not only the vehicle, but also the traffic signals in the vicinity. Combined with some of the features described here, such as a better suspension, it could provide better transit without radically altering the roadway. Now someone point out where this exists for me 🤫
Yibin, China? Unless you meant specifically the traffic signal integration.
 
Provided that the experiment in Perth is a success, this could work for quite a few wide streets in the GTA - Lawrence East, Kingston Road, Steeles, Burnhamthorpe, Major Mackenzie... but the system working in Perth is a big "if". We should be looking to use Australia as a model instead of China, since the built forms of our countries are more similar.

Edit: And then there's the whole "winter" thing we have up here. Following painted markings is a good plan for about 8 months in the year, but how much will keeping the rights-of-way consistently snow-free cost? On second thought, we might as well just keep moving forward with all-electric buses.

And there was a Chinese version thats battery powered that would make for more flexible routing.




If ridership on the Mississauga Transitway ever warranted it, I could see these trackless trams being a good fit for it. Not just because of their size, battery power, and automation, but because it would easily allow for other buses to continue to use the transitway, as its an important spire for GO buses and the like.
 
By the time capacity is a problem, we’ll have automated vehicles good enough for normal speed operation in a somewhat controlled environment like the mi-way, and then until much higher capacity there is little reason to use higher capacity vehicles instead of more vehicles.

Hence why these vehicles are mostly a dead end. The world is a big place though, and China is a big country, and regional governors at times get convinced to do something unique to also secure investment in a factory for their town, or to keep a factory from moving, or to show case local products (Winnipeg has in the past rejected LRT partly because the city has a perfectly good bus factory!).

At least these are real useful products, and not shadow banking investment scams like the ridiculous straddle bus.
 

Back
Top