@@goncalor.8192 the problem is it functions as a tram on the branches, not fully grade separated, so I don't know how it would function as a heavy metro that way. Also, don't forget when this was planned in the 90s nobody thought it would have the success it now has. For example the yellow line was just upgraded, enabling double the frequency (every 3 minutes) it had before. Also, in the future one could have longer vehicles and/or instead of coupling two of them together, having one 70 m vehicle, since the driver cabs occupy space for at least 40 more people. Furthermore, for now the system only has basically a trunk and the yellow line, which are heavely congested. Once the new lines (circular, yellow extension to Senhora da Hora and second Gaia line) open, the old ones will decongest.
@@RMTransit one interesting video I would love to see from you is how to upgrade an overcrowded system on a budget. It's easy to upgrade capacity with lots of cash but I wonder what is your opinion on the best ways of dealing with overcrowding for cheap
Thanks for covering my city’s frustrating Frankenstein project! It originally started off as a LR project from the city centre to Mount Roskill using the north/south Dominion Road. This is currently a high frequency service using double decker buses, and it will eventually run out of capacity, hence the LR proposal. Then the route was extended to the airport. Then light metro was put on the table. Then three options were considered, one of which avoided Dominion Road altogether - this one. So the original problem statement of removing buses from Dominion Road was just conveniently forgotten. A couple of points to make: the North Shore already has an existing busway that looks suspiciously like a LR line without the LR vehicles! Not sure the gradients would be compatible with HR. From the south east of the airport, there is already an airport connecting bus to the southern mainline station at Puhinui, which was just rebuilt for this interchange purpose. Running a HR spur from the mainline is considered quite difficult at this location, due to a spur to Manukau just south of here, plus the adjacent train depot. The service scheduling for southern, Manukau and airport services would be a headache.
I've followed this project with interest, and never understood why a Puhinui heavy rail branch wasn't done instead. The Manukau branch always seemed like a very random project to me, and think it'd be better reused for a regional tram for the eastern suburbs, running north-south from Puhinui up to Botany, then across to Sylvia Park. Irirangi drive runs the majority of that route with decent medians that could be re-used, so you'd get a pretty decent quality service with pretty much no tunnelling in an area with no rail at all at present.
The new tram tunnels in central Karlsruhe (population 312,000) can be described as ’strategic’. The tunnels total 3.8kms and there are 7 stations. However in the last 50 years many larger Western German cities have ‘heavily tunnelled’ so as to convert their trams into Stadtbahns. (Cologne, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, Hannover, Stuttgart, Frankfurt (Main)) By contrast the only tram tunnel in Eastern Germany is a short ‘strategic’ tunnel in Rostock (pop. 205,000) - under the Hauptbahnhof! With Karlsruhe complete, I think there is now only one tram tunnel under construction in the whole of Germany. This is in Augsburg (pop. 300,000), and is another short 'strategic' line under the Hauptbahnhof.
I think growth is an important consideration too, you can afford less return on investment if you don’t expect to grow as fast or if you have better existing infra
I think with legacy systems it still makes perfectly sense. Way too expensive to build entirely new rights of way. Keep in mind that Stuttgart and the Rhine-Ruhr cities actually did plan on long-term metro conversion initially, and to that end it was sensible preparation work. They're also trunk lines, as Reece pointed out. Anything new, if planners think grade separation is necessary, makes more sense to be built to full metro standards from the start.
I think that German Stadtbahn systems actually make sense, as most tunnels are either strategic or are serving trunk routes that bundle multiple lines within a city center. But it has to be said that Stadtbahn systems usually only serve medium-sized cities, which benefit from a "tram upgrade". In North America or Auckland, it seems like these new light rail tunnel try to act as a cheap metro alternative, which is really stupid. For example, Nuremburg and Fürth, two medium-sized cities of a population of 650k combined can support one heavy metro and two light metro lines with additional tram lines in Nuremburg for additional local service.
Edge cases - as you say “strategic” - tunnels to avoid traffic congestion (road junctions, especially busy ones), tunnels for geographical or ecology reasons (through hills or under parks etc) and grade separating junctions without needing a large elevated structure (often for visual amenity reasons/historical districts).
It also makes sense if you have a few lines coming together in a city center, essentialy "tunnel for the trunk, on street operation for the branches" as the much higher frequency justifies the full grade separation, and the fact that multiple lines comes together makes any delays on any branch affect the core section less. When it is a single line, it is the onstreet section that dictates frequency and speed, not the tunnel.
@@RMTransit take for example the MN Blue Line LRT tunnel that runs 2.2 kilometers under the airport, servicing both terminals free 24/7 and allowing very fast speeds for an LRT. The airport tunnel connection provides one of the best airport transit connections in North America, as according to City Nerd 😉 so strategic tunneling works for LRT
I suppose a good example of such strategic tunneling would be what the Chicago Surface Lines, the City's tram/streetcar network before it was ripped up, had. There were at least two tunnels that saw regular use. They basically ensured that the trams would keep running regular service even when the drawbridge's over the Chicago River were raised to allow boat traffic through. I believe the tunnels are still there, actually, just not in use anymore and sealed up.
As an Australian who works in public transport, and has just returned home after three years living in Auckland, I have to say first up this video and your insights are far more advanced and logical than the understanding of most of the decision makers in this space in New Zealand. Of note in relation to the existing heavy rail options you mention - both closest points had EXISTING or designed links to the airport. The end of Onehunga (to the north) had a tunnel that ran to the airport that was DESTROYED on purpose. To the east, the layout of tracks considered a corridor from the airport where a track could be later joined. One of the problems with a single central government are issues like this. Auckland Transport (part of Auckland Council) have come close with better more appropriate plans for light rail in past iterations but this will become an expensive, under-utilised system that serves only a very niche purpose. It will never repay itself in benefits. And believe me, there is no telling NZ’ers how to do something better because they firmly believe nobody knows better. Very frustrating place to live and work and poor public transport (now and future) will forever hold Auckland back.
Here in Brussels they're converting the city centre tram (pre-metro) tunnel into a new metro line that will the be extended to the North of the city with a new tunnel. This is a good reminder that building a light rail system in such a way that it can easily be converted to heavy rail/metro once there is enough money and/or demand is also an option. The work that has to be done for the conversion of the existing tunnels is minimal. Installation of a third rail (our metro network is all third rail), and raising the lower part of the platform to the height of the rest of the platform. (This was planned from the beginning ca.1976 in the case of this tunnel). Trams used to run on a significant part of our current metro network, and every single tram tunnel currently in use is actually waiting to be completed and converted into a metro line eventually (this can take anywhere from under a decade to half a century or more, the one remaining major tram tunnel yet to be converted dates back to 1970). It's a bit weird, but it does break up the cost of building a metro line into chunks as it can just start as building a tunnel that serves as part of a tram line, then making that tunnel gradually longer to make the trams more efficient, and finally biting the bullet by building some more tunnel and converting the whole thing to metro. Problems happen when you build a heavily tunnelled tram system without conversion to metro in mind, because you might then make it much more expensive than it could be to convert to a more high-capacity system.
@@RMTransit It’s about cash flow and financial modelling. Often it is better to get a project up and running early even if it may require conversion later. Roads are similar where it would be irresponsible to build a 6 lane motorway when a 4 land arterial road will suffice for the next 30 years. The money you defer can then be used on other projects. Perfection up front is not something most cities can afford.
The upgrade of the north-south axis tunnel under Brussels to a new metro line isn't the only time a premetro/U-stadtbahn system has been upgraded to a proper metro. It has also happened in some Western German cities such as Stuttgart and Koln. And it happened to the very first dedicated stadtbahn; that of Vienna Austria.
@@danieleyre8913 Also, the pré-métro concept was kind of played with before WW2 in Marseille, which used to have the largest tram network in France, and planned to dig strategic tunnels to funnel their trams underneath the Canebière (one was already built and was actually the reason Marseille did not remove *all* of their trams after the war, contrary to almost all other French cities). Nowadays, digging a metro tunnel in Marseille is almost inconceivable due to the archeological interest of the 2600-year old city: the last metro extension took almost ten years to be built in part because of archeological findings, and it was merely a 500-meter aerial line.
I think that Portland, Oregon's light rail system could benefit from one of those "strategic" tunnels. Remove the Steel Bridge bottleneck, avoid the tiny blocks of downtown, and help facilitate faster crosstown trips
I do think that light rail does have a place in tunnels when it comes to densely built downtowns. I think that the San Francisco MUNI metro is a great example of what I am talking about. It has a subway running the length of Market street and the twin peaks tunnel. From this line 5 lines branch out. This means in the downtown where ridership is high they have 5 lines sharing the tracks to cope with the higher demand. Running these lines on the surface would heavily slow everything down and isn’t very efficient. Another good project in my opinion is the regional connector. If it was a surface line it’s capacity would be restricted by either rules about signal priority or crossing gates which would mean less strains to Long Beach and Santa Monica
Both good points. I'm not familiar with the lines or locations you mentioned, but my impression is that a regional connector might not be a good candidate for a tunnel. The length of the tunnel and the lower density traffic make the interference less problematic, I would think. An example completely opposite to the video's point, is Buffalo New York's "tram". It's a bit of a regional connector to link the university campus (old suburbs) to downtown via tunnel. It surfaces downtown, however and serves as a light rail (if I have the terms correct). It seems to work, but it would be cool to get RMTransit's opinion.
Thanks for the video discussing Auckland! - I'm an architecture student living here and am pretty disheartened by the proposals being made. Auckland's public transport (or lack thereof) is fascinating and unfortunately the city invested heavily in Highways in the 60s and 70s. Today the city is strangling itself with congestion and desperately needs investment in rapid transit (and much more than just an airport link line) as well as a secondary harbour crossing. However, it has taken almost 7 years for decision makers to reach this "proposal" stage and now the endorsed mode is really a worst of both worlds. The huge estimated cost of the project is likely to mean resistance politically, economically and from the public. In my opinion, a surface level tram-train mode from the CBD to Mangere serving the city centre and surrounding suburbs is the most logical, affordable and attractive option. Running down the key arterial of Dominion Road on which buses are already reaching a critical concentration. The road is lined with shops and intersects some major population centres including growth areas at the end of this line. There is enough room to run tracks down the centre of the street and would be little need to buy up private land (although this would mean less space for cars and no on street parking 😱). This mode has more than enough capacity to serve predicted ridership in the next 50 years, and would mean redeveloped streetscapes for Dominion Road - It would really change the character of this important cross isthmus route. Such an elegant application that would be an affordable and fairly quick project to construct which would gather support for expanding light rail to more lines in the City. Also to mention - a BRT linking the airport to heavy rail at Puhinui is planned. Why have NZTA and central govt not chosen something resembling this? Why do they want to spend the whole budget on tunnels and leave our streets clogged with cars? Questions need to be asked.
Much of the Oslo metro started out as tram lines, partially underground, before they were converted as the needs of the city grew. So long as you plan a bit ahead I don't see the issue in doing it underground. There's plenty of cities that now have such extensive underground tram networks that it really wouldn't require that much to give them fully fledged metros. It's a lot easier to pitch that conversion down the line than building a whole metro system from scratch.
I think this is a perspective that is missed in this video. Of course transit lovers know that metros are the most efficient and the most desirable, but that doesn't mean they are politically feasible. Previously RM transit has said that incremental upgrades are the best (completing the next cheapest project with the highest impact)... building tunnels in sections is one way to do this.
@Zaydan Naufal Singapore's governance is abit like more stereotypical Asian parenting I think, where it's sometimes seen as rude/ungrateful to question the gov't because of their past achievements e.g. managing to lead the country to develop so fast in the 2nd 1/2 of the 20th century. Our politicians are braver to speak politically incorrect & unpopular things because our electorate is less likely to vote them out for that e.g. MP Ellen Lee called her voters 'selfish' in 2012 for being NIMBYs by opposing an old-folks home built near their houses, our PM also saying that immigrants will "spur us to work harder" & that they didn't ask for work-life balance (unlike some of us). When there was criticism over the country flooding a few years back (though no deaths thankfully) e.g. blaming on overdevelopment, I remember that our PM said that the Japanese however had complained less after the Great _Tohoku_ Earthquake. When it comes to transport planning we can be a bit dichotomical; a neighbourhood could be served by only buses for 30-40yrs since the 1st houses there were built before the gov't thinks there'll be enough demand to build a train station there, because we eschew "in the middle" solutions e.g. trams as the gov't doesn't like overhead wires. Sometimes we save a lot of money but at other times we spend quite a lot. e.g. as late as 2017 we were buying buses that don't tell you where your next stop is, though on the other hand we also spend S$30b on 2 fully-underground train lines (Circle & Downtown) that have tunnels over 3m wide but platforms only 70m/3 cars long, which doesn't sound so cost-effective to me
Seattle's light rail really confuses me. The vast majority is already grade separated, either through tunnels or elevated. There's really only one section that's at grade around the Columbia City area, as well as a bit of awkwardness when first entering the downtown tunnel from the south (remember it was originally built as a bus tunnel so the light rail is at grade for a bit when it goes into it). But with just a little more work the whole system could have been grade separated from the start...
Adding to that, they are actually building a couple of more grade crossings as part of the East Link in Bellevue (the 2 line) which are set to open next year.
The idea is that the foundational stretch between the airport and downtown would have been too expensive, without the compromise through Columbia City on grade separation. I think current headways already allow for upcoming East Link service, which will interline through downtown and subsequent north grade separations, making better use of those quality tunnels and viaducts
One thing I kind of like from Seattle system is the shared bus and LRT tunnel, it looks like it makes transfer between the two much easier and it reminds me of Ottawa’s original plan for it’s LRT.
It was done that way to get people to vote for it. Link was not expected to get nearly as many riders as it does so they built it cheaper to satisfy voters
@@CyanideCarrot that is the main issue that I bet all the systems he talked about share, they are multiple different projects that would be better served with separate solutions but he leaves out they are frankenstiens because they have to be in order to get the political will/capital necessary to make them happen at all. The option isn't really between the different options of transit but between them each and the powerful incumbent of doing nothing.
With Auckland, the alternative is roads. The opposition party only supports roads and even Labour is mostly road leaning. It's not if we speak up we can get a better mass transit but, if we don't support this hard enough it'll be scrapped and a bigger road built. NZ is not a mass transit friendly country, cities are still pulling up rails and scrapping bus lines
I agree we have a very black and white political system in NZ especially when it comes to transport, national did kick start the CRL but they had to be dragged kicking and screaming while delaying the project by years and in that time many roading projects appeared from nowhere.
That's not true at all. Both the main parties in NZ are lukewarm towards rail and pro-roading. It was under Labour between 1999-2008 that most of the motorways in NZ from the last 20 years were either built or begun or planned-out. The only thing the Nat's have actually done are the waterview tunnel and that stupid Transmission gully motorway north of Wellington, and the rest was just talk like the westlink. Even today: Labour are pushing for a road link through the Hutt valley that will ruin everything. And it was under National that the Auckland network was electrified and the CRL under Auckland was begun. There _are_ other alternatives in Auckland to either light rail/light metro or just more roads. Aside from the mainline suburban rail network that could still be improved & expanded; there are also busways. the Northern Busway has been around for over 15 years and has been an enormous success. The Eastern Busway has been begun and the North-Western Busway is going to be begun within 5 years.
@@danieleyre8913 Simeon (the national party transport guy) literally stated in a recent opinion piece that National's policy would be to cancel ALR, and spend that on motorways. Labour are going along with existing NZTA roading plans somewhat begrudgingly while cancelling the worst ones, National are trying to expand the project list to include the worst ones (east west link, mc-sprawl-land mill road) and spend any money that transit would have happened into on motorways.
@@jackgibbons6013 If you _really_ take the public statements of politicians at their word; you must have born yesterday levels of naive. Simeon Brown much more likely made that announcement as a way to put his name out there and as an attempt to score cheap points and maybe drum some support. It in no way means that he would make good on that statement if given the chance. He was probably advised to make it by his PR advisors or that dreadful Chris Bishop and he probably doesn't really know the transport portfolio at this stage. There's nothing "begrudging" about Labour's enthusiasm for roads. It's labour pushing rubbish like the proposed roads in wellington and Porirua's Labour mayor Jenny Brash was a big pusher for transmission gully. the Clark government of 1999-2008 were big pushers of motorway and other roading projects across NZ especially in Auckland and especially when Mark Goshe and Paul Swain held the portfolio's. It wasn't until Annette King became minister of transport that that government started caring about railways. Brown's statement is empty anyway because Auckland light rail is very unlikely to ever be funded let alone happen. It's now the third time it's been changed to something that's simply too expensive to be funded. Outside of Goff and the Auckland council: Labour do NOT want to build it. Phil Twyford made the empty promise to build it in 2017 because it looked like Labour would lose the election and they were desperate for any support. Now they're making it too grandiose to build. Regardless of who wins the next election; the next big infrastructure project for Auckland will very probably be the second harbour crossing and its early stages might even be begun before the CRL is finished. It will probably be two large bore tunnels under the harbour and the nippon clip-on's will come off of the harbour bridge. And the irony is: It will have a provision for light rail, which will be what the Northern busway is upgraded-to before 2040. And after that; there will be a mainline connection built to the airport. Both Labour and National will pursue these projects if they win the election regardless of whatever rhetoric they spew and the light rail down Dominion road will slowly be forgotten about.
Btw, I’d be really curious if you ever did a deep dive into the mass transit system in Bolivia’s capital. I only found out recently about their cable car alternative to mass transit and I’m blown away at how STRANGE the whole thing is, but it seems to be working and they’re still building more lines and stations and it all looks like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else!
Is Sucre or La Paz the capital of Bolivia you're referring to? Does this transit system have a name? Maybe I can find videos right here on TH-cam in the meantime. 😛
@@samuelitooooo it’s known as “Teleférico La Paz-El Alto”, as it links these two cities in a big metropolitan area. As of 2022 it has 10 lines of cable cars with over 30 stations. I’ve seen some videos on here about the system operating and people riding it, but not a documentary style, comprehensive one on the project, history, and I think it’s super interesting!
As an Aucklander, it is so frustrating seeing the waste and lack of foresight on the part of the government to make the city have effective public transport. They can't even operate the current regional rail system properly at the moment. They've had so much deferred maintenance that they just decided to shut down lines for weeks at a time. Over the holidays this year you couldn't even take trains out of the main station for a couple of weeks! It's insane. It shows how little the government cares about transit riders that they think they can just shut down the lines, replace them with slower, less reliable rail buses and call it a day. It seems to be a problem in Anglophone countries in general where the concerns of anti-transit politicians and government officials who want to build transit for the appearances ("watch me cut this ribbon!") result in these hybrid systems that don't accomplish much of anything.
To be fair the majority of the work being undertaken during the recent Auckland Block of line was related to expansion projects such as the CRL tie in at Mt Eden, the Wiri to Quay Park triple tracking and the Pukekohe electrification extension. Much better to do this work in a concentrated period when many people are on holidays than to drag the work out over many weekends during the year
Auckland’s public transport is light years ahead of where it was 15 years ago. And that’s mainly due to the government. Most of the problems they’re having now are due to the Auckland council. It’s the Auckland council (and the consultancy they hire: MR Cagney) who insist on not running a staggered timetable and instead having all the trains stop at all the stops, which is not only unattractive to users near periphery stations but also clogs up the rial corridor. That’s a big reason why the regional rail service is a loser; they can’t get further into the network than Papakura. But to tell you the truth; they’re chasing the wrong market. With the Waikato expressway; rail cannot compete with driving from Hamilton time-wise, so there’s just not much demand for services from Hamilton to Auckland. There’s however a much bigger demand in the northern Waikato, between Pukekohe and Mercer, and that’s where they should begin their service from instead of Hamilton. As for light rail: I’ve said all along that it’s never happening and it’s not a great idea to run it to the airport after it’s pottered down Dominion road anyway. It’s only ever been something pushed by the Auckland council and MR Cagney, just drop it and move on. Auckland will probably get a light rail when they upgrade the Northern busway.
@@deathtoluke Why would you put the light rail to Onehunga? The mainline already goes there. If they really want light rail down dominion Rd and beyond: Surely Mt Roskill which has no current rail would be the logical choice?
Why do all of these light rail lines have massive gadgetbahn energy despite using some of the most straightforward and widely available technology possible
SF Muni has run a hybrid metro service since the 1980's, which is a combination of the legacy streetcar system having survived, plus opportunities presented by the construction of BART. The decision to go hybrid was relatively sensible, albeit not without challenges. It's a fairly popular system, but has had a few instances of transit meltdowns, usually around tunnel entrances, due to the complexities introduced by train control switching between ground level and underground operation, plus the routing of all lines through the Market Street tunnel ensuring that it would be the bottleneck. They have learned to turn the underground transition into a timed transfer when doing maintenance and upgrades.
Embarcadero Station use to be the terminus of all five lines (J, K, L, M, N) from 1980 to 1998. It was a Last-In-First-Out station and during meltdowns, LRVs in the preceding three stations would crawl along at 5 MPH or just come to a standstill. In 1998, the N Judah was extended from Embarcadero Station to the planned site of the new Pacific Bell Park and Caltrain Depot would alleviated that bottle neck.
I live in Auckland and the whole project has been political from day one. That is always a recipe for bad decisions. Since announcement of this plan it is already very controversial, and some fear that it has been carefully crafted to panic people into cancelling the project altogether. It is impossible to down scope the project or separate it into a rolling program because that would be another failure for a government that has had too many to be popular and the route has been chosen with political interests in mind so it cannot go the full metro type. I am glad you mentioned the possibility of railway connections to the airport from existing network because it is so obvious that even a clown like me was able to see it as a possibility. Either by extending the Onehunga line through or by making a link from Manakau or Homai. I am not sure if the current plan is better than having nothing at all.
Extending the Onehunga Line to the airport would end up actually being very costly both financially and in terms of overall capacity of the rail network. The Onehunga line is only single track and would therefore require significant property acquisition to double track it and the new line would end up clogging the main trunk into Britomart even further which is already at capacity during peak times and has its own logistical problems. I disagree with the tunnelled option though. I think they should’ve kept it fully at surface for the whole route or only tunnelled through the cbd at the most.
@@tubsward realistically the only option for heavy rail would be to bring it East to say Puhinui, and then use the main line into the city. The other advantage of this is that it would allow for theoretical future rail connections from Hamilton to the Airport etc too. As you say, the Onehunga line would require expensive double-tracking.
@@grrrgrrr304 Going airport to Puhinui is even worse. It looks easy on a map, but the trouble is that the stretch of rail just north of Puhinui is already at capacity, trying to handle Southern Line, Eastern Line, AND the heavy freight traffic around Southdown. They're already planning to triple-track it. If we wanted to send an Airport Line through there too, we'd have to pay for quadruple- or quintuple-tracking, or else reduce the frequency of the other lines to redirect trains to the airport. Needless to say, slashing frequency to huge swathes of the city just to add one station is a bad plan. Besides, at the end of the day... Mangere needs rapid transit. That's the appeal of the Onehunga-to-Airport proposal. If we built Puhinui-to-Airport, we'd probably end up needing to build Onehunga light rail anyway, to support that region. (That's not to say Airport to Puhinui is completely off the cards -- just that it's better suited to a different mode. It'll be covered by the A2B busway that's currently being developed, with a possible upgrade to light rail eventually if there's demand.)
My feeling is the tunnelled light rail is proposed to cancel, consider next year is the election year. The major issue of extending the heavy rail is infrastructure ownership. Kiwirail owns the track infrastructure and at the same time it is a freight operator. Therefore, rail infrastructure is more optimized for freight services than commuter trains (mode of maintenance, signal headway, etc), thus we saw so many track failures and close down in the past few years. Light rail probably can avoid the issue by building a separate set of infrastructure, but eventually this problem need to be dealt with when Auckland needs to improve its mainline rail service.
Cost and utility wise, street running light rail is a fantastic way to build out an urban semi rapid transit network. Tunneling would improve capacity, but it shouldnt be built from the start. The stadtbahn approach for upgrading light rail is best. This trend for over engineering light rail is worrisome, it may politically hinder future useful light rail projects due to ballooning costs. Good video
It might be a bit jaded to consider, but in some areas you might actually find the kind of politicos who would push a project into becoming a dysfunctional Frankenstein's monster specifically to make costs balloon, especially if the big makeups will happen under someone else's administration, to "prove" that this kind of thing can't work.
Whilst I generally agree with you when it comes to building new systems, it's a way of improving transit whilst keeping an existing tram system. So you can just take a normal tram system, add a tunnel for some lines in the most congested areas, extend lines outwards on dedicated tracks, and thus massively improve the service without needing to build an all new system. I also think that this might be a sensible option for smaller cities that can't afford or don't need a full scale metro system. You might also be underestimating the massive benefits of having just a single unified system that shares one standard. You'll only need one maintenance facility for one type of train, one set of operating procedures, one kind of staff training and one pool of spare parts/vehicles. Even though sticking to one system might not be ideal it's often much cheaper than building something separate and incompatible.
Haha, I do mention this to an extent and I think my recent videos on “Should you have one metro train” and on Karlsruhe cover my thoughts well! It CAN be a good option, but I don’t know that it usually is
@@afcgeo882 I find the opinion in the video to be both "educated" and open to the possibility of new information. Comments here from Aucklanders seem to generally support those opinions.
Great to video, to add a bit of context/info: Auckland rocks are notoriously hard to bore through, or so we were told endlessly in the tunnels we had bored through recently so the tunnel project is no easy job. The only silver lining on the cost part is that much of the machinery and expertise from the CRLcan be repurposed for the tunnel section. The other thing is that light rail was a promise by the current Labour government, which took them 1 and a half term to green light (as if governments aren't accustomed to broken promises). It also serves to replace Dominion Road; where the road is so overused that double decker buses at less 10 min per bus is not sufficient for rush hour. There is also significant plans to intensify the housing around the area, which would mean higher demand. The original light rail proposal that was scrapped before new legislation that allowed for intensification of residential zoning, had the rail at almost capacity at launch. The more and more I listen in the video, the more perplexed at how heavy rail wasn't considered if they had chosen the tunnel option. To me, it seems that the government and the public/media in general had a tunnel vision for light rail when this area they are going through is probably the most densely populated suburb of the city. One thing that has to be mentioned though is that the light rail is probably better in serving the Mangere region; an underprivileged suburb of Auckland and has very poor connection to the wider transport network. A heavy rail might struggle to reach into the heart of Mangere and Mangere East and then pivot back to the airport. Point on the airport, the eastern portion is already well served by direct buses that directly leaves from one of the train station on the Southern line, and there are future proposals to extend bus routes from East Auckland all the way down, I always thought that the airport rail option is a low priority for Auckland. I think the conclusion is quite correct in that each of needs require a different solution, and trying to jam everything under the Light Rail umbrella just don't make sense.
Probably might be cheapest & most optimal for different stretches uses different forms of transport e.g. heavy vs light rail, grade-separated vs at grade, but this might require passengers to make more transfers too
I'm really glad you talked about Auckland's new line, as a Kiwi viewer 😊 I assume you read blog posts from Greater Auckland when writing this, but if not you absolutely have to check them out! I agree with everything you said, and have some additions. Currently, all rail in New Zealand is narrow gauge so the idea that freight trains would share tracks with whatever kind of tunnel is built across the harbour is definitely good. This country has a terrible obsession with business cases and they often tend to make roads seem cheap and anything rail seem incredibly expensive - basically, the government transport agency has been anti rail for several decades now and it is extremely difficult to shake them out of it. That means that the proposed line is supposed to cost $14b (according to the flawed business case) which will obviously go even higher with our terribly inefficient infrastructure construction, whereas a fully street level system would be only about $9b (apparently). A street level system would also inveitably include more town centre renewals instead of tunneling under those and then not having the funds to beautify those town centres. Auckland is also severely behind on its bike network, so spending an unnecessary extra $5b on tunneling takes away money that could create a world class cycle network. The heavy rail link to the airport is not as simple as it seems from assessing via a map, but if we're going to invest this much money it's reasonable to include it. Finally, I hope you explore Wellington's rail network one day - sure, it's not a big city or even region, but it has a lot of interesting things going on that I think you'd be really interested in, particularly the Johnsonville line using heavy rail and the city's proposed light rail line. Feel free to hit me up for info on that if you do it, I'm a train driver on that network 😊
I do wonder what people would make of wellington's transport networks - or they would just throw up their hands in horror at the terrain and constraints. Johnsonville like is a fun one and makes no sense until you look into it's history.
@@kalgart The Johnsonville line doesn't make much sense even if you take it as it is now. Because the route is so steep and wiggly the trains have to go painfully slowly and it's single tracked so the rest of the line is slowed too. It's usually twice as fast to catch the bus. It is beautiful though.
Tyne and Wear Metro is a wonderful light rail system that uses tunnels in Newcastle and Gateshead's cores briefly in Sunderland and just out in the open for the suburbs served. Airport, ferry, bus exchange, large towns cities all on one. There is also a big project to finally dual track the 3 sections without ready for 6 and hour frequency on the individual lines. And new Stadler trains incoming.
I still wonder if Nicola Roberts referred to the Tyne&Wear metro in the song "On the metro". It is the only metro system in the UK that is commonly known as such, the others being tram, tramlink, subway, DLR or underground.
@@offichannelnurnberg5894 I am not sure, although it will always make me smile hearing "get off the meh’ro now!" Listening to Sam Fender. Astounding cultural impact.
@@RMTransit what do you think of light rail / light metro rolling stock seen in Monterrey and Guadalajara? I feel they'd be a great upgrade for door-count in american light rail
To be fair to Seattle's system, the system when complete will be mostly at or above grade. The underground portion is under heavily populated areas like downtown, much of which is in pre-existing tunnels.
Seattle's Link Light Rail goes through tunnel in downtown, on street in Columbia City and Rainier Beach, and elevated section beyond Rainier Beach. The reason they do this is to minimize the incline climb and decent angle as much as possible as the trains that they use cannot climb or decent steep incline.. Downtown Seattle is on high elevation and Tukwila and Seatac area are on lower elevation relative to the elevation of the SoundTransit depot in SODO. The only station exception is Northgate station which is an elevated station despite being on very high elevation, making the train leaving northbound from Roosevelt station to climb steep incline getting out of the tunnel.
Agree with this. Certainly if you're building an expensive tunnel or elevated alignment for the vast majority of a route, don't put coparatively small low floor trams (or Teslas!), in it. Minimetro vehicles with high floors could have similar curve and gradient negotiation abilities (at cost of speed where exploited clearly) so the tunnel can weave around underground obstacles to a similar degree where neccessary. Once built, an automated system would have lower ops costs too.
If you split railway lines between underground & above ground sections you could also make the underground section driverless using cheaper/less complicated signalling systems since it won't have to worry about things like rain changing the trains' acceleration or about items falling onto tracks
@@thedak808 Yes, they mostly are four car trains. It makes them as long as a subway train. And given the amount of ridership it has (even on weekends), four-car trains are needed! And the part north of downtown is pretty much built like a subway/metro system with full grade separation either with tunnels or elevated lines, all the way up to Lynnwood, which will be the northern terminus in 2024. The section south of downtown to the airport has lots of at-grade sections, though. That's the only part that is more like your typical American light rail.
@@compdude100 definitely, the NY subway trains just seem so massive, also I’ve never been on an actual heavy metro, just the Link which seems sizable ish. and yeah peak crowds push it to capacity regardless. imagine me dragging a suitcase, guitar, backpack from the airport during rush hour :)
6:50 San Diego's trolley (lightrail-type) is similar. There is exactly one tunnel, and it exists for a very good reason - it brings the trolley to a very high-traffic location that happens to be in a relatively mountainous area. Whenever there isn't a literal mountain in the way, SDMTS prefers at-grade or elevated tracks depending on local density, with the new blue line extension being almost entirely elevated. It could really use an airport link, however.
I really love how Karlsruhe got mentioned again, it's quite cool to see my city getting a bit of recognition after being a construction site for over a decade. I got a bit confused by the title, remembering you making a quite positive video about our system just a few weeks ago. But after realizing you were talking Auckland with 1.4mio inhabitants, I very much agree. These kind of systems are great for smaller cities and many German cities fall into that category. But building this kind of system e.g. in Munich or Hamburg, especially from the ground up, just wouldn't make sense. For good reason Munich is currently building their second S-Bahn tunnel and not a light rail. In general I'm a big fan of these tram train hybrid systems, but they do have their limits in terms of when they make sense. And connecting huge metropolitain areas, just isn't what they are meant to do. One thing that wasn't really a topic in the Karlsruhe video, but I think needs to be meantioned in this context. We do have other kinds of rail as well. Most cities on our network do also have heavy rail connections. Those are a lot faster and have much higher capacity. Going from Karlsruhe-Durlach to Pforzheim by tram is possible, but takes ~1h, while the IRE (Interregional Express), which can be used on the same ticket, only needs 20min. The point of the tram is connecting the smaller towns along the way. In the same way, you can go from Karlsruhe to Baden-Baden by tram, but in theory you could even take the ICE (german highspeed train). Nobody built a long distance tram track on these routes and very few use these trams for the entire distance. In that sense, if you would want to actually copy our system, building an airport express would mean building heavy rail infrastructure, having an actual express service train and then having smaller stations along the way only serviced by tram/ subway. I recently went to Stockholm and that's pretty much what they did. There is either the 45min subway or the 15min Arlanda Express going to Stockholm Central. Both most likely share the same rail, but serve different purposes. Our tunnel is a cool upgrade to the system, but that's all it is. We already had an established, functioning system, so improving it made sense. But if you can/ have to start up from the ground anyways and are digging a lot of tunnels, it's probably not the kind of system you should build.
As someone who has lived in Seattle his whole life, I remember when the transit tunnel opened. Originally it was intended for buses and light rail to share the tunnel. The buses were hybrid, having both retractable overhead trolley wires and Diesel engines so they could operate in the tunnel without giving everyone CO poisoning. They even laid tracks in the tunnel for a future light rail network. By the time that light rail began construction, approximately 15 years later, the technology had changed and the scope had increased, so the existing tracks had to be ripped up and replaced. I think originally the intent was to do more like the MUNI Metro in San Francisco, with 1-2 car tram trains. What we ended up getting was regional light rail. But by then the tunnel was already built. So to me it’s more a matter of “using what you have” than some total lack of vision or other nincompoopery that led to a white elephant.
I don't see why you couldn't run a in the Seattle Tunnel. Maybe you couldn't run busses alongside it, but the tunnels wouldn't be the issue (Light Rail tunnels are typically larger than metro tunnels).
The Link repurposes a lot of existing tunnel and uses tunnels to pass under the downtown area without disrupting the surface streets, while still being mostly at grade or elevated. It also tunnels under hills rather than going around them or over them
@@compdude100 Looking at my board today, I am shocked to see that we have ALL 4 car trains in service today. Usually at least one or two are 3 car. Our 4 car trains are the same length as Chicago's platforms.
And tunnels (especially deep tunnels) can mean that it takes longer for passengers to get to/from the platform. The point about having capacity when doing tunnels is interesting. The downtown tunnel in Seattle was initially used by buses, so the Link light rail is definitely an upgrade
I get what you said about Seattle. I'm pretty sure their reason for choosing Light Rail was because the tunnel was already built for buses and for a long time it operated in mixed traffic. Now, they're trying to effectively make a BART using light rail trains. Not only that, there seems to be no improvements with the Sounder when it should at the absolute least run all day and run through. Just annoying because Seattle has a great bus system and a ton of potential for high quality rail, but they seem to be making all of the wrong decisions (LRT where Metro would be good, crappy BRT where LRT would be good, crappy commuter rail where electrified regional rail would be good, and completely useless streetcar).
Couldnt have said it better myself. I have no idea why they built that rinky dinky LightRail that goes so slow averaging 25 mph when they could have made normal 3 rail subway metro that goes fasted 45-50 mph. And the fact that they built NEW track for the Bellevue East Link extension clearly shows they haven’t learned a thing from their stupidity
You should definitely make a video about the light rail Stadtbahnen of the Ruhr Area in Germany. They are extremely practical and comfortable in my opinion, especially for all the medium-sized cities they serve, such as Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Oberhausen, Duisburg, Mülheim and Herne. The only downsides they have is their missing interconnectivity and the fact that they only run until midnight.
It seems like an insignificant detail at first but it isn't: Airport passengers have lots of luggage. A train can easily accommodate that (overhead/ special racks), a Tram can't.
Never heared such a nonsense. A tram is most often prepared for wheelchairs, strollers, bicycles much better. And on every passenger seat you can put a suitcase if you like. It's never occupied up to the last seat.
@@maxwellwagoner-watts4747 This doesn't really share your knowledge. Are the cars so packed with people ? Is there only one tram per hour ? How frequent do they go ? If they go every 10minutes, they should easily carry 100 people. So from 6 flights a 200 people about half of the passangers. People on airplanes often just do daytrips with hand lagguage, not everybody is coming with luggage for 3 weeks. Imagine people doing their weekly grocery shopping with a tram. They do have "luggage" and not properly stored in suitcases, just in thin plastic bags.
Curious. The primary thing I use the Seattle Link for is going to the airport. The wheelchair seats are usually folded up but there isn't a wheelchair user there, which leaves more space than I need for luggage, right next to my seat.
We have this in Pittsburgh, and it is nice in how it improves light rail service having parts in tunnels. It would be nice to have a metro, but population wise, our city really can't sustain it, and I highly doubt because of geography that our metro area will ever reach more than 3 million people. and you probably need about 5 million or more people in your metro area to warrant a metro. In Japan the only metro areas similar in size to Pittsburgh that have metro systems are Sapporo and Sendai. Hiroshima, and Shizuoka-Hamamatsu metro areas use light rail, heavy rail, and busses instead of metros.
@@chickenpommes19 How can the city afford that? Kyoto a city of 1.4 million is struggling to afford anything due to the decline in tourism, and the overbuilt metro lines for the city. How is Germany doing it? the mob, is it a front for something?
Prague population: 1,3 million people 3 heavy metro lines and 142 km of tram lines Budapest population: 1,7 million people 3 heavy metro lines and one historic/light metro line and 174 km of tram lines I don't know but 3 million people sound like a lot 🤷🏻♂️
I think you’ve got to think about the size, population spread, density, walkability etc of a city. Pittsburgh is car dependant, sprawling, etc whilst Prague is dominated by dense, walkable neighbourhoods where the rate of car ownership is much much lower… to me that’s as big a thing as the city’s overall population
Reece, in your consideration of Seattle's light rail, I think you missed the reason why Seattle's light rail tunnels exist outside of the urban core(s): Terrain In the locations where there are tunnels, the terrain above them is not conducive at all to rail. For example, between the Convention Center and Capital Hill stations, the surface elevation climbs 200 vertical feet, but the tracks remain close to level grade. I'm not sure if you know, but Convention Center Station was a surface station at its opening and is only under a building now with the convention center expanding over it. The tunnel to the south from Convention Center is in place to transit the dense urban core, (a purpose you're OK with) and the tunnel to the north is to avoid circuitous routing to increase rail elevation unnecessarily. By the time this tunnel gets to the University of Washington station, its elevation is actually lower than at Convention Center, and very near the surface again. From there, the tracks don't dive further underground, the terrain above climbs again. To the south of downtown there is another tunnel, just past the maintenance yard, where the tracks tunnel through a 300' tall ridge. The Beacon Hill station is the deepest on the line and there are residential neighborhoods on top and to the east. The only way to avoid tunneling through that ridge and still provide service to the King St. Amtrak/Commuter Rail station would have been to thread through (likely impossible) or over the I-90/I5 interchange. Pretty sure that over would be 'easier', but certainly not inexpensive. Throughout the system, both constructed or planned, the tunnels always serve one of those two purposes: Transit a dense urban core (Seattle and Bellevue downtowns) or to transit a ridge. (Capitol Hill, Beacon Hill, UW/Roosevelt.
Yes you're absolutely correct, central Seattle and Seattle in general has tricky terrain but I think the case I am making is that Seattle went 99% of the way to having a subway and should have just fixed the MLK section and south of the transit tunnel - it would be a small cost for a really substantail benefit. My estimation is probably on the order of 1.5x the capacity if not more
Long time viewer, first time commenter and someone who is quite involved with public transport in Auckland. For the purposes of full disclosure, I am not in favour of the New Zealand government's proposal and instead have views similar to that of RMTransit (a surface light rail route along city streets and an extension of the existing suburban rail network to the Airport). There are quite a few things that overseas commenters might not realise. Firstly, there is a high degree of politics involved here. The mayor of Auckland represented the Mount Roskill area (which the light rail route would go through) in the New Zealand Parliament for over thirty years. The current Minister of Transport, who is in some respects the protégé of the mayor of Auckland, currently represents the Mount Roskill area. They have both been advocates of light rail along Dominion Road for many years and so this has an influence. Then there is the fact one of the strongest advocates for extending the suburban rail network is not viewed favourably in some circles - personal attacks get thrown about a lot and I suspect this has soured the view of some politicians to the extension of the suburban rail network. Secondly, it looks increasingly likely that this project is tied in with some major urban renewal projects, particularly in Wesley (one suburb over from Mount Roskill) and Mangere. It would be worth looking up the Kainga Ora website to view their materials on these developments. Thirdly, light rail was originally sold as being a more cost effective option than extending the suburban rail network. Of course, now the NZ$14 billion P50 cost significantly outweighs the estimated NZ$1.5 billion cost of extending the suburban rail network. Arguably this might have been an attempt to get light rail on the agenda as at the time there were genuine fears that Auckland's bus network would become extremely congested - fears that appear unfounded given that the number of buses in the Auckland CBD per hour is going to be less in 2028 than it was in 2016.
In defense of Seattle's light rail, it does have its reasons in the long term. Lake Washington is way too deep to actually run light rail under Lake Washington, yet they knew they would want to connect the east and west sides together. Trying to run light rail across a floating bridge was already hard and expensive enough, full metro would have likely multiplied those costs. Underground tunnels are expensive, as you say, but there's not a lot of areas where it's necessary to do tunneling, mostly around the dense downtown and U districr area where there's not really any room to elevate it. I do admit that it would have been better to elevate along Columbia City, but given the costs I don't exactly blame them.
Here in Karlsruhe, Germany, there was a 10+ year project bringing the all trams underground in the entire city center. This actually made a lot of sense, as they were cutting through the entire pedestrian zone. Now the city center is being redone as a pure pedestrian zone without any traffic (or roads, for that matter).
I know some people have already commented about this, but I think it would be really interesting to see a video on Brussels', Antwerp's and Charleroi's pre-metros.
Wow WAY more comments than I expected! To keep it succinct, it almost always comes down to money. Light Rail projects tend to be seen slightly more favorably in North America (and similar areas, e.g. NOT most of Europe and Asia) because they are seen as the "cheaper" alternative to heavy rail with much of the benefits. Yes, at a basic level, full metro systems should be the ones in the tunnels and other modalities should "stay in their lanes" to throw a pun in the mix, but that's not reality. I don't think light rail in tunnels is the devil it is made out to be, however, at least in areas with significant funding challenges. Everyone (including Reece) seems to be digging on Seattle for having light rail in tunnels but you have to consider the local circumstances, and often when you see it, it is more vestige than anything, and adapting to local conditions. In Seattle's case, they had miles/km's of existing bus tunnel to use, and at the time the political will did not allow for full metro, but having ridden the system multiple occasions, it does work well at the present time. If the growth continues, it would be great for the system to "evolve," but I think it's practical right now. Another benefit to having ANY kind of train underground is staying away from the elements--there can be severe weather outside, but in general the trains can run reliably underground. Also, any time you can avoid co-mingling with cars and people above ground is generally a good thing. What I would like to see an in depth video on someday (forgive me if it's already done) is the proliferation of BRT, which as a defunct advocacy group, LightRailNow! used to say, most transit systems using that terminology generally do not fit the definition of rapid transit, and they advocated for the terminology "quality bus." There are some cities/systems where it can work well (e.g. Eugene, Curitaba, etc.) but most of the time it's just splashy bus service.
Boston's Green Line light rail network runs the main trunk line through downtown, including the original Tremont tunnel aka the oldest subway in the US, in a tunnel while 3 of the 4 branches comprising the majority of the system are street running. These parts of the line are always far slower. The new Green Line Extension, a project 30 years in the making, has the ROW along an existing rail corridor yet the cost to realign the existing tracks and add the new ones plus a half dozen stations came out to half a billion per mile. I don't really have a point, it's just insane.
As a local, I would just say I agree! Most Bostonians know that the Green Line in any form is the worst line. In general, it is *perhaps* sometimes passable when underground, but don't forget all the screeching at Boylston or when the cars just randomly stop in the tunnel for 20 minutes
A lot of German cities are bankrupting themselves because the maintenance costs are so high for underground tunnels. Some cities (Dusseldorf, Cologne for example) are relatively big and can support the price, but there are cities with less than 300.000 inhabitants that built these systems because they are government subsidized (The government payed about 80%-90% of construction costs), that didn't think about maintenance and replacement costs in 40 years (which is now). A lot of companies are even considering shutting down their entire system and replacing it with busses, which would be sad... Cologne, Dusseldorf, Karlsruhe - all good examples, but there are a lot of cities (Dortmund, Duisburg, Bochum, Essen, Mülheim) which are really struggling financially and that might not have their tunnel for the net 40 years..
The tunnels aren't too expensive to maintain. Nobody wants to pay for them that's the issue. Of course one small city can not maintain such heavy infrastructure but Germany is a very rich country and regions that are less developed than Northrhine-Westphalia can support large metrosystems as well. And the Rhine/Rhur Area is large enough to justify a proper city-wide metrosystem, but in a car-centric country like Germany, politicians prefer to call everything "too expensive" and leave it at that.
It's mostly the Rhine-Ruhr-systems that are struggling. Ironically, the original intent over there was to operate the tunnels as part of a massive metro system which never happened. I doubt that operating the tunnels that way rather than with light rail trains would have softened the financial outcome. The whole project looked like it was just way too ambitious to begin with. All the Stadtbahns are quite a mixed back and can't really be dumped into a single category. In the case of Cologne, I think Reece's argument still stands as the light rail system is quite expensive to maintain but doesn't provide sufficient enough capacity due to its short platform length. Still, there's Frankfurt with a Stadtbahn that is just as good as, say, the Berlin U-Bahn in terms of capacity, yet is much, much cheaper to operate.
It’s definitely true that you shouldn’t build something you can’t maintain, the good thing is North American cities have so little transit infra given their size that it’s not a huge issue here (when priorities are sensible)
Just as a small comparison, how do you think london maintains the tube infrastructure? Or all of it's other urban rails? When in comes to gdp (I know that's a rather rough comparison but it gives you an idea of how much money the area might have to spend on transit) London and the Rhine/Rhur Area are roughly equal. Which makes sense when you think about it. There is no justification whatsoever for that bs we've got going on here in West Germany when in comes to transit. There is enough money available to build Paris- or London-level transit. But instead the state-government lets the cities pay for everything on their own and the result of that is pure misery.
What I'm trying to say is, don't ever think that transit in Northrhine-Westphalia is too ambitious or too expensive. It's quite the opposite of that. And if we keep believing that it's impossible to even maintain a tunnel in Dortmund, then we are never going to move forward.
Think about corridors with 15-20k pphpd peak demand crossing very dense regions. Elevated systems can be difficult to implement. A BRT system would require an even bigger space to properly function (i.e., bypass lanes). Is an underground light metro the best option? I feel that it would still be over-dimensioned for the demand, that's the kind of corridor I use to think an underground light rail like Ottawa's would work. But in the end I think it comes to how much you can save with tunneling costs! Maybe with light rail you can use cut an cover, as the maximum slope ranges from 8% to 12%, while you would need a tunneling machine with heavier rail, whose slope is around 4%.
In my opinion, most folk seldom give much thought to these things. It is good to see presentations like this. It is something our policy and decision-makers would benefit from. Clearly transit is an issue, and now with Covid and other such issues likely to be on the horizon, many other factors must surely go into such planning endeavors. It requires considerable thought and effort to consider all the many factors involved in this and other similar issues. In particular, how does this impact other means of transit including automobiles, bicycles, pedestrians, wheelchair, people with visual and auditory impairments, aged and other kinds of impaired folk and other concerns to create an accessible, fair and cost-effective system. Good job of introducing folks to this matter.
Disagree. Boston's green line is part tunnel under the high density part of the city, and part on-street tram through the old streetcar suburbs. Great way to get to the central part of the city.
Exactly, and the Green Line T is in fact the original subway in North America, proof of concept. Would be a royal pain getting around on the Green Line in downtown Boston city traffic. Having that part of it underground makes it much more efficient.
Funfact: Vienna has a Subwayline which has not a single grade crossing. It does have parts in tunnel but often an overground part. Due to preservation of more than a century old infrastructures they decided to make it the only subway line being served by Light Rails. It is the U6. So if you ever want to see something else in Vienna Transit you might wanna look at it. Or the WLB that goes to the city of Baden which is pretty much a classic light rail
The Brussels example might be the best opposite case to this - they’re converting their ‘premetro’ tram tunnels to high floor metro when the ridership warrants it. The latest one to be converted is Line 3, currently under construction.
@@RMTransit how efficient is that, considering that at one point, when your demand is actually good, you will have to shut down your system (at least partially) for some years while you upgrade it?
Also bear in mind that all the Brussels tram tunnels were always meant to become metro tunnels (Hence 'pre-metro'). The underground tram-stops are the size of metro stations and even the platform access was built to accommodate future conversion to high platforms. For an underground tram system, they were overbuilt from the start, for a metro system they're just right. If you build the minimal possible station size for lightrail and don't add in contingencies to make conversion to metro easier in the future, it's going to be very expensive to do so. As for lightrail as a holdover, we still have a pre-metro tunnel from 1970-1975 which still runs only trams, so that future might be over half a century away when you first build the tunnels. It should also be noted that Brussels has and had a large tram network to feed trams in and out of these tunnels. If you build an entirely new line in an area where there are no trams to start with, then the cost benefit of not running metro will be relatively small, especially if you're already building most of it to metro spec to accommodate a future capacity increase.
@@mariusdufour9186 I was thinking "when is he going to mention Brussels" throughout the video, until it ended and he didn't. Yes, Brussels is a great example for cities in this situation, and the planners from 50 years ago should be credited for their far-sightedness.
@@RMTransit that leaves out an important consideration, which is whether or not a network actually has adequate tunnel length to better utilize them as a metro. I guess you mention the strategic tunnels, but since you placed the focus on the efficiency of the metro, it may lead viewers to believe that any tunneled tram network is wasted potential when that potential may not be there in the first place. The toronto and Auckland projects do have that potential of course. When talking of smaller cities, I think the question should be less about whether large tunneling should be light rail or metro, but whether that tunneling is viable at all in the first place. As you said, Auckland may be better off spending the money on a larger number of smaller projects. Frankly many cities would. Capacity is important but how are you going to generate the capacity when whole swaths of the city are left without any way to get to the corridor. Initial frequency and capacity can imo be sacrificed (mind u I'm talking like going from 2 minute metro headways to like 6 minute tram headways) in favor of network mileage, particularly in suburban sprawl north america. Your channel is an interesting mix where u emphasize the importance of focusing on the meat and potatoes local stuff (toronto bus network) but then exalt the merits of building new light metro asap and everywhere. Light metro is hypothetically the most efficient rapid transit technology available but without building out the local stuff first it will remain underutilized, like running trams in tunnels. One may say to that "well who cares because at least riders have a fantastic new service" but I feel like in the age of the climate emergency, the project that gets the highest share of people off their car seat cushioned butts and onto transit is the winner. Maybe this is the reason all these overengineered light rail systems are popping up in our day and age, developers plan for underutilization from the start since that's the baseline they're working with and solving the issue is outside their scope. I guess since these are the projects that politicians love to announce and construction firms love to lobby its what we have to work with in the transit discussion space. Sorry if this rant is standoffish, I think I'm just airing my frustrations out about the state of things more than anything. You are by far the best transit channel on youtube.
LOL! All I could think of is the Buffalo Metro, what New Yorkers I went to university with derisively referred as a streetcar in a tunnel. Yet the NFTA Metro Rail is really a "light metro" with a 5 mile long twin-bore heavy-rail subway with all-high-level boarding at the subway stations and at the street-level stations downtown a combination of high-level and retractable stairs used by the 1980s LRV rollingstock. For the planned 3-mile grade-level suburban Amherst extension from UB South Campus to UB North Campus the plan is for high-level side and island platforms built within the mediums of existing boulevards. While I was in college I found the Metro Rail a great mode of transport, which was actually faster than driving down Main Street due to the traffic lights which slows down cars and buses.
Gonna have to agree with other commenters. Many times strategic tunnels eventually expand the system to a completely or almost completely tunnelled systems. Also in many cases light rails are the most affordable way for a mid size city to build a reliable rapid transit. While in the long term the costs are larger if the city needs to convert the line to a full size metro, it is the exact growth of the city that leads to it being a viable option for the council
In Brisbane, I remember years ago when they first talked about a Busway instead of a light rail. They had it planned for ages before a few years even earlier, they wanted to future proof transit into the CBD but needed something to carry the needs of the Earlie 2000s. The point is the goal, to make sure a Future Brisbane could have a traditional light rail that would first be Busways then Ev Busses that had metro like characteristics. Today that evolution is still serving the city and growing with it while preserving it. Frankly, it has its issues and better is still possible, but the flexibility in how it functions works as intended and the need to future proof transit
I work at the Seattle Link rail system (Sitting there now.) I would argue that Seattle had to go tunnel for a couple of reasons. 1. The downtown tunnel was built in the '80s with the intention of adding rail along with bus traffic and rail wasn't introduced until 2009. 2. Seattle is geographically bottlenecked. The downtown core is very dense at 3 square miles. Half a mile wide in one part and only 1.3 miles long. 3. North of Seattle is expensive real estate wise. This is the area using the majority of the tunnel system, 7 miles out of the 25 miles total. Clearing enough land to place the rail and stations would likely have cost nearly as much as the tunnel sections and, more importantly, would not have passed the ballot. The stations in the tunnel section here are not along the freeway and would underserve the areas that need the stations most, specifically the university and it's stadium. The voters insisted on the tunnel. 4. Hills. Seattle has many of them. The other tunnel segment (Beacon hill) starts at ~40 feet above grade, the station is 162 feet below grade (surface elevation is 360 feet above sea level), and exits about 30 feet above grade again. Seattle link is called light rail, but is more of a metro line with a downtown core and a foolish grade running segment in the historically lower rent area of town. Each car holds up to 150 people comfortably and we have 4 cars in a train when running full capacity at 6 minute headways. (6,000 passengers each way per hour at peak times.) As far as sharing our tracks with heavy rail. It wouldn't work. The night window for us is only about 2.5 hours, and that is reserved for maintenance.
@@RMTransit I don't know how else to do it. only two tracks and service 21 hours a day. When else would you do it? Tonight was substation maintenance and vibration testing. No way to do those during service.
Frankfurt has about 30 stations underground and many kilometers of tunnel. This isn't only a couple of stations or the very core of the city. It is basically the whole city center.
The Westgerman Stadtbahn Systems all have greater proportions of tunnels (than needed for trams). Frankfurt has second most underground stations and tunnels for all german Stadtbahn systems and feels more like a metro. Because of the long high floor units even kind of in the outter street level sections.
One extension of the Taipei MRT that's currently in the planning stages, from the eastern terminus of the Blue Line in Nangang to Keelung City, was recently changed from a completely elevated tramway to a being a proper metro rail. I feel a lot of the arguments you made here about capacity and just "why not just build the capacity we need" came into play. Interestingly, the line basically parallels the TRA corridor between the two cities, though rail service headways into Keelung itself aren't as frequent as one would think - many of the local services either stop short of the city or turn south to Yilan, where a significant number of commuters to Taipei live.
If you have been following the Green Line Extension(SWLRT) in Minneapolis, due to the tunnel that is being constructed the projected timeline got pushed back from 2023 to 2027, and raised the price of the line from $2 billion to $2.75 billion. I think I would have to agree, that tunnels so be avoided if not neccessary.
This tunnel is also because of NIMBYism and has been a bottleneck of the project, despite the line extension already being over 60% complete. It's not as if Minnesota's LRTs don't already use tunnels, the Blue Line has its own in the airport that was cut-and-cover and also required a tunnel boring machine. It's unfortunate that the SWLRT has been delayed, but it's still only such a small section of the overall length of the line that it's very strange it costs so much in the first place.
If you ask me, tunneling for light rail is a benefit if done right. Heck, Baltimore's light rail on Howard Street needs to be sent underground and with the looming CSX tunnel expansion nearing (current runs under said "Howard Street" in downtown), it would be a good idea to just go ahead cut & cover that roadway to make room for both LRT & freight trains.
You have covered this fairly well. A few points to note: * New Zealand doesn't have a lot of money to spend on these projects * These sorts of projects tend to be more expensive here than other countries which makes the previous point even more problematic * The North Shore already has a bus way that goes over the harbour bridge. The bus way has some gradients which are far too steep for regular main rail trains. Light metro might work. * Housing in Auckland is very low density. Density may increase around this route will likely happen. So Auckland might be bigger than other cities it is not as dense as European cities. * All rail has narrow gauge in NZ. Not sure how that compares to light rail or light metro, but i imagine light metro generally needs a wider gauge to be successful. Other points about the existing plan missed are: * Speed will likely be affected by having a full light rail route from the city to the airport. Making the route less than optimum, in fact buses are currently doing that route a lot quicker than projected rail times.
I think Auckland should be planning and start building a 4-7 surface light rail system if Auckland wants light rail. The proposed NZ$15 billion for the Auckland's light rail system could be better spent on upgrading and electrify between Pukekohe to Hamilton and Tauranga, complete the electrification between Palmerston North and Waikane, upgrade the NIMT between Muri and Paekakariki by double tracking and future proofing where possible for climate change, reopen the Wairoa to Gisborne line and in fact upgrade the whole national rail infrastructure including signalling and train control to increase freight and regional, interregional and long distance passenger rail services connecting the 13 regions including Auckland of the 16 regions in NZ.
Eglinton Avenue in Toronto will be so much nicer for pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and shopkeepers because the Crosstown LRT is below ground. Here, at least, there is real value to a tunnel.
It might seem an excessive investment to build a tunnel for smaller capacity lines but for some cities during the 20th century they foresaw great population growth so it would make sense later. In my hometown of Guadalajara they built a metro-like tunnel that initially was used by trolleybuses due to budget constraints. Later it was upgraded to light metro and some people complained that it was a "train to nowhere". Now that the city has grown to more than 5M inhabitants I can't imagine what it would be like without that line.
Actually, Guadalajara seems to be the full antithesis of what Reese have talked about LRT and BRT included. However, the tunneling in GDL can be considered as strategic for L3, meanwhile the L1 was planned like a German stadtbahn thus the actual result, the only weird here is the L2, which is planned to be totally underground while keeping the characteristics of the L1.
I just realized the San Diego Trolley also has 1 tunnel in the entire network. And it’s right underneath SDSU. Although it would be pretty cool to see the train running right through the university campus, it can just go right by all the buildings and students without stopping when it’s underground
Where the route utilizes both street running an tunnel running, light rail makes perfect sense. The Buffalo NFTA system is 40 years old now and does just that. Unsignaled light rail in the middle of the street (Main Street was turned into a pedestrian mall) with train-preferred traffic lights at intersections, then fully signaled (like heavy rail transit) in tunnel, where street running was no longer possible.
@@RMTransit Maybe so, it's a compromise. You can't run heavy rail (which is best in tunnels) down the middle of the street. Light Rail is the only choice. And you can't force people to change trains at every transition from street-level to tunnel.
San Francisco’s Muni Metro is the epitome of the worst combo of all three, underground metro with huge platforms but tiny 1 car trams; and 2 lines (K/T, and N) that operate as a streetcar in mixed traffic, subway, and light rail with dedicated lanes. The central subway will fix the T and untangle it from the K, making it only a dedicated lane light rail and subway service. (Which I doubt will be much better) but doesn’t do anything for the other five lines. Also we built ourselves into a corner with high platforms at all the metro and dedicated lane light rail stops so all the trains require movable steps at the door to operate in mixed street traffic, and the steps constantly break down
The Seattle Tunnel is interesting: they built it for a future light rail that wasn’t funded yet, ran electric buses in it for years, finally got a light rail… which was incompatible with the rails and power lines in the tunnel, so all that had to be ripped out and replaced. 🤦♂️ They then ran it in the tunnel with busses until it lost the terminal station at the end of the tunnel for the busses to development for the convention center, now it’s only light rail (which makes more sense since the light rail now turns into a new tunnel to head farther north.) But, the stations are HUGE, way bigger than a single light rail train set unless they run 2 of them combined during busy times.
The platforms are exactly the length of a light rail train. It seems like everyone outside of Seattle assumes we have 1 or 2 car trains. Our light rail system has 4 car trains, the same length as a "Metro" system
As a Californian, we have light rail in downtown LA that kinda has to go underground because of space limitations, and we have a very clean, reliable subway (the red and purple lines) that is exclusively underground.
seattle has a lot of very steep hills and ridges in the north which makes building at grade very difficult thats why is grade seprated because that was the only option
True. Seattle city center is very similar to San Francisco in that it’s very dense with (relatively) narrow streets that would cause Link to create gridlock with an at grade version and a very difficult design if it was chosen to be above grade
@@metrofilmer8894 no no what i am saying is that the hills are too steep not to tunnel through and the akward layout of some parts of the city just make it was easier just to pay for the tunnels
To me, while you may be right to some degree regarding the direct material optimization of the projects, the premise of this video relies upon ignoring the single most powerful barrier to transit in general, which is the deeply political task of getting a project proposed, approved, and funded. Creating multiple interdependent systems for the purpose of conjointly supporting the city’s transit needs relies upon getting ALL of those projects proposed, approved, and funded, and if any part of it fails, you end up with a transit network crippled with glaring insufficiencies. Imagine if we designed (A) a mainline rail network expected to function primarily by riders transferring to (B) a surface tramway/streetcar/light rail network upon arrival at a central rail hub in the city. Now imagine both of these projects are submitted, but only one of them actually makes it to getting built. If A is built but B is not, riders can use their mainline commuter system to get into the urban core, but are stranded miles away from their destination at the hub upon arrival. Getting to their destination requires a cab, Uber, etc. That’s an expensive hassle. Might as well just drive. If B is built but A is not, riders can get from anywhere in the urban core to anywhere else with ease, but getting into the urban core if you don’t already live there is impossible without driving, and if I’m gonna drive, I might as well just drive all the way to my destination. And none of that is even to speak of the fact that to most riders, the biggest benefit of transit (besides traffic avoidance) is that it’s a passive process. Rather than having to watch the road, you can play games on your phone or work on your laptop. The more transfers you ask of riders, and the more work you ask them to put into those transfers (such as you must now walk from this mainline rail station to the separate tramway station 2 blocks away to catch the train that actually goes to your destination), the less and less enticing the prospect of using transit instead of just driving sounds. Transit asks riders to give up control, directness, and privacy in exchange for ease, speed, and the ability to make personal use of the commute time. The more active processes (in particular, transfers, especially to different systems) you ask the commuter to engage in, the less the transit package has to offer someone to give up their car with its isolated bubble, one’s own choice of music, otherwise general quiet, and absolute directness.
I don't think it's practical to oppose transfers completely. We can't have routes from everywhere to everywhere else and still operate them all at high frequency; the only way we can get high frequency is with a smaller number of routes running a hub-and-spokes model, which inherently means transferring at the hubs. And sometimes we really do need to change modes -- we might need the capacity of a metro on one corridor, but we can't then run that metro down all the suburban streets, we have to transfer people to busses for the final mile. You're right that we should try to avoid *excessive* transfers though. Anybody who has to transfer 3 times in a trip is gunna tell horror stories about it, and will try to avoid that trip in future.
Londons underground moves also in surface outdoors so its not new even in ancient city rail networks. Its rarely road access, its more likely that its either a rail line OR a road and we still needs roads to ship goods into cities. The other issue is city build infrastructure. Few cities can now accomidate a surface light rail within the tight confines of old city buildings. So you could end car traffic but the gridlock in other roads would be endemic. It already happens with light rail builds. Many european cities often have narrow streets (Paris put in an underground and it has wide streets but other cities were built when a horse was transport so wide streets (like the regular US city grid layout) are an option. If you are going to send down a tunnel boring machine, then boring further is not that much extra cost. Look at cities without light rail and the city traffic and then ask what happens when all road traffic is given secondary access to rail. Surface light rail that did not always have it, often incur car/truck/cycle accidents and the citizens need to almost grow up with surface rail intersections and tunnels avoid that. The reason the default is not underground metro is cost- nothing more. If tunnels were as cheap, there would be no surface light rail and the trains could run as often, as fast and as long as you wanted. Elon Musk showed that no amount of tech can really cut tunnelling costs.
I think the first 'tram tunnel' was in Boston where it dramatically alleviated traffic in the downtown and this was essentially before there was any significant numbers of automobiles. That might be the reason why Boston didn't junk its trolley system after WW2 like most other cities. Philadelphia did the same thing with its subway/surface routes that street run outside the downtown core but are subways downtown, again, these are the surviving streetcar systems in that city, the tracks for the other lines are still there but are run as bus lines. European cities are older with a lot of narrow streets in hodgepodge directions, tunneling can logically hit the city core in a direct linear fashion and avoid the traffic. The East Berlin system illustrates the beauty of tram lines, they start downtown, exit the core in dedicated lanes and then gradually branch off to neighborhoods with street running. This gives the system far more coverage than the underground routes in the western part of the city.
An excellent video that succinctly explains the flaws in the latest Auckland light rail proposal. I agree with your views that tunnelled light rail option seems to be the worst of all worlds and that there should be a place for further extensions of the existing electrified suburban rail system to the airport and North shore. The performance of the existing network suffers from issues such as too many level crossings, needing to share the tracks with freight trains and probably most importantly from Auckland Transport’s perspective, a lack of control as the network infrastructure is owned and run by the Government owned rail company, KiwiRail. These issues have somehow created the perception that further heavy rail routes are somehow not suitable for Auckland, which is pretty silly when one looks at the performance of modern high capacity /speed narrow gauge lines such as the Mandurah line in Perth. However if Auckland really feel that a new separate mass transit system is needed, I am rather attracted to the Regional Rapid Transit system concept in India that you covered recently. A speed grade separated system , preferably using the same 1067 mm gauge as the KiwiRail network connecting Central Auckland to the airport and on to the developing areas in Southern Auckland and the Waikato would be a much better use of the sort of investment that is being talked about for the Auckland Light Rail project.
I think you hit the nail on the head regarding StatBahn that it is a core flow of multiple strassebahn or tram-trains creating a high frequency. Plus often removing the teams from street running frees up the streets to more pedestrian, cycle friendly and limited access streets enabling a city or town to introduce a congestion or low emissions zone with suitable park and ride on the edge of towns.
I agree. With the huge amount of development and modernisation Auckland itself is seeing, along with a lot of investment, the CityRail link and an increase in immigration, it just makes sense for there to be a more heavy rail/metro system connecting major points like the airport to the CBD (and the North Shore which desperately needs a good transit connection), as opposed to a light rail system which feels more temporary and at the end of the day is limited in terms of capacity… Also worth pointing out Auckland has terrible traffic congestion so this could help alleviate that
Im from seattle and the Link LR wouldn’t be possible without the tunnels, because of the geography of the pnw. If the track was above ground it would have to be Much less stright and probably more expensive then keeping it straight through tunnels. Seattle also used to run buses in the light rail tunnel. And almost no one remembers it.
I live in Auckland. Needless to say your assessment is much more on the money than our friends in central government in Wellington. The logical solutions in my mind are: 1) Extend heavy rail from Manukau west to the Airport; which provides a direct rail link to Britomart and the CBD for the airport, and also the option for a rail to the airport from other areas (even cities like Hamilton). (the current proposal would take passengers from the airport to the to be built Karangahape Station or to Wynyard Qtr, so in each case tourists will have a 5-15 minute walk or transfer with their luggage to get to hotels/businesses that are their likely destinations. 2) Use light rail on the surface or a busway to provide local connection from Mangere and the Sandringham/Dominion Road coridor through the ithmus to the city. Tunneling this would only be for political reasons, and moreover, the area is built entirely over old lava flows which are difficult to excavate and or have pesky lava caves. 3) Long term extend rail from Britomart via a tunnel to the North Shore, potentially running it over the existing Northern Busway coridor to Albany or even further north. This alleviates traffic congestion on the harbour bridge currently used by both bus and private traffic (buses are the only public transport option from the shore to the CBD. As for your mention of the asymetry at britomart; once the City Rail Loop heavy rail project is completed, this will largely be solved, as trains can route around the loop to return, or run through the station between the West and South / South East (and hopefully eventually the north).
Light rail tunnels make sense in the use case where you have a convergence of light rail lines through a super high frequency downtown corridor. Lots of German cities have this and Boston has this. The initial Seattle downtown tunnel also wasn't a bad usage of this because thats what it was when you consider it was shared with trolleybusses.
As a German, I don't fully agree. Tunnels reduce the number of trains per hour compared to tram lines above ground. The only way they can help to increase capacity is because they enable longer trains. In the case of Stuttgart for example you've got up to 5 lines that converge in a central tunnel, none of which can use the full length of the platforms because of some minor street running sections. Yet they can't just run more trains due to the extreme number of services, some of which really should have remained above ground. Frankfurt on the other hand limits the number of lines per tunnel or places the point of convergence further outside of the city center and thus provides a much higher number of trains per line. And due to strategically placing the tunnels they can run 100 m long trainsets which means the capacity they provide is almost identical to the Berlin U-Bahn. Light rail tunnels make sense if they enable a metro-style service with longer and/or wider trains on parts of the network. They don't make sense if you just end up replacing an above-ground tram with an underground tram.
@@RMTransit speaking of trolley busses Boston silver line should be converted to light rail with converging lines in the tunnel no question. Idk what they were thinking with that one. I think a mix of high frequency underground light rail sharing space with trolleybusses that otherwise are mostly above ground isn't a bad idea and it seemed like a unique and interesting way for Seattle to speed up busses in the downtown.
@@RMTransit The Seattle trolley coaches were dual mode. Diesel on the surface and electric in the tunnel. First of their kind and hated by the operators. Later they used hybrids with a "Hush" mode that would make them electric at the platforms. The tunnel was very short (1.2 miles).
This is a good polemic and it reinforces the critiques I had when I saw proposals for a tram in Glasgow rather than expanding the subway. They wanted to go south west from the city to a large shopping mall, a major hospital and Glasgow airport. Yes cheaper but its an incredibly busy city and speed, capacity and future growth of the subway would suffer.
The very first one was actually Boston 1897 Green Line Tremont Street Subway fast forward 70 years later the 1960s Stadtbahn West Germany Rhein-Ruhr region Frankfurt Am Main. Basically what the other cities did was Copy Boston Tremont Street Subway for the purpose of running Trams under city streets. That includes San Francisco Market Street Twin peaks tunnel systems to which the steps ends up converting to a level access to Subway platforms
Well in the case of the Twin Peak tunnel, that was built because it was travelling through a mountain. Unless you want to route all the way around it, you can't exactly run streetcars on the surface there, so they had to settle for a tunnel until Market Street.
@@Absolute_Zero7 thank you for telling me about this and I'm wondering if there is a link tunnel between the two even though they are built some 50 years apart from each other 1918 Twin Peaks 1968-1980 Market Street Subway
@V69 didn't know about that Marseille predated Boston, MA by 4 years. Because for most Americans into this field they would talk about 1897 Tremont Street Subway MBTA Green line trams
Auckland is in an Earthquake zone. Deeper tunnels have less damage to the infrastructure types from Earthquakes. Surface or near surface can have significant damage from the P and or S waves.
I love the title of this video! Los Angeles’ first “subway”, the Hollywood Line of the Pacific Electric, had a largely underground right of way in Downtown and was technically an interurban. Additionally, they’re building new stations as we speak, better connecting the E/Expo Line and A Line to Downtown along a complete underground alignment, which would include new transit points with the B and D Lines, the actual city subway. Ultimately it’s just a weird situation where light rail running along the medians of streets are efficient and effective on the wide suburban streets but not so much in the Downtown. Ultimately, I liked the original L Line’s work around this. It ran along the street median, only crossing underground for one station before immediately rising again. After the old Little Tokyo Station it rose onto an elevated line where it bridged the US 101, as a underground alignment wasn’t viable because the freeway is far too sunken in the Downtown area.
I like your channel Reece, but you said 6 months ago (The Best Transit System in the US Just Got Better: Seattle Link Light Rail) that Seattle was your favorite transit system in the US. Well, our light rail tunnels completely underground from the International District until you reach Northgate. I think you might be just a little conflicted in your view. On the street "tram-like" trains just wouldn't be feasible unless you knocked out a lot of buildings and widened streets for the trams. That's why I feel that Seattle and San Francisco do better with light rail tunnels. But then, I could be completely missing your point.
St. Louis and LA got it right with high level platforms and LRT trains. But I never hear of these systems referred to as Light Metro. On the other hand we have Seattle with its metro infrastructure and low floor trains. Did Seattle mess up in its conception and design?
To be fair, the original downtown transit tunnel in Seattle was built for buses, and had buses and trains operating in it at the same time for a while, so the trains had to be low-floor to match the platform height of the buses. It looks pretty silly now for sure though, I wish we had high floor as well :')
@@bluegreenmagenta What would be the advantage ? Aren't high plaforms just a remainder of old times, when engines have been much bigger and more expensive ? Today you have 2 small 20cm engines on each axis, not requiring much space. With a small ramp included in the train, not in the plaform, it's easy to access with wheelchairs without any platform.
@@RMTransit I think we need to stem away from that high floor/low floor debate. Losing some seats for easy construction is not a big deal. I see no difference between either as long as they function accordingly.
_reads the title as a German_ "Wait, wouldn't that just make it a regular streetcar?" _It turns out the title is somewhat exaggerated._ "Oh ok that makes a bit more sense."
You, as a tourist, cannot understand the logic behind such a decision. This "dinky 5-car fully low-floor trams" serves the city well and the cost with the tunnels is one that you can only dream of in Canada where you spend insane amounts of money per kilometer, that can get up to more than 6 times the cost in per km in Málaga system. I believe that in Spain, where I live, we know a bit more on how to build a good public transport system that is adapted for the local needs.
Thanks for this video. Very interesting. Making me think about Manchester metrolink all the way through. I can only ever think of it as a compromise - can't think where the light rail part of it works apart from you don't have to go down escalators. The whole system is painfully slow and congested. The airport link's only real purpose that I can see is to serve Wythenshawe - surely one or two metro stops would do the job better though.
I'm thinking about how this relates to Boston's Green Line, which started out using something like the "strategic stadtbahn tunnel" approach at a choke point for surface trams over 120 years ago, then extended that to a few kilometers of tunnel across the downtown. But Boston didn't build any subsequent metro lines that way.
Which gives the reason why cities have trouble understanding the function & usefulness of tunnels for light rail trams. And Boston is built on marshlands...
There is a place on Oslo's tram network where the tram runs on the metro's track. There is both OHLE and the quite fat, elevated 3rd rail for about 2.5km, or 1.5 freedom units.
I honestly must agree. Edmonton ran it's first LRT line through an extensive tunnelled section in the down-town core, which was a huge expense that annulled most of the cost savings of using light rail in the first place. Ultimately, it is a very good pre-metro or light metro line, but it was costly to build and took decades to finish. tunnels are very expensive, and I would certainly advocate to avoid them when possible. It's probably cheaper to close a thoroughfare to car traffic and run your line along that right of way. with grade crossing priority via crossing arms, a light rail/pre-metro system operating entirely at grade should have no problem keeping pace with a much more expensive tunnel. Tunnels can be a good choice in the dense urban core, of course, but if you choose a partially tunnelled line, careful consideration must be given to what that line will do on the surface. a surface line that operates in mixed traffic like a tram will not be able to saturate and take advantage of that tunnel. if the tunnel is not going to be used to it's capacity, then you probably should have just run the light rail line along the surface, at far less cost.
I think it depends on how your city is laid out. Trams in the city centre running through pedestrian areas are usually speed restricted for safety. If you don't have too much foot traffic, you might get comparable speeds to a tunnel, though in my experience that's generally not the case. There's also the route itself, if you have lots of sharp corners it's inevitably going to be slower than a tunnel with much shallower curves.
The Edmonton tunnel section was planned before the term "Light Rail" was adopted. Called the "rapid transit project" it was originally modeled after Montreal pedestrian access, Toronto dimensions, and Cleveland use of a standard railway right-of-way with bus features. The name was changed to the British term "Light Rail" (from "Light Railway") in 1977, when the city planners incorporated public input for the surface lines that have now and are going to be built. The operating rules were copied from Boston's Green Line and of course, the most significant event was the strong-arming of Siemens Canada to overcome their reluctance to build rail transit cars for such a small market. They were in Alberta to sell electrical equipment to the oil companies. Edmonton chose the Frankfurt U--2 cars as the best to fit into a high-floor environment that was already determined. Instructors and inspectors for San Diego and Sacramento were trained in Edmonton. One trace of this history in other systems is the use of the word "Control" instead of "Dispatcher." That's what Denver calls it, but it arrived from the UK via the Edmonton Police and Fire radio procedures, which were adopted by Edmonton Transit. Calgary was able to build a much larger system by using street-running in the downtown instead of a tunnel. However, Calgary also has more streets in downtown than Edmonton did. And Edmonton's noted timed-transfer feeder bus system of that era would not have worked as well with street traffic delays on the rail core line.
Funny thing is, most of the crenshaw extension in LA is gonna be light rail but will mostly be underground, although Crenshaw Blvd does shrink in size so this does make sense
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Porto Metro: *sweats nervously*
I wish porto metro was a heavy metro like in Lisbon, it's so overcrowded sometimes I have to wait for the next train
As it should! Video coming, eventually!
@@goncalor.8192 the problem is it functions as a tram on the branches, not fully grade separated, so I don't know how it would function as a heavy metro that way. Also, don't forget when this was planned in the 90s nobody thought it would have the success it now has. For example the yellow line was just upgraded, enabling double the frequency (every 3 minutes) it had before. Also, in the future one could have longer vehicles and/or instead of coupling two of them together, having one 70 m vehicle, since the driver cabs occupy space for at least 40 more people.
Furthermore, for now the system only has basically a trunk and the yellow line, which are heavely congested. Once the new lines (circular, yellow extension to Senhora da Hora and second Gaia line) open, the old ones will decongest.
@@portugueseeagle8851 I've heard of the expansions and I'm super excited for it! I use the yellow line every day and the upgrade helped immensely
@@RMTransit one interesting video I would love to see from you is how to upgrade an overcrowded system on a budget. It's easy to upgrade capacity with lots of cash but I wonder what is your opinion on the best ways of dealing with overcrowding for cheap
Thanks for covering my city’s frustrating Frankenstein project!
It originally started off as a LR project from the city centre to Mount Roskill using the north/south Dominion Road. This is currently a high frequency service using double decker buses, and it will eventually run out of capacity, hence the LR proposal. Then the route was extended to the airport. Then light metro was put on the table. Then three options were considered, one of which avoided Dominion Road altogether - this one. So the original problem statement of removing buses from Dominion Road was just conveniently forgotten.
A couple of points to make: the North Shore already has an existing busway that looks suspiciously like a LR line without the LR vehicles! Not sure the gradients would be compatible with HR.
From the south east of the airport, there is already an airport connecting bus to the southern mainline station at Puhinui, which was just rebuilt for this interchange purpose. Running a HR spur from the mainline is considered quite difficult at this location, due to a spur to Manukau just south of here, plus the adjacent train depot. The service scheduling for southern, Manukau and airport services would be a headache.
I've followed this project with interest, and never understood why a Puhinui heavy rail branch wasn't done instead. The Manukau branch always seemed like a very random project to me, and think it'd be better reused for a regional tram for the eastern suburbs, running north-south from Puhinui up to Botany, then across to Sylvia Park. Irirangi drive runs the majority of that route with decent medians that could be re-used, so you'd get a pretty decent quality service with pretty much no tunnelling in an area with no rail at all at present.
The new tram tunnels in central Karlsruhe (population 312,000) can be described as ’strategic’. The tunnels total 3.8kms and there are 7 stations. However in the last 50 years many larger Western German cities have ‘heavily tunnelled’ so as to convert their trams into Stadtbahns. (Cologne, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, Hannover, Stuttgart, Frankfurt (Main)) By contrast the only tram tunnel in Eastern Germany is a short ‘strategic’ tunnel in Rostock (pop. 205,000) - under the Hauptbahnhof! With Karlsruhe complete, I think there is now only one tram tunnel under construction in the whole of Germany. This is in Augsburg (pop. 300,000), and is another short 'strategic' line under the Hauptbahnhof.
I think growth is an important consideration too, you can afford less return on investment if you don’t expect to grow as fast or if you have better existing infra
Some cities like ludwigshaven can't afford to maintain their 1960s infra like stadtbahns anymore
I think with legacy systems it still makes perfectly sense. Way too expensive to build entirely new rights of way. Keep in mind that Stuttgart and the Rhine-Ruhr cities actually did plan on long-term metro conversion initially, and to that end it was sensible preparation work. They're also trunk lines, as Reece pointed out.
Anything new, if planners think grade separation is necessary, makes more sense to be built to full metro standards from the start.
"Leid-Rail"
I think that German Stadtbahn systems actually make sense, as most tunnels are either strategic or are serving trunk routes that bundle multiple lines within a city center. But it has to be said that Stadtbahn systems usually only serve medium-sized cities, which benefit from a "tram upgrade". In North America or Auckland, it seems like these new light rail tunnel try to act as a cheap metro alternative, which is really stupid. For example, Nuremburg and Fürth, two medium-sized cities of a population of 650k combined can support one heavy metro and two light metro lines with additional tram lines in Nuremburg for additional local service.
Edge cases - as you say “strategic” - tunnels to avoid traffic congestion (road junctions, especially busy ones), tunnels for geographical or ecology reasons (through hills or under parks etc) and grade separating junctions without needing a large elevated structure (often for visual amenity reasons/historical districts).
Yeah, the longer and more expensive the less and less it makes sense, even Paris has some tunneled tram - just very little!
It also makes sense if you have a few lines coming together in a city center, essentialy "tunnel for the trunk, on street operation for the branches" as the much higher frequency justifies the full grade separation, and the fact that multiple lines comes together makes any delays on any branch affect the core section less. When it is a single line, it is the onstreet section that dictates frequency and speed, not the tunnel.
@@RMTransit take for example the MN Blue Line LRT tunnel that runs 2.2 kilometers under the airport, servicing both terminals free 24/7 and allowing very fast speeds for an LRT. The airport tunnel connection provides one of the best airport transit connections in North America, as according to City Nerd 😉 so strategic tunneling works for LRT
I suppose a good example of such strategic tunneling would be what the Chicago Surface Lines, the City's tram/streetcar network before it was ripped up, had.
There were at least two tunnels that saw regular use. They basically ensured that the trams would keep running regular service even when the drawbridge's over the Chicago River were raised to allow boat traffic through.
I believe the tunnels are still there, actually, just not in use anymore and sealed up.
@@andrewlucia865 I think they carry communications cables now.
As an Australian who works in public transport, and has just returned home after three years living in Auckland, I have to say first up this video and your insights are far more advanced and logical than the understanding of most of the decision makers in this space in New Zealand.
Of note in relation to the existing heavy rail options you mention - both closest points had EXISTING or designed links to the airport. The end of Onehunga (to the north) had a tunnel that ran to the airport that was DESTROYED on purpose. To the east, the layout of tracks considered a corridor from the airport where a track could be later joined.
One of the problems with a single central government are issues like this. Auckland Transport (part of Auckland Council) have come close with better more appropriate plans for light rail in past iterations but this will become an expensive, under-utilised system that serves only a very niche purpose. It will never repay itself in benefits. And believe me, there is no telling NZ’ers how to do something better because they firmly believe nobody knows better. Very frustrating place to live and work and poor public transport (now and future) will forever hold Auckland back.
What alternative would you have gone for?
Here in Brussels they're converting the city centre tram (pre-metro) tunnel into a new metro line that will the be extended to the North of the city with a new tunnel. This is a good reminder that building a light rail system in such a way that it can easily be converted to heavy rail/metro once there is enough money and/or demand is also an option. The work that has to be done for the conversion of the existing tunnels is minimal. Installation of a third rail (our metro network is all third rail), and raising the lower part of the platform to the height of the rest of the platform. (This was planned from the beginning ca.1976 in the case of this tunnel). Trams used to run on a significant part of our current metro network, and every single tram tunnel currently in use is actually waiting to be completed and converted into a metro line eventually (this can take anywhere from under a decade to half a century or more, the one remaining major tram tunnel yet to be converted dates back to 1970). It's a bit weird, but it does break up the cost of building a metro line into chunks as it can just start as building a tunnel that serves as part of a tram line, then making that tunnel gradually longer to make the trams more efficient, and finally biting the bullet by building some more tunnel and converting the whole thing to metro. Problems happen when you build a heavily tunnelled tram system without conversion to metro in mind, because you might then make it much more expensive than it could be to convert to a more high-capacity system.
It could be a good approach, though there is additional cost to making conversions of course!
@@RMTransit It’s about cash flow and financial modelling. Often it is better to get a project up and running early even if it may require conversion later. Roads are similar where it would be irresponsible to build a 6 lane motorway when a 4 land arterial road will suffice for the next 30 years. The money you defer can then be used on other projects. Perfection up front is not something most cities can afford.
The upgrade of the north-south axis tunnel under Brussels to a new metro line isn't the only time a premetro/U-stadtbahn system has been upgraded to a proper metro. It has also happened in some Western German cities such as Stuttgart and Koln. And it happened to the very first dedicated stadtbahn; that of Vienna Austria.
@@glaframb As long as nobody mentions the other premetro system in Belgium (*cough* Charleroi) hahahaha
@@danieleyre8913 Also, the pré-métro concept was kind of played with before WW2 in Marseille, which used to have the largest tram network in France, and planned to dig strategic tunnels to funnel their trams underneath the Canebière (one was already built and was actually the reason Marseille did not remove *all* of their trams after the war, contrary to almost all other French cities). Nowadays, digging a metro tunnel in Marseille is almost inconceivable due to the archeological interest of the 2600-year old city: the last metro extension took almost ten years to be built in part because of archeological findings, and it was merely a 500-meter aerial line.
I think that Portland, Oregon's light rail system could benefit from one of those "strategic" tunnels. Remove the Steel Bridge bottleneck, avoid the tiny blocks of downtown, and help facilitate faster crosstown trips
They are actually studying a downtown right now.
It makes total sense it slows down so bad
I do think that light rail does have a place in tunnels when it comes to densely built downtowns. I think that the San Francisco MUNI metro is a great example of what I am talking about. It has a subway running the length of Market street and the twin peaks tunnel. From this line 5 lines branch out. This means in the downtown where ridership is high they have 5 lines sharing the tracks to cope with the higher demand. Running these lines on the surface would heavily slow everything down and isn’t very efficient. Another good project in my opinion is the regional connector. If it was a surface line it’s capacity would be restricted by either rules about signal priority or crossing gates which would mean less strains to Long Beach and Santa Monica
Both good points. I'm not familiar with the lines or locations you mentioned, but my impression is that a regional connector might not be a good candidate for a tunnel. The length of the tunnel and the lower density traffic make the interference less problematic, I would think. An example completely opposite to the video's point, is Buffalo New York's "tram". It's a bit of a regional connector to link the university campus (old suburbs) to downtown via tunnel. It surfaces downtown, however and serves as a light rail (if I have the terms correct). It seems to work, but it would be cool to get RMTransit's opinion.
Thanks for the video discussing Auckland! - I'm an architecture student living here and am pretty disheartened by the proposals being made. Auckland's public transport (or lack thereof) is fascinating and unfortunately the city invested heavily in Highways in the 60s and 70s. Today the city is strangling itself with congestion and desperately needs investment in rapid transit (and much more than just an airport link line) as well as a secondary harbour crossing. However, it has taken almost 7 years for decision makers to reach this "proposal" stage and now the endorsed mode is really a worst of both worlds. The huge estimated cost of the project is likely to mean resistance politically, economically and from the public.
In my opinion, a surface level tram-train mode from the CBD to Mangere serving the city centre and surrounding suburbs is the most logical, affordable and attractive option. Running down the key arterial of Dominion Road on which buses are already reaching a critical concentration. The road is lined with shops and intersects some major population centres including growth areas at the end of this line. There is enough room to run tracks down the centre of the street and would be little need to buy up private land (although this would mean less space for cars and no on street parking 😱). This mode has more than enough capacity to serve predicted ridership in the next 50 years, and would mean redeveloped streetscapes for Dominion Road - It would really change the character of this important cross isthmus route. Such an elegant application that would be an affordable and fairly quick project to construct which would gather support for expanding light rail to more lines in the City. Also to mention - a BRT linking the airport to heavy rail at Puhinui is planned.
Why have NZTA and central govt not chosen something resembling this? Why do they want to spend the whole budget on tunnels and leave our streets clogged with cars?
Questions need to be asked.
Much of the Oslo metro started out as tram lines, partially underground, before they were converted as the needs of the city grew. So long as you plan a bit ahead I don't see the issue in doing it underground. There's plenty of cities that now have such extensive underground tram networks that it really wouldn't require that much to give them fully fledged metros. It's a lot easier to pitch that conversion down the line than building a whole metro system from scratch.
Ah yes, forward planning. A rare resource where many governments are concerned 😦
I think this is a perspective that is missed in this video. Of course transit lovers know that metros are the most efficient and the most desirable, but that doesn't mean they are politically feasible.
Previously RM transit has said that incremental upgrades are the best (completing the next cheapest project with the highest impact)... building tunnels in sections is one way to do this.
@@SamruaiKiwi When tunneling under water, you cannot do it in sections.
@Zaydan Naufal Singapore's governance is abit like more stereotypical Asian parenting I think, where it's sometimes seen as rude/ungrateful to question the gov't because of their past achievements e.g. managing to lead the country to develop so fast in the 2nd 1/2 of the 20th century. Our politicians are braver to speak politically incorrect & unpopular things because our electorate is less likely to vote them out for that e.g. MP Ellen Lee called her voters 'selfish' in 2012 for being NIMBYs by opposing an old-folks home built near their houses, our PM also saying that immigrants will "spur us to work harder" & that they didn't ask for work-life balance (unlike some of us). When there was criticism over the country flooding a few years back (though no deaths thankfully) e.g. blaming on overdevelopment, I remember that our PM said that the Japanese however had complained less after the Great _Tohoku_ Earthquake.
When it comes to transport planning we can be a bit dichotomical; a neighbourhood could be served by only buses for 30-40yrs since the 1st houses there were built before the gov't thinks there'll be enough demand to build a train station there, because we eschew "in the middle" solutions e.g. trams as the gov't doesn't like overhead wires. Sometimes we save a lot of money but at other times we spend quite a lot. e.g. as late as 2017 we were buying buses that don't tell you where your next stop is, though on the other hand we also spend S$30b on 2 fully-underground train lines (Circle & Downtown) that have tunnels over 3m wide but platforms only 70m/3 cars long, which doesn't sound so cost-effective to me
Seattle's light rail really confuses me. The vast majority is already grade separated, either through tunnels or elevated. There's really only one section that's at grade around the Columbia City area, as well as a bit of awkwardness when first entering the downtown tunnel from the south (remember it was originally built as a bus tunnel so the light rail is at grade for a bit when it goes into it). But with just a little more work the whole system could have been grade separated from the start...
Adding to that, they are actually building a couple of more grade crossings as part of the East Link in Bellevue (the 2 line) which are set to open next year.
The idea is that the foundational stretch between the airport and downtown would have been too expensive, without the compromise through Columbia City on grade separation. I think current headways already allow for upcoming East Link service, which will interline through downtown and subsequent north grade separations, making better use of those quality tunnels and viaducts
One thing I kind of like from Seattle system is the shared bus and LRT tunnel, it looks like it makes transfer between the two much easier and it reminds me of Ottawa’s original plan for it’s LRT.
It was done that way to get people to vote for it. Link was not expected to get nearly as many riders as it does so they built it cheaper to satisfy voters
@@CyanideCarrot that is the main issue that I bet all the systems he talked about share, they are multiple different projects that would be better served with separate solutions but he leaves out they are frankenstiens because they have to be in order to get the political will/capital necessary to make them happen at all. The option isn't really between the different options of transit but between them each and the powerful incumbent of doing nothing.
With Auckland, the alternative is roads. The opposition party only supports roads and even Labour is mostly road leaning.
It's not if we speak up we can get a better mass transit but, if we don't support this hard enough it'll be scrapped and a bigger road built. NZ is not a mass transit friendly country, cities are still pulling up rails and scrapping bus lines
I agree we have a very black and white political system in NZ especially when it comes to transport, national did kick start the CRL but they had to be dragged kicking and screaming while delaying the project by years and in that time many roading projects appeared from nowhere.
That's not true at all.
Both the main parties in NZ are lukewarm towards rail and pro-roading. It was under Labour between 1999-2008 that most of the motorways in NZ from the last 20 years were either built or begun or planned-out. The only thing the Nat's have actually done are the waterview tunnel and that stupid Transmission gully motorway north of Wellington, and the rest was just talk like the westlink. Even today: Labour are pushing for a road link through the Hutt valley that will ruin everything.
And it was under National that the Auckland network was electrified and the CRL under Auckland was begun.
There _are_ other alternatives in Auckland to either light rail/light metro or just more roads. Aside from the mainline suburban rail network that could still be improved & expanded; there are also busways. the Northern Busway has been around for over 15 years and has been an enormous success. The Eastern Busway has been begun and the North-Western Busway is going to be begun within 5 years.
As a local, can you tell me why none of the proposed harbour tunnels go to Devonport? Is that area NIMBY central?
@@danieleyre8913 Simeon (the national party transport guy) literally stated in a recent opinion piece that National's policy would be to cancel ALR, and spend that on motorways. Labour are going along with existing NZTA roading plans somewhat begrudgingly while cancelling the worst ones, National are trying to expand the project list to include the worst ones (east west link, mc-sprawl-land mill road) and spend any money that transit would have happened into on motorways.
@@jackgibbons6013 If you _really_ take the public statements of politicians at their word; you must have born yesterday levels of naive. Simeon Brown much more likely made that announcement as a way to put his name out there and as an attempt to score cheap points and maybe drum some support. It in no way means that he would make good on that statement if given the chance. He was probably advised to make it by his PR advisors or that dreadful Chris Bishop and he probably doesn't really know the transport portfolio at this stage.
There's nothing "begrudging" about Labour's enthusiasm for roads. It's labour pushing rubbish like the proposed roads in wellington and Porirua's Labour mayor Jenny Brash was a big pusher for transmission gully. the Clark government of 1999-2008 were big pushers of motorway and other roading projects across NZ especially in Auckland and especially when Mark Goshe and Paul Swain held the portfolio's. It wasn't until Annette King became minister of transport that that government started caring about railways.
Brown's statement is empty anyway because Auckland light rail is very unlikely to ever be funded let alone happen. It's now the third time it's been changed to something that's simply too expensive to be funded. Outside of Goff and the Auckland council: Labour do NOT want to build it. Phil Twyford made the empty promise to build it in 2017 because it looked like Labour would lose the election and they were desperate for any support. Now they're making it too grandiose to build.
Regardless of who wins the next election; the next big infrastructure project for Auckland will very probably be the second harbour crossing and its early stages might even be begun before the CRL is finished. It will probably be two large bore tunnels under the harbour and the nippon clip-on's will come off of the harbour bridge. And the irony is: It will have a provision for light rail, which will be what the Northern busway is upgraded-to before 2040. And after that; there will be a mainline connection built to the airport. Both Labour and National will pursue these projects if they win the election regardless of whatever rhetoric they spew and the light rail down Dominion road will slowly be forgotten about.
Btw, I’d be really curious if you ever did a deep dive into the mass transit system in Bolivia’s capital. I only found out recently about their cable car alternative to mass transit and I’m blown away at how STRANGE the whole thing is, but it seems to be working and they’re still building more lines and stations and it all looks like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else!
I think it was the most adequate solution given the drastic terrain contrast of La Paz and El Alto. It would have been too difficult to build a Metro
I will for sure at some point! It’s very interesting, I discussed cable transport in my previous gondola video though :)
Is Sucre or La Paz the capital of Bolivia you're referring to? Does this transit system have a name? Maybe I can find videos right here on TH-cam in the meantime. 😛
@@samuelitooooo it’s known as “Teleférico La Paz-El Alto”, as it links these two cities in a big metropolitan area. As of 2022 it has 10 lines of cable cars with over 30 stations. I’ve seen some videos on here about the system operating and people riding it, but not a documentary style, comprehensive one on the project, history, and I think it’s super interesting!
@@AlbertGMag Wow! Cool, thank you 😁
As an Aucklander, it is so frustrating seeing the waste and lack of foresight on the part of the government to make the city have effective public transport. They can't even operate the current regional rail system properly at the moment. They've had so much deferred maintenance that they just decided to shut down lines for weeks at a time. Over the holidays this year you couldn't even take trains out of the main station for a couple of weeks! It's insane. It shows how little the government cares about transit riders that they think they can just shut down the lines, replace them with slower, less reliable rail buses and call it a day.
It seems to be a problem in Anglophone countries in general where the concerns of anti-transit politicians and government officials who want to build transit for the appearances ("watch me cut this ribbon!") result in these hybrid systems that don't accomplish much of anything.
Oh absolutely, I heard about these shutdowns from friends in Auckland - bad bad bad
To be fair the majority of the work being undertaken during the recent Auckland Block of line was related to expansion projects such as the CRL tie in at Mt Eden, the Wiri to Quay Park triple tracking and the Pukekohe electrification extension. Much better to do this work in a concentrated period when many people are on holidays than to drag the work out over many weekends during the year
Auckland’s public transport is light years ahead of where it was 15 years ago. And that’s mainly due to the government.
Most of the problems they’re having now are due to the Auckland council. It’s the Auckland council (and the consultancy they hire: MR Cagney) who insist on not running a staggered timetable and instead having all the trains stop at all the stops, which is not only unattractive to users near periphery stations but also clogs up the rial corridor.
That’s a big reason why the regional rail service is a loser; they can’t get further into the network than Papakura. But to tell you the truth; they’re chasing the wrong market. With the Waikato expressway; rail cannot compete with driving from Hamilton time-wise, so there’s just not much demand for services from Hamilton to Auckland. There’s however a much bigger demand in the northern Waikato, between Pukekohe and Mercer, and that’s where they should begin their service from instead of Hamilton.
As for light rail: I’ve said all along that it’s never happening and it’s not a great idea to run it to the airport after it’s pottered down Dominion road anyway. It’s only ever been something pushed by the Auckland council and MR Cagney, just drop it and move on. Auckland will probably get a light rail when they upgrade the Northern busway.
@@danieleyre8913
Light Rail: City to Onehunga,
Heavy Rail: Onehunga Line extension to Airport
or Puhinui Branch Spur to Airport
@@deathtoluke Why would you put the light rail to Onehunga? The mainline already goes there. If they really want light rail down dominion Rd and beyond: Surely Mt Roskill which has no current rail would be the logical choice?
Why do all of these light rail lines have massive gadgetbahn energy despite using some of the most straightforward and widely available technology possible
They could have been something greater!
Probably because running that style of con is the only way to get half the necessary politicians to sign off on it in the first place.
What is gadgetbahn?
SF Muni has run a hybrid metro service since the 1980's, which is a combination of the legacy streetcar system having survived, plus opportunities presented by the construction of BART. The decision to go hybrid was relatively sensible, albeit not without challenges. It's a fairly popular system, but has had a few instances of transit meltdowns, usually around tunnel entrances, due to the complexities introduced by train control switching between ground level and underground operation, plus the routing of all lines through the Market Street tunnel ensuring that it would be the bottleneck. They have learned to turn the underground transition into a timed transfer when doing maintenance and upgrades.
Embarcadero Station use to be the terminus of all five lines (J, K, L, M, N) from 1980 to 1998. It was a Last-In-First-Out station and during meltdowns, LRVs in the preceding three stations would crawl along at 5 MPH or just come to a standstill. In 1998, the N Judah was extended from Embarcadero Station to the planned site of the new Pacific Bell Park and Caltrain Depot would alleviated that bottle neck.
I live in Auckland and the whole project has been political from day one. That is always a recipe for bad decisions. Since announcement of this plan it is already very controversial, and some fear that it has been carefully crafted to panic people into cancelling the project altogether. It is impossible to down scope the project or separate it into a rolling program because that would be another failure for a government that has had too many to be popular and the route has been chosen with political interests in mind so it cannot go the full metro type.
I am glad you mentioned the possibility of railway connections to the airport from existing network because it is so obvious that even a clown like me was able to see it as a possibility. Either by extending the Onehunga line through or by making a link from Manakau or Homai.
I am not sure if the current plan is better than having nothing at all.
There is for and against cases for light from City to Mangere and heavy rail extension from Puihnui to the Airport.
Extending the Onehunga Line to the airport would end up actually being very costly both financially and in terms of overall capacity of the rail network. The Onehunga line is only single track and would therefore require significant property acquisition to double track it and the new line would end up clogging the main trunk into Britomart even further which is already at capacity during peak times and has its own logistical problems. I disagree with the tunnelled option though. I think they should’ve kept it fully at surface for the whole route or only tunnelled through the cbd at the most.
@@tubsward realistically the only option for heavy rail would be to bring it East to say Puhinui, and then use the main line into the city. The other advantage of this is that it would allow for theoretical future rail connections from Hamilton to the Airport etc too. As you say, the Onehunga line would require expensive double-tracking.
@@grrrgrrr304 Going airport to Puhinui is even worse. It looks easy on a map, but the trouble is that the stretch of rail just north of Puhinui is already at capacity, trying to handle Southern Line, Eastern Line, AND the heavy freight traffic around Southdown. They're already planning to triple-track it. If we wanted to send an Airport Line through there too, we'd have to pay for quadruple- or quintuple-tracking, or else reduce the frequency of the other lines to redirect trains to the airport. Needless to say, slashing frequency to huge swathes of the city just to add one station is a bad plan.
Besides, at the end of the day... Mangere needs rapid transit. That's the appeal of the Onehunga-to-Airport proposal. If we built Puhinui-to-Airport, we'd probably end up needing to build Onehunga light rail anyway, to support that region.
(That's not to say Airport to Puhinui is completely off the cards -- just that it's better suited to a different mode. It'll be covered by the A2B busway that's currently being developed, with a possible upgrade to light rail eventually if there's demand.)
My feeling is the tunnelled light rail is proposed to cancel, consider next year is the election year.
The major issue of extending the heavy rail is infrastructure ownership. Kiwirail owns the track infrastructure and at the same time it is a freight operator. Therefore, rail infrastructure is more optimized for freight services than commuter trains (mode of maintenance, signal headway, etc), thus we saw so many track failures and close down in the past few years. Light rail probably can avoid the issue by building a separate set of infrastructure, but eventually this problem need to be dealt with when Auckland needs to improve its mainline rail service.
Cost and utility wise, street running light rail is a fantastic way to build out an urban semi rapid transit network. Tunneling would improve capacity, but it shouldnt be built from the start. The stadtbahn approach for upgrading light rail is best. This trend for over engineering light rail is worrisome, it may politically hinder future useful light rail projects due to ballooning costs.
Good video
It might be a bit jaded to consider, but in some areas you might actually find the kind of politicos who would push a project into becoming a dysfunctional Frankenstein's monster specifically to make costs balloon, especially if the big makeups will happen under someone else's administration, to "prove" that this kind of thing can't work.
Whilst I generally agree with you when it comes to building new systems, it's a way of improving transit whilst keeping an existing tram system. So you can just take a normal tram system, add a tunnel for some lines in the most congested areas, extend lines outwards on dedicated tracks, and thus massively improve the service without needing to build an all new system.
I also think that this might be a sensible option for smaller cities that can't afford or don't need a full scale metro system.
You might also be underestimating the massive benefits of having just a single unified system that shares one standard. You'll only need one maintenance facility for one type of train, one set of operating procedures, one kind of staff training and one pool of spare parts/vehicles. Even though sticking to one system might not be ideal it's often much cheaper than building something separate and incompatible.
Haha, I do mention this to an extent and I think my recent videos on “Should you have one metro train” and on Karlsruhe cover my thoughts well! It CAN be a good option, but I don’t know that it usually is
@@afcgeo882 I find the opinion in the video to be both "educated" and open to the possibility of new information. Comments here from Aucklanders seem to generally support those opinions.
Great to video, to add a bit of context/info: Auckland rocks are notoriously hard to bore through, or so we were told endlessly in the tunnels we had bored through recently so the tunnel project is no easy job. The only silver lining on the cost part is that much of the machinery and expertise from the CRLcan be repurposed for the tunnel section. The other thing is that light rail was a promise by the current Labour government, which took them 1 and a half term to green light (as if governments aren't accustomed to broken promises).
It also serves to replace Dominion Road; where the road is so overused that double decker buses at less 10 min per bus is not sufficient for rush hour. There is also significant plans to intensify the housing around the area, which would mean higher demand. The original light rail proposal that was scrapped before new legislation that allowed for intensification of residential zoning, had the rail at almost capacity at launch. The more and more I listen in the video, the more perplexed at how heavy rail wasn't considered if they had chosen the tunnel option. To me, it seems that the government and the public/media in general had a tunnel vision for light rail when this area they are going through is probably the most densely populated suburb of the city.
One thing that has to be mentioned though is that the light rail is probably better in serving the Mangere region; an underprivileged suburb of Auckland and has very poor connection to the wider transport network. A heavy rail might struggle to reach into the heart of Mangere and Mangere East and then pivot back to the airport. Point on the airport, the eastern portion is already well served by direct buses that directly leaves from one of the train station on the Southern line, and there are future proposals to extend bus routes from East Auckland all the way down, I always thought that the airport rail option is a low priority for Auckland.
I think the conclusion is quite correct in that each of needs require a different solution, and trying to jam everything under the Light Rail umbrella just don't make sense.
Well if you want high capacity buses use articulated not double decker. Articulated allow more frequency!
Probably might be cheapest & most optimal for different stretches uses different forms of transport e.g. heavy vs light rail, grade-separated vs at grade, but this might require passengers to make more transfers too
I'm really glad you talked about Auckland's new line, as a Kiwi viewer 😊 I assume you read blog posts from Greater Auckland when writing this, but if not you absolutely have to check them out! I agree with everything you said, and have some additions. Currently, all rail in New Zealand is narrow gauge so the idea that freight trains would share tracks with whatever kind of tunnel is built across the harbour is definitely good. This country has a terrible obsession with business cases and they often tend to make roads seem cheap and anything rail seem incredibly expensive - basically, the government transport agency has been anti rail for several decades now and it is extremely difficult to shake them out of it. That means that the proposed line is supposed to cost $14b (according to the flawed business case) which will obviously go even higher with our terribly inefficient infrastructure construction, whereas a fully street level system would be only about $9b (apparently). A street level system would also inveitably include more town centre renewals instead of tunneling under those and then not having the funds to beautify those town centres. Auckland is also severely behind on its bike network, so spending an unnecessary extra $5b on tunneling takes away money that could create a world class cycle network. The heavy rail link to the airport is not as simple as it seems from assessing via a map, but if we're going to invest this much money it's reasonable to include it. Finally, I hope you explore Wellington's rail network one day - sure, it's not a big city or even region, but it has a lot of interesting things going on that I think you'd be really interested in, particularly the Johnsonville line using heavy rail and the city's proposed light rail line. Feel free to hit me up for info on that if you do it, I'm a train driver on that network 😊
Ah, was hoping someone else would bring up Greater Auckland. They've done quite a bit of good work and made Auckland a better place to live.
I do wonder what people would make of wellington's transport networks - or they would just throw up their hands in horror at the terrain and constraints. Johnsonville like is a fun one and makes no sense until you look into it's history.
@@kalgart The Johnsonville line doesn't make much sense even if you take it as it is now. Because the route is so steep and wiggly the trains have to go painfully slowly and it's single tracked so the rest of the line is slowed too. It's usually twice as fast to catch the bus. It is beautiful though.
Tyne and Wear Metro is a wonderful light rail system that uses tunnels in Newcastle and Gateshead's cores briefly in Sunderland and just out in the open for the suburbs served. Airport, ferry, bus exchange, large towns cities all on one.
There is also a big project to finally dual track the 3 sections without ready for 6 and hour frequency on the individual lines. And new Stadler trains incoming.
I still wonder if Nicola Roberts referred to the Tyne&Wear metro in the song "On the metro". It is the only metro system in the UK that is commonly known as such, the others being tram, tramlink, subway, DLR or underground.
@@offichannelnurnberg5894 I am not sure, although it will always make me smile hearing "get off the meh’ro now!" Listening to Sam Fender. Astounding cultural impact.
I’d call it a light metro video coming eventually!
@@RMTransit thank you, I used to always insist on calling it a metro then Gareth Dennis said Light Rail and I obeyed.
@@RMTransit what do you think of light rail / light metro rolling stock seen in Monterrey and Guadalajara? I feel they'd be a great upgrade for door-count in american light rail
To be fair to Seattle's system, the system when complete will be mostly at or above grade. The underground portion is under heavily populated areas like downtown, much of which is in pre-existing tunnels.
Seattle's Link Light Rail goes through tunnel in downtown, on street in Columbia City and Rainier Beach, and elevated section beyond Rainier Beach. The reason they do this is to minimize the incline climb and decent angle as much as possible as the trains that they use cannot climb or decent steep incline.. Downtown Seattle is on high elevation and Tukwila and Seatac area are on lower elevation relative to the elevation of the SoundTransit depot in SODO. The only station exception is Northgate station which is an elevated station despite being on very high elevation, making the train leaving northbound from Roosevelt station to climb steep incline getting out of the tunnel.
Agree with this. Certainly if you're building an expensive tunnel or elevated alignment for the vast majority of a route, don't put coparatively small low floor trams (or Teslas!), in it. Minimetro vehicles with high floors could have similar curve and gradient negotiation abilities (at cost of speed where exploited clearly) so the tunnel can weave around underground obstacles to a similar degree where neccessary. Once built, an automated system would have lower ops costs too.
Yes! Teslas are this made WAY worse
I’m not familiar with if Seattle’s light rail is considered small? Most run in 4 train sets only
If you split railway lines between underground & above ground sections you could also make the underground section driverless using cheaper/less complicated signalling systems since it won't have to worry about things like rain changing the trains' acceleration or about items falling onto tracks
@@thedak808 Yes, they mostly are four car trains. It makes them as long as a subway train. And given the amount of ridership it has (even on weekends), four-car trains are needed!
And the part north of downtown is pretty much built like a subway/metro system with full grade separation either with tunnels or elevated lines, all the way up to Lynnwood, which will be the northern terminus in 2024. The section south of downtown to the airport has lots of at-grade sections, though. That's the only part that is more like your typical American light rail.
@@compdude100 definitely, the NY subway trains just seem so massive, also I’ve never been on an actual heavy metro, just the Link which seems sizable ish. and yeah peak crowds push it to capacity regardless.
imagine me dragging a suitcase, guitar, backpack from the airport during rush hour :)
6:50 San Diego's trolley (lightrail-type) is similar. There is exactly one tunnel, and it exists for a very good reason - it brings the trolley to a very high-traffic location that happens to be in a relatively mountainous area. Whenever there isn't a literal mountain in the way, SDMTS prefers at-grade or elevated tracks depending on local density, with the new blue line extension being almost entirely elevated.
It could really use an airport link, however.
And that one location is to service SDSU.
I really love how Karlsruhe got mentioned again, it's quite cool to see my city getting a bit of recognition after being a construction site for over a decade. I got a bit confused by the title, remembering you making a quite positive video about our system just a few weeks ago. But after realizing you were talking Auckland with 1.4mio inhabitants, I very much agree. These kind of systems are great for smaller cities and many German cities fall into that category. But building this kind of system e.g. in Munich or Hamburg, especially from the ground up, just wouldn't make sense. For good reason Munich is currently building their second S-Bahn tunnel and not a light rail.
In general I'm a big fan of these tram train hybrid systems, but they do have their limits in terms of when they make sense. And connecting huge metropolitain areas, just isn't what they are meant to do. One thing that wasn't really a topic in the Karlsruhe video, but I think needs to be meantioned in this context. We do have other kinds of rail as well. Most cities on our network do also have heavy rail connections. Those are a lot faster and have much higher capacity. Going from Karlsruhe-Durlach to Pforzheim by tram is possible, but takes ~1h, while the IRE (Interregional Express), which can be used on the same ticket, only needs 20min. The point of the tram is connecting the smaller towns along the way. In the same way, you can go from Karlsruhe to Baden-Baden by tram, but in theory you could even take the ICE (german highspeed train). Nobody built a long distance tram track on these routes and very few use these trams for the entire distance.
In that sense, if you would want to actually copy our system, building an airport express would mean building heavy rail infrastructure, having an actual express service train and then having smaller stations along the way only serviced by tram/ subway. I recently went to Stockholm and that's pretty much what they did. There is either the 45min subway or the 15min Arlanda Express going to Stockholm Central. Both most likely share the same rail, but serve different purposes.
Our tunnel is a cool upgrade to the system, but that's all it is. We already had an established, functioning system, so improving it made sense. But if you can/ have to start up from the ground anyways and are digging a lot of tunnels, it's probably not the kind of system you should build.
As someone who has lived in Seattle his whole life, I remember when the transit tunnel opened. Originally it was intended for buses and light rail to share the tunnel. The buses were hybrid, having both retractable overhead trolley wires and Diesel engines so they could operate in the tunnel without giving everyone CO poisoning. They even laid tracks in the tunnel for a future light rail network. By the time that light rail began construction, approximately 15 years later, the technology had changed and the scope had increased, so the existing tracks had to be ripped up and replaced. I think originally the intent was to do more like the MUNI Metro in San Francisco, with 1-2 car tram trains. What we ended up getting was regional light rail. But by then the tunnel was already built. So to me it’s more a matter of “using what you have” than some total lack of vision or other nincompoopery that led to a white elephant.
Amen!! Sick of this guy complaining about other cities public transportation without understanding WHY it is.
I don't see why you couldn't run a in the Seattle Tunnel. Maybe you couldn't run busses alongside it, but the tunnels wouldn't be the issue (Light Rail tunnels are typically larger than metro tunnels).
The Link repurposes a lot of existing tunnel and uses tunnels to pass under the downtown area without disrupting the surface streets, while still being mostly at grade or elevated. It also tunnels under hills rather than going around them or over them
That existing tunnel was built for conversion If I’m not wrong and just generally uses a ton
@@RMTransit They had to rebuild the entire tunnel to accommodate the trains.
Yeah, well it might as well be a subway north of downtown. It even has four-car trains, which makes it as long as subway trains.
@@compdude100 Looking at my board today, I am shocked to see that we have ALL 4 car trains in service today. Usually at least one or two are 3 car.
Our 4 car trains are the same length as Chicago's platforms.
And tunnels (especially deep tunnels) can mean that it takes longer for passengers to get to/from the platform. The point about having capacity when doing tunnels is interesting. The downtown tunnel in Seattle was initially used by buses, so the Link light rail is definitely an upgrade
I get what you said about Seattle. I'm pretty sure their reason for choosing Light Rail was because the tunnel was already built for buses and for a long time it operated in mixed traffic. Now, they're trying to effectively make a BART using light rail trains. Not only that, there seems to be no improvements with the Sounder when it should at the absolute least run all day and run through.
Just annoying because Seattle has a great bus system and a ton of potential for high quality rail, but they seem to be making all of the wrong decisions (LRT where Metro would be good, crappy BRT where LRT would be good, crappy commuter rail where electrified regional rail would be good, and completely useless streetcar).
Couldnt have said it better myself. I have no idea why they built that rinky dinky LightRail that goes so slow averaging 25 mph when they could have made normal 3 rail subway metro that goes fasted 45-50 mph. And the fact that they built NEW track for the Bellevue East Link extension clearly shows they haven’t learned a thing from their stupidity
You should definitely make a video about the light rail Stadtbahnen of the Ruhr Area in Germany. They are extremely practical and comfortable in my opinion, especially for all the medium-sized cities they serve, such as Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Oberhausen, Duisburg, Mülheim and Herne. The only downsides they have is their missing interconnectivity and the fact that they only run until midnight.
It seems like an insignificant detail at first but it isn't: Airport passengers have lots of luggage. A train can easily accommodate that (overhead/ special racks), a Tram can't.
Portland MAX has entered the chat
Never heared such a nonsense. A tram is most often prepared for wheelchairs, strollers, bicycles much better. And on every passenger seat you can put a suitcase if you like. It's never occupied up to the last seat.
@@holger_p try going to downtown Portland from the airport via max with a full complement of luggage. Your statement is inaccurat.
@@maxwellwagoner-watts4747 This doesn't really share your knowledge.
Are the cars so packed with people ?
Is there only one tram per hour ?
How frequent do they go ? If they go every 10minutes, they should easily carry 100 people. So from 6 flights a 200 people about half of the passangers.
People on airplanes often just do daytrips with hand lagguage, not everybody is coming with luggage for 3 weeks.
Imagine people doing their weekly grocery shopping with a tram. They do have "luggage" and not properly stored in suitcases, just in thin plastic bags.
Curious. The primary thing I use the Seattle Link for is going to the airport. The wheelchair seats are usually folded up but there isn't a wheelchair user there, which leaves more space than I need for luggage, right next to my seat.
We have this in Pittsburgh, and it is nice in how it improves light rail service having parts in tunnels. It would be nice to have a metro, but population wise, our city really can't sustain it, and I highly doubt because of geography that our metro area will ever reach more than 3 million people. and you probably need about 5 million or more people in your metro area to warrant a metro. In Japan the only metro areas similar in size to Pittsburgh that have metro systems are Sapporo and Sendai. Hiroshima, and Shizuoka-Hamamatsu metro areas use light rail, heavy rail, and busses instead of metros.
1.5m people should be enough for a metro
@@chickenpommes19 How can the city afford that? Kyoto a city of 1.4 million is struggling to afford anything due to the decline in tourism, and the overbuilt metro lines for the city. How is Germany doing it? the mob, is it a front for something?
Prague population: 1,3 million people
3 heavy metro lines and 142 km of tram lines
Budapest population: 1,7 million people
3 heavy metro lines and one historic/light metro line and 174 km of tram lines
I don't know but 3 million people sound like a lot 🤷🏻♂️
I think you’ve got to think about the size, population spread, density, walkability etc of a city. Pittsburgh is car dependant, sprawling, etc whilst Prague is dominated by dense, walkable neighbourhoods where the rate of car ownership is much much lower… to me that’s as big a thing as the city’s overall population
It's interesting. That network is actually what remains of an old streetcar network. It feels similar to Boston or San Francisco
Reece, in your consideration of Seattle's light rail, I think you missed the reason why Seattle's light rail tunnels exist outside of the urban core(s): Terrain
In the locations where there are tunnels, the terrain above them is not conducive at all to rail.
For example, between the Convention Center and Capital Hill stations, the surface elevation climbs 200 vertical feet, but the tracks remain close to level grade. I'm not sure if you know, but Convention Center Station was a surface station at its opening and is only under a building now with the convention center expanding over it.
The tunnel to the south from Convention Center is in place to transit the dense urban core, (a purpose you're OK with) and the tunnel to the north is to avoid circuitous routing to increase rail elevation unnecessarily. By the time this tunnel gets to the University of Washington station, its elevation is actually lower than at Convention Center, and very near the surface again. From there, the tracks don't dive further underground, the terrain above climbs again.
To the south of downtown there is another tunnel, just past the maintenance yard, where the tracks tunnel through a 300' tall ridge. The Beacon Hill station is the deepest on the line and there are residential neighborhoods on top and to the east. The only way to avoid tunneling through that ridge and still provide service to the King St. Amtrak/Commuter Rail station would have been to thread through (likely impossible) or over the I-90/I5 interchange. Pretty sure that over would be 'easier', but certainly not inexpensive.
Throughout the system, both constructed or planned, the tunnels always serve one of those two purposes: Transit a dense urban core (Seattle and Bellevue downtowns) or to transit a ridge. (Capitol Hill, Beacon Hill, UW/Roosevelt.
Yes you're absolutely correct, central Seattle and Seattle in general has tricky terrain but I think the case I am making is that Seattle went 99% of the way to having a subway and should have just fixed the MLK section and south of the transit tunnel - it would be a small cost for a really substantail benefit. My estimation is probably on the order of 1.5x the capacity if not more
Long time viewer, first time commenter and someone who is quite involved with public transport in Auckland. For the purposes of full disclosure, I am not in favour of the New Zealand government's proposal and instead have views similar to that of RMTransit (a surface light rail route along city streets and an extension of the existing suburban rail network to the Airport). There are quite a few things that overseas commenters might not realise.
Firstly, there is a high degree of politics involved here. The mayor of Auckland represented the Mount Roskill area (which the light rail route would go through) in the New Zealand Parliament for over thirty years. The current Minister of Transport, who is in some respects the protégé of the mayor of Auckland, currently represents the Mount Roskill area. They have both been advocates of light rail along Dominion Road for many years and so this has an influence. Then there is the fact one of the strongest advocates for extending the suburban rail network is not viewed favourably in some circles - personal attacks get thrown about a lot and I suspect this has soured the view of some politicians to the extension of the suburban rail network.
Secondly, it looks increasingly likely that this project is tied in with some major urban renewal projects, particularly in Wesley (one suburb over from Mount Roskill) and Mangere. It would be worth looking up the Kainga Ora website to view their materials on these developments.
Thirdly, light rail was originally sold as being a more cost effective option than extending the suburban rail network. Of course, now the NZ$14 billion P50 cost significantly outweighs the estimated NZ$1.5 billion cost of extending the suburban rail network. Arguably this might have been an attempt to get light rail on the agenda as at the time there were genuine fears that Auckland's bus network would become extremely congested - fears that appear unfounded given that the number of buses in the Auckland CBD per hour is going to be less in 2028 than it was in 2016.
In defense of Seattle's light rail, it does have its reasons in the long term. Lake Washington is way too deep to actually run light rail under Lake Washington, yet they knew they would want to connect the east and west sides together. Trying to run light rail across a floating bridge was already hard and expensive enough, full metro would have likely multiplied those costs. Underground tunnels are expensive, as you say, but there's not a lot of areas where it's necessary to do tunneling, mostly around the dense downtown and U districr area where there's not really any room to elevate it. I do admit that it would have been better to elevate along Columbia City, but given the costs I don't exactly blame them.
Here in Karlsruhe, Germany, there was a 10+ year project bringing the all trams underground in the entire city center. This actually made a lot of sense, as they were cutting through the entire pedestrian zone. Now the city center is being redone as a pure pedestrian zone without any traffic (or roads, for that matter).
I know some people have already commented about this, but I think it would be really interesting to see a video on Brussels', Antwerp's and Charleroi's pre-metros.
Wow WAY more comments than I expected!
To keep it succinct, it almost always comes down to money.
Light Rail projects tend to be seen slightly more favorably in North America (and similar areas, e.g. NOT most of Europe and Asia) because they are seen as the "cheaper" alternative to heavy rail with much of the benefits. Yes, at a basic level, full metro systems should be the ones in the tunnels and other modalities should "stay in their lanes" to throw a pun in the mix, but that's not reality. I don't think light rail in tunnels is the devil it is made out to be, however, at least in areas with significant funding challenges. Everyone (including Reece) seems to be digging on Seattle for having light rail in tunnels but you have to consider the local circumstances, and often when you see it, it is more vestige than anything, and adapting to local conditions. In Seattle's case, they had miles/km's of existing bus tunnel to use, and at the time the political will did not allow for full metro, but having ridden the system multiple occasions, it does work well at the present time. If the growth continues, it would be great for the system to "evolve," but I think it's practical right now. Another benefit to having ANY kind of train underground is staying away from the elements--there can be severe weather outside, but in general the trains can run reliably underground. Also, any time you can avoid co-mingling with cars and people above ground is generally a good thing.
What I would like to see an in depth video on someday (forgive me if it's already done) is the proliferation of BRT, which as a defunct advocacy group, LightRailNow! used to say, most transit systems using that terminology generally do not fit the definition of rapid transit, and they advocated for the terminology "quality bus." There are some cities/systems where it can work well (e.g. Eugene, Curitaba, etc.) but most of the time it's just splashy bus service.
Boston's Green Line light rail network runs the main trunk line through downtown, including the original Tremont tunnel aka the oldest subway in the US, in a tunnel while 3 of the 4 branches comprising the majority of the system are street running. These parts of the line are always far slower.
The new Green Line Extension, a project 30 years in the making, has the ROW along an existing rail corridor yet the cost to realign the existing tracks and add the new ones plus a half dozen stations came out to half a billion per mile.
I don't really have a point, it's just insane.
As a local, I would just say I agree! Most Bostonians know that the Green Line in any form is the worst line. In general, it is *perhaps* sometimes passable when underground, but don't forget all the screeching at Boylston or when the cars just randomly stop in the tunnel for 20 minutes
A friend called this Streetcars Hiding In Tunnels. The acronym speaks for itself.
A lot of German cities are bankrupting themselves because the maintenance costs are so high for underground tunnels. Some cities (Dusseldorf, Cologne for example) are relatively big and can support the price, but there are cities with less than 300.000 inhabitants that built these systems because they are government subsidized (The government payed about 80%-90% of construction costs), that didn't think about maintenance and replacement costs in 40 years (which is now). A lot of companies are even considering shutting down their entire system and replacing it with busses, which would be sad... Cologne, Dusseldorf, Karlsruhe - all good examples, but there are a lot of cities (Dortmund, Duisburg, Bochum, Essen, Mülheim) which are really struggling financially and that might not have their tunnel for the net 40 years..
The tunnels aren't too expensive to maintain. Nobody wants to pay for them that's the issue. Of course one small city can not maintain such heavy infrastructure but Germany is a very rich country and regions that are less developed than Northrhine-Westphalia can support large metrosystems as well. And the Rhine/Rhur Area is large enough to justify a proper city-wide metrosystem, but in a car-centric country like Germany, politicians prefer to call everything "too expensive" and leave it at that.
It's mostly the Rhine-Ruhr-systems that are struggling. Ironically, the original intent over there was to operate the tunnels as part of a massive metro system which never happened. I doubt that operating the tunnels that way rather than with light rail trains would have softened the financial outcome. The whole project looked like it was just way too ambitious to begin with.
All the Stadtbahns are quite a mixed back and can't really be dumped into a single category. In the case of Cologne, I think Reece's argument still stands as the light rail system is quite expensive to maintain but doesn't provide sufficient enough capacity due to its short platform length. Still, there's Frankfurt with a Stadtbahn that is just as good as, say, the Berlin U-Bahn in terms of capacity, yet is much, much cheaper to operate.
It’s definitely true that you shouldn’t build something you can’t maintain, the good thing is North American cities have so little transit infra given their size that it’s not a huge issue here (when priorities are sensible)
Just as a small comparison, how do you think london maintains the tube infrastructure? Or all of it's other urban rails? When in comes to gdp (I know that's a rather rough comparison but it gives you an idea of how much money the area might have to spend on transit) London and the Rhine/Rhur Area are roughly equal. Which makes sense when you think about it. There is no justification whatsoever for that bs we've got going on here in West Germany when in comes to transit. There is enough money available to build Paris- or London-level transit. But instead the state-government lets the cities pay for everything on their own and the result of that is pure misery.
What I'm trying to say is, don't ever think that transit in Northrhine-Westphalia is too ambitious or too expensive. It's quite the opposite of that. And if we keep believing that it's impossible to even maintain a tunnel in Dortmund, then we are never going to move forward.
Think about corridors with 15-20k pphpd peak demand crossing very dense regions. Elevated systems can be difficult to implement. A BRT system would require an even bigger space to properly function (i.e., bypass lanes). Is an underground light metro the best option? I feel that it would still be over-dimensioned for the demand, that's the kind of corridor I use to think an underground light rail like Ottawa's would work. But in the end I think it comes to how much you can save with tunneling costs! Maybe with light rail you can use cut an cover, as the maximum slope ranges from 8% to 12%, while you would need a tunneling machine with heavier rail, whose slope is around 4%.
I am still learning something new as an old railroad buff. This show satisfies my curiosity about rail transportation planning that I have imagined.
In my opinion, most folk seldom give much thought to these things. It is good to see presentations like this. It is something our policy and decision-makers would benefit from. Clearly transit is an issue, and now with Covid and other such issues likely to be on the horizon, many other factors must surely go into such planning endeavors. It requires considerable thought and effort to consider all the many factors involved in this and other similar issues. In particular, how does this impact other means of transit including automobiles, bicycles, pedestrians, wheelchair, people with visual and auditory impairments, aged and other kinds of impaired folk and other concerns to create an accessible, fair and cost-effective system. Good job of introducing folks to this matter.
Disagree. Boston's green line is part tunnel under the high density part of the city, and part on-street tram through the old streetcar suburbs. Great way to get to the central part of the city.
Exactly, and the Green Line T is in fact the original subway in North America, proof of concept. Would be a royal pain getting around on the Green Line in downtown Boston city traffic. Having that part of it underground makes it much more efficient.
Funfact: Vienna has a Subwayline which has not a single grade crossing. It does have parts in tunnel but often an overground part. Due to preservation of more than a century old infrastructures they decided to make it the only subway line being served by Light Rails.
It is the U6. So if you ever want to see something else in Vienna Transit you might wanna look at it. Or the WLB that goes to the city of Baden which is pretty much a classic light rail
This video didn't work for me. Was it just 12 mins to give the opinion that tunnels should be given heavier use ?
As a Transit Creator myself. Your content is well made, entertaining and you make a lot of great points here! Keep up the good work!
Street cars or LRV in tunnels since 1897 in Boston Massachusetts, means in use for 125 years.
Dallas is moving a few light rail stations downtown underground. It makes sense though, since there's a congestion problem on the downtown main line..
Yeah, it’s strategic! So not bad
The Brussels example might be the best opposite case to this - they’re converting their ‘premetro’ tram tunnels to high floor metro when the ridership warrants it. The latest one to be converted is Line 3, currently under construction.
Yeah but that means they are just doing light rail as a holdover to better utilizing the tunnels in the future!
@@RMTransit how efficient is that, considering that at one point, when your demand is actually good, you will have to shut down your system (at least partially) for some years while you upgrade it?
Also bear in mind that all the Brussels tram tunnels were always meant to become metro tunnels (Hence 'pre-metro'). The underground tram-stops are the size of metro stations and even the platform access was built to accommodate future conversion to high platforms. For an underground tram system, they were overbuilt from the start, for a metro system they're just right.
If you build the minimal possible station size for lightrail and don't add in contingencies to make conversion to metro easier in the future, it's going to be very expensive to do so.
As for lightrail as a holdover, we still have a pre-metro tunnel from 1970-1975 which still runs only trams, so that future might be over half a century away when you first build the tunnels. It should also be noted that Brussels has and had a large tram network to feed trams in and out of these tunnels. If you build an entirely new line in an area where there are no trams to start with, then the cost benefit of not running metro will be relatively small, especially if you're already building most of it to metro spec to accommodate a future capacity increase.
@@mariusdufour9186 I was thinking "when is he going to mention Brussels" throughout the video, until it ended and he didn't. Yes, Brussels is a great example for cities in this situation, and the planners from 50 years ago should be credited for their far-sightedness.
@@RMTransit that leaves out an important consideration, which is whether or not a network actually has adequate tunnel length to better utilize them as a metro. I guess you mention the strategic tunnels, but since you placed the focus on the efficiency of the metro, it may lead viewers to believe that any tunneled tram network is wasted potential when that potential may not be there in the first place. The toronto and Auckland projects do have that potential of course.
When talking of smaller cities, I think the question should be less about whether large tunneling should be light rail or metro, but whether that tunneling is viable at all in the first place. As you said, Auckland may be better off spending the money on a larger number of smaller projects. Frankly many cities would. Capacity is important but how are you going to generate the capacity when whole swaths of the city are left without any way to get to the corridor. Initial frequency and capacity can imo be sacrificed (mind u I'm talking like going from 2 minute metro headways to like 6 minute tram headways) in favor of network mileage, particularly in suburban sprawl north america. Your channel is an interesting mix where u emphasize the importance of focusing on the meat and potatoes local stuff (toronto bus network) but then exalt the merits of building new light metro asap and everywhere. Light metro is hypothetically the most efficient rapid transit technology available but without building out the local stuff first it will remain underutilized, like running trams in tunnels. One may say to that "well who cares because at least riders have a fantastic new service" but I feel like in the age of the climate emergency, the project that gets the highest share of people off their car seat cushioned butts and onto transit is the winner. Maybe this is the reason all these overengineered light rail systems are popping up in our day and age, developers plan for underutilization from the start since that's the baseline they're working with and solving the issue is outside their scope.
I guess since these are the projects that politicians love to announce and construction firms love to lobby its what we have to work with in the transit discussion space. Sorry if this rant is standoffish, I think I'm just airing my frustrations out about the state of things more than anything. You are by far the best transit channel on youtube.
LOL! All I could think of is the Buffalo Metro, what New Yorkers I went to university with derisively referred as a streetcar in a tunnel. Yet the NFTA Metro Rail is really a "light metro" with a 5 mile long twin-bore heavy-rail subway with all-high-level boarding at the subway stations and at the street-level stations downtown a combination of high-level and retractable stairs used by the 1980s LRV rollingstock. For the planned 3-mile grade-level suburban Amherst extension from UB South Campus to UB North Campus the plan is for high-level side and island platforms built within the mediums of existing boulevards. While I was in college I found the Metro Rail a great mode of transport, which was actually faster than driving down Main Street due to the traffic lights which slows down cars and buses.
I'd love to see a video on Seattle's new proposals for the west Seattle light rail stations.
Gonna have to agree with other commenters. Many times strategic tunnels eventually expand the system to a completely or almost completely tunnelled systems. Also in many cases light rails are the most affordable way for a mid size city to build a reliable rapid transit. While in the long term the costs are larger if the city needs to convert the line to a full size metro, it is the exact growth of the city that leads to it being a viable option for the council
In Brisbane, I remember years ago when they first talked about a Busway instead of a light rail. They had it planned for ages before a few years even earlier, they wanted to future proof transit into the CBD but needed something to carry the needs of the Earlie 2000s. The point is the goal, to make sure a Future Brisbane could have a traditional light rail that would first be Busways then Ev Busses that had metro like characteristics. Today that evolution is still serving the city and growing with it while preserving it. Frankly, it has its issues and better is still possible, but the flexibility in how it functions works as intended and the need to future proof transit
I work at the Seattle Link rail system (Sitting there now.)
I would argue that Seattle had to go tunnel for a couple of reasons.
1. The downtown tunnel was built in the '80s with the intention of adding rail along with bus traffic and rail wasn't introduced until 2009.
2. Seattle is geographically bottlenecked. The downtown core is very dense at 3 square miles. Half a mile wide in one part and only 1.3 miles long.
3. North of Seattle is expensive real estate wise. This is the area using the majority of the tunnel system, 7 miles out of the 25 miles total. Clearing enough land to place the rail and stations would likely have cost nearly as much as the tunnel sections and, more importantly, would not have passed the ballot. The stations in the tunnel section here are not along the freeway and would underserve the areas that need the stations most, specifically the university and it's stadium. The voters insisted on the tunnel.
4. Hills. Seattle has many of them. The other tunnel segment (Beacon hill) starts at ~40 feet above grade, the station is 162 feet below grade (surface elevation is 360 feet above sea level), and exits about 30 feet above grade again.
Seattle link is called light rail, but is more of a metro line with a downtown core and a foolish grade running segment in the historically lower rent area of town. Each car holds up to 150 people comfortably and we have 4 cars in a train when running full capacity at 6 minute headways. (6,000 passengers each way per hour at peak times.)
As far as sharing our tracks with heavy rail. It wouldn't work. The night window for us is only about 2.5 hours, and that is reserved for maintenance.
Re overnight maintenance, especially when planned from the outset
@@RMTransit
I don't know how else to do it. only two tracks and service 21 hours a day. When else would you do it?
Tonight was substation maintenance and vibration testing. No way to do those during service.
Frankfurt has about 30 stations underground and many kilometers of tunnel. This isn't only a couple of stations or the very core of the city. It is basically the whole city center.
The Westgerman Stadtbahn Systems all have greater proportions of tunnels (than needed for trams). Frankfurt has second most underground stations and tunnels for all german Stadtbahn systems and feels more like a metro. Because of the long high floor units even kind of in the outter street level sections.
One extension of the Taipei MRT that's currently in the planning stages, from the eastern terminus of the Blue Line in Nangang to Keelung City, was recently changed from a completely elevated tramway to a being a proper metro rail. I feel a lot of the arguments you made here about capacity and just "why not just build the capacity we need" came into play.
Interestingly, the line basically parallels the TRA corridor between the two cities, though rail service headways into Keelung itself aren't as frequent as one would think - many of the local services either stop short of the city or turn south to Yilan, where a significant number of commuters to Taipei live.
If you have been following the Green Line Extension(SWLRT) in Minneapolis, due to the tunnel that is being constructed the projected timeline got pushed back from 2023 to 2027, and raised the price of the line from $2 billion to $2.75 billion. I think I would have to agree, that tunnels so be avoided if not neccessary.
This tunnel is also because of NIMBYism and has been a bottleneck of the project, despite the line extension already being over 60% complete. It's not as if Minnesota's LRTs don't already use tunnels, the Blue Line has its own in the airport that was cut-and-cover and also required a tunnel boring machine. It's unfortunate that the SWLRT has been delayed, but it's still only such a small section of the overall length of the line that it's very strange it costs so much in the first place.
If you ask me, tunneling for light rail is a benefit if done right. Heck, Baltimore's light rail on Howard Street needs to be sent underground and with the looming CSX tunnel expansion nearing (current runs under said "Howard Street" in downtown), it would be a good idea to just go ahead cut & cover that roadway to make room for both LRT & freight trains.
You have covered this fairly well. A few points to note:
* New Zealand doesn't have a lot of money to spend on these projects
* These sorts of projects tend to be more expensive here than other countries which makes the previous point even more problematic
* The North Shore already has a bus way that goes over the harbour bridge. The bus way has some gradients which are far too steep for regular main rail trains. Light metro might work.
* Housing in Auckland is very low density. Density may increase around this route will likely happen. So Auckland might be bigger than other cities it is not as dense as European cities.
* All rail has narrow gauge in NZ. Not sure how that compares to light rail or light metro, but i imagine light metro generally needs a wider gauge to be successful.
Other points about the existing plan missed are:
* Speed will likely be affected by having a full light rail route from the city to the airport. Making the route less than optimum, in fact buses are currently doing that route a lot quicker than projected rail times.
I think Auckland should be planning and start building a 4-7 surface light rail system if Auckland wants light rail. The proposed NZ$15 billion for the Auckland's light rail system could be better spent on upgrading and electrify between Pukekohe to Hamilton and Tauranga, complete the electrification between Palmerston North and Waikane, upgrade the NIMT between Muri and Paekakariki by double tracking and future proofing where possible for climate change, reopen the Wairoa to Gisborne line and in fact upgrade the whole national rail infrastructure including signalling and train control to increase freight and regional, interregional and long distance passenger rail services connecting the 13 regions including Auckland of the 16 regions in NZ.
Eglinton Avenue in Toronto will be so much nicer for pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and shopkeepers because the Crosstown LRT is below ground. Here, at least, there is real value to a tunnel.
It might seem an excessive investment to build a tunnel for smaller capacity lines but for some cities during the 20th century they foresaw great population growth so it would make sense later.
In my hometown of Guadalajara they built a metro-like tunnel that initially was used by trolleybuses due to budget constraints. Later it was upgraded to light metro and some people complained that it was a "train to nowhere". Now that the city has grown to more than 5M inhabitants I can't imagine what it would be like without that line.
Actually, Guadalajara seems to be the full antithesis of what Reese have talked about LRT and BRT included.
However, the tunneling in GDL can be considered as strategic for L3, meanwhile the L1 was planned like a German stadtbahn thus the actual result, the only weird here is the L2, which is planned to be totally underground while keeping the characteristics of the L1.
I just realized the San Diego Trolley also has 1 tunnel in the entire network. And it’s right underneath SDSU. Although it would be pretty cool to see the train running right through the university campus, it can just go right by all the buildings and students without stopping when it’s underground
Where the route utilizes both street running an tunnel running, light rail makes perfect sense. The Buffalo NFTA system is 40 years old now and does just that. Unsignaled light rail in the middle of the street (Main Street was turned into a pedestrian mall) with train-preferred traffic lights at intersections, then fully signaled (like heavy rail transit) in tunnel, where street running was no longer possible.
Uh, I don’t know if it does make perfect sense! You don’t get most of the benefit of those tunnels
@@RMTransit Maybe so, it's a compromise. You can't run heavy rail (which is best in tunnels) down the middle of the street. Light Rail is the only choice. And you can't force people to change trains at every transition from street-level to tunnel.
San Francisco’s Muni Metro is the epitome of the worst combo of all three, underground metro with huge platforms but tiny 1 car trams; and 2 lines (K/T, and N) that operate as a streetcar in mixed traffic, subway, and light rail with dedicated lanes. The central subway will fix the T and untangle it from the K, making it only a dedicated lane light rail and subway service. (Which I doubt will be much better) but doesn’t do anything for the other five lines. Also we built ourselves into a corner with high platforms at all the metro and dedicated lane light rail stops so all the trains require movable steps at the door to operate in mixed street traffic, and the steps constantly break down
The Seattle Tunnel is interesting: they built it for a future light rail that wasn’t funded yet, ran electric buses in it for years, finally got a light rail… which was incompatible with the rails and power lines in the tunnel, so all that had to be ripped out and replaced. 🤦♂️
They then ran it in the tunnel with busses until it lost the terminal station at the end of the tunnel for the busses to development for the convention center, now it’s only light rail (which makes more sense since the light rail now turns into a new tunnel to head farther north.) But, the stations are HUGE, way bigger than a single light rail train set unless they run 2 of them combined during busy times.
They actually run four light rail trains together currently.
The platforms are exactly the length of a light rail train. It seems like everyone outside of Seattle assumes we have 1 or 2 car trains. Our light rail system has 4 car trains, the same length as a "Metro" system
As a Californian, we have light rail in downtown LA that kinda has to go underground because of space limitations, and we have a very clean, reliable subway (the red and purple lines) that is exclusively underground.
The DLR in London works pretty well, and the new automated Metro lines in Paris are good (and light).
seattle has a lot of very steep hills and ridges in the north which makes building at grade very difficult thats why is grade seprated because that was the only option
True. Seattle city center is very similar to San Francisco in that it’s very dense with (relatively) narrow streets that would cause Link to create gridlock with an at grade version and a very difficult design if it was chosen to be above grade
@@metrofilmer8894 no no what i am saying is that the hills are too steep not to tunnel through and the akward layout of some parts of the city just make it was easier just to pay for the tunnels
Guadalajara, Mexico, has a lightrail system. It's almost entirely underground
To me, while you may be right to some degree regarding the direct material optimization of the projects, the premise of this video relies upon ignoring the single most powerful barrier to transit in general, which is the deeply political task of getting a project proposed, approved, and funded.
Creating multiple interdependent systems for the purpose of conjointly supporting the city’s transit needs relies upon getting ALL of those projects proposed, approved, and funded, and if any part of it fails, you end up with a transit network crippled with glaring insufficiencies. Imagine if we designed (A) a mainline rail network expected to function primarily by riders transferring to (B) a surface tramway/streetcar/light rail network upon arrival at a central rail hub in the city. Now imagine both of these projects are submitted, but only one of them actually makes it to getting built.
If A is built but B is not, riders can use their mainline commuter system to get into the urban core, but are stranded miles away from their destination at the hub upon arrival. Getting to their destination requires a cab, Uber, etc. That’s an expensive hassle. Might as well just drive.
If B is built but A is not, riders can get from anywhere in the urban core to anywhere else with ease, but getting into the urban core if you don’t already live there is impossible without driving, and if I’m gonna drive, I might as well just drive all the way to my destination.
And none of that is even to speak of the fact that to most riders, the biggest benefit of transit (besides traffic avoidance) is that it’s a passive process. Rather than having to watch the road, you can play games on your phone or work on your laptop. The more transfers you ask of riders, and the more work you ask them to put into those transfers (such as you must now walk from this mainline rail station to the separate tramway station 2 blocks away to catch the train that actually goes to your destination), the less and less enticing the prospect of using transit instead of just driving sounds.
Transit asks riders to give up control, directness, and privacy in exchange for ease, speed, and the ability to make personal use of the commute time. The more active processes (in particular, transfers, especially to different systems) you ask the commuter to engage in, the less the transit package has to offer someone to give up their car with its isolated bubble, one’s own choice of music, otherwise general quiet, and absolute directness.
I don't think it's practical to oppose transfers completely. We can't have routes from everywhere to everywhere else and still operate them all at high frequency; the only way we can get high frequency is with a smaller number of routes running a hub-and-spokes model, which inherently means transferring at the hubs.
And sometimes we really do need to change modes -- we might need the capacity of a metro on one corridor, but we can't then run that metro down all the suburban streets, we have to transfer people to busses for the final mile.
You're right that we should try to avoid *excessive* transfers though. Anybody who has to transfer 3 times in a trip is gunna tell horror stories about it, and will try to avoid that trip in future.
Londons underground moves also in surface outdoors so its not new even in ancient city rail networks. Its rarely road access, its more likely that its either a rail line OR a road and we still needs roads to ship goods into cities. The other issue is city build infrastructure. Few cities can now accomidate a surface light rail within the tight confines of old city buildings. So you could end car traffic but the gridlock in other roads would be endemic. It already happens with light rail builds. Many european cities often have narrow streets (Paris put in an underground and it has wide streets but other cities were built when a horse was transport so wide streets (like the regular US city grid layout) are an option. If you are going to send down a tunnel boring machine, then boring further is not that much extra cost. Look at cities without light rail and the city traffic and then ask what happens when all road traffic is given secondary access to rail. Surface light rail that did not always have it, often incur car/truck/cycle accidents and the citizens need to almost grow up with surface rail intersections and tunnels avoid that. The reason the default is not underground metro is cost- nothing more. If tunnels were as cheap, there would be no surface light rail and the trains could run as often, as fast and as long as you wanted. Elon Musk showed that no amount of tech can really cut tunnelling costs.
I think the first 'tram tunnel' was in Boston where it dramatically alleviated traffic in the downtown and this was essentially before there was any significant numbers of automobiles. That might be the reason why Boston didn't junk its trolley system after WW2 like most other cities. Philadelphia did the same thing with its subway/surface routes that street run outside the downtown core but are subways downtown, again, these are the surviving streetcar systems in that city, the tracks for the other lines are still there but are run as bus lines. European cities are older with a lot of narrow streets in hodgepodge directions, tunneling can logically hit the city core in a direct linear fashion and avoid the traffic. The East Berlin system illustrates the beauty of tram lines, they start downtown, exit the core in dedicated lanes and then gradually branch off to neighborhoods with street running. This gives the system far more coverage than the underground routes in the western part of the city.
An excellent video that succinctly explains the flaws in the latest Auckland light rail proposal. I agree with your views that tunnelled light rail option seems to be the worst of all worlds and that there should be a place for further extensions of the existing electrified suburban rail system to the airport and North shore. The performance of the existing network suffers from issues such as too many level crossings, needing to share the tracks with freight trains and probably most importantly from Auckland Transport’s perspective, a lack of control as the network infrastructure is owned and run by the Government owned rail company, KiwiRail. These issues have somehow created the perception that further heavy rail routes are somehow not suitable for Auckland, which is pretty silly when one looks at the performance of modern high capacity /speed narrow gauge lines such as the Mandurah line in Perth. However if Auckland really feel that a new separate mass transit system is needed, I am rather attracted to the Regional Rapid Transit system concept in India that you covered recently. A speed grade separated system , preferably using the same 1067 mm gauge as the KiwiRail network connecting Central Auckland to the airport and on to the developing areas in Southern Auckland and the Waikato would be a much better use of the sort of investment that is being talked about for the Auckland Light Rail project.
I think you hit the nail on the head regarding StatBahn that it is a core flow of multiple strassebahn or tram-trains creating a high frequency. Plus often removing the teams from street running frees up the streets to more pedestrian, cycle friendly and limited access streets enabling a city or town to introduce a congestion or low emissions zone with suitable park and ride on the edge of towns.
I agree. With the huge amount of development and modernisation Auckland itself is seeing, along with a lot of investment, the CityRail link and an increase in immigration, it just makes sense for there to be a more heavy rail/metro system connecting major points like the airport to the CBD (and the North Shore which desperately needs a good transit connection), as opposed to a light rail system which feels more temporary and at the end of the day is limited in terms of capacity… Also worth pointing out Auckland has terrible traffic congestion so this could help alleviate that
Im from seattle and the Link LR wouldn’t be possible without the tunnels, because of the geography of the pnw. If the track was above ground it would have to be Much less stright and probably more expensive then keeping it straight through tunnels. Seattle also used to run buses in the light rail tunnel. And almost no one remembers it.
I live in Auckland. Needless to say your assessment is much more on the money than our friends in central government in Wellington. The logical solutions in my mind are:
1) Extend heavy rail from Manukau west to the Airport; which provides a direct rail link to Britomart and the CBD for the airport, and also the option for a rail to the airport from other areas (even cities like Hamilton). (the current proposal would take passengers from the airport to the to be built Karangahape Station or to Wynyard Qtr, so in each case tourists will have a 5-15 minute walk or transfer with their luggage to get to hotels/businesses that are their likely destinations.
2) Use light rail on the surface or a busway to provide local connection from Mangere and the Sandringham/Dominion Road coridor through the ithmus to the city. Tunneling this would only be for political reasons, and moreover, the area is built entirely over old lava flows which are difficult to excavate and or have pesky lava caves.
3) Long term extend rail from Britomart via a tunnel to the North Shore, potentially running it over the existing Northern Busway coridor to Albany or even further north. This alleviates traffic congestion on the harbour bridge currently used by both bus and private traffic (buses are the only public transport option from the shore to the CBD.
As for your mention of the asymetry at britomart; once the City Rail Loop heavy rail project is completed, this will largely be solved, as trains can route around the loop to return, or run through the station between the West and South / South East (and hopefully eventually the north).
Light rail tunnels make sense in the use case where you have a convergence of light rail lines through a super high frequency downtown corridor. Lots of German cities have this and Boston has this.
The initial Seattle downtown tunnel also wasn't a bad usage of this because thats what it was when you consider it was shared with trolleybusses.
This is exactly what Austin, TX is doing with their new light rail
As a German, I don't fully agree. Tunnels reduce the number of trains per hour compared to tram lines above ground. The only way they can help to increase capacity is because they enable longer trains. In the case of Stuttgart for example you've got up to 5 lines that converge in a central tunnel, none of which can use the full length of the platforms because of some minor street running sections. Yet they can't just run more trains due to the extreme number of services, some of which really should have remained above ground. Frankfurt on the other hand limits the number of lines per tunnel or places the point of convergence further outside of the city center and thus provides a much higher number of trains per line. And due to strategically placing the tunnels they can run 100 m long trainsets which means the capacity they provide is almost identical to the Berlin U-Bahn. Light rail tunnels make sense if they enable a metro-style service with longer and/or wider trains on parts of the network. They don't make sense if you just end up replacing an above-ground tram with an underground tram.
A tunnel isn’t worth it for Trolleybuses in most cases unless it’s VERY short
@@RMTransit speaking of trolley busses Boston silver line should be converted to light rail with converging lines in the tunnel no question. Idk what they were thinking with that one.
I think a mix of high frequency underground light rail sharing space with trolleybusses that otherwise are mostly above ground isn't a bad idea and it seemed like a unique and interesting way for Seattle to speed up busses in the downtown.
@@RMTransit The Seattle trolley coaches were dual mode. Diesel on the surface and electric in the tunnel. First of their kind and hated by the operators. Later they used hybrids with a "Hush" mode that would make them electric at the platforms. The tunnel was very short (1.2 miles).
This is a good polemic and it reinforces the critiques I had when I saw proposals for a tram in Glasgow rather than expanding the subway. They wanted to go south west from the city to a large shopping mall, a major hospital and Glasgow airport. Yes cheaper but its an incredibly busy city and speed, capacity and future growth of the subway would suffer.
The very first one was actually Boston 1897 Green Line Tremont Street Subway fast forward 70 years later the 1960s Stadtbahn West Germany Rhein-Ruhr region Frankfurt Am Main. Basically what the other cities did was Copy Boston Tremont Street Subway for the purpose of running Trams under city streets. That includes San Francisco Market Street Twin peaks tunnel systems to which the steps ends up converting to a level access to Subway platforms
Well in the case of the Twin Peak tunnel, that was built because it was travelling through a mountain. Unless you want to route all the way around it, you can't exactly run streetcars on the surface there, so they had to settle for a tunnel until Market Street.
@@Absolute_Zero7 thank you for telling me about this and I'm wondering if there is a link tunnel between the two even though they are built some 50 years apart from each other 1918 Twin Peaks 1968-1980 Market Street Subway
@V69 didn't know about that Marseille predated Boston, MA by 4 years. Because for most Americans into this field they would talk about 1897 Tremont Street Subway MBTA Green line trams
@@EpicThe112 I've been to San Francisco on a visit and learned that the Market Street tunnel links right up to the Twin Peaks tunnel.
Auckland is in an Earthquake zone.
Deeper tunnels have less damage to the infrastructure types from Earthquakes.
Surface or near surface can have significant damage from the P and or S waves.
Lots of places in earthquake zones do surface rail
Auckland actually suffers very few major earthquakes.
I love the title of this video! Los Angeles’ first “subway”, the Hollywood Line of the Pacific Electric, had a largely underground right of way in Downtown and was technically an interurban. Additionally, they’re building new stations as we speak, better connecting the E/Expo Line and A Line to Downtown along a complete underground alignment, which would include new transit points with the B and D Lines, the actual city subway. Ultimately it’s just a weird situation where light rail running along the medians of streets are efficient and effective on the wide suburban streets but not so much in the Downtown.
Ultimately, I liked the original L Line’s work around this. It ran along the street median, only crossing underground for one station before immediately rising again. After the old Little Tokyo Station it rose onto an elevated line where it bridged the US 101, as a underground alignment wasn’t viable because the freeway is far too sunken in the Downtown area.
I like your channel Reece, but you said 6 months ago (The Best Transit System in the US Just Got Better: Seattle Link Light Rail) that Seattle was your favorite transit system in the US. Well, our light rail tunnels completely underground from the International District until you reach Northgate. I think you might be just a little conflicted in your view. On the street "tram-like" trains just wouldn't be feasible unless you knocked out a lot of buildings and widened streets for the trams. That's why I feel that Seattle and San Francisco do better with light rail tunnels. But then, I could be completely missing your point.
St. Louis and LA got it right with high level platforms and LRT trains. But I never hear of these systems referred to as Light Metro. On the other hand we have Seattle with its metro infrastructure and low floor trains. Did Seattle mess up in its conception and design?
I think Seattle would’ve been much better with high Flores
To be fair, the original downtown transit tunnel in Seattle was built for buses, and had buses and trains operating in it at the same time for a while, so the trains had to be low-floor to match the platform height of the buses. It looks pretty silly now for sure though, I wish we had high floor as well :')
@@bluegreenmagenta What would be the advantage ? Aren't high plaforms just a remainder of old times, when engines have been much bigger and more expensive ? Today you have 2 small 20cm engines on each axis, not requiring much space. With a small ramp included in the train, not in the plaform, it's easy to access with wheelchairs without any platform.
@@RMTransit I think we need to stem away from that high floor/low floor debate. Losing some seats for easy construction is not a big deal. I see no difference between either as long as they function accordingly.
_reads the title as a German_
"Wait, wouldn't that just make it a regular streetcar?"
_It turns out the title is somewhat exaggerated._
"Oh ok that makes a bit more sense."
Malaga, Spain is the craziest one I've seen...one of the lines is COMPLETELY underground, and it uses dinky 5-car fully low-floor trams.
You just described what is in Seville as well. The hope was to feed more lines into it, but they havent the money to do the new lines.
You, as a tourist, cannot understand the logic behind such a decision. This "dinky 5-car fully low-floor trams" serves the city well and the cost with the tunnels is one that you can only dream of in Canada where you spend insane amounts of money per kilometer, that can get up to more than 6 times the cost in per km in Málaga system.
I believe that in Spain, where I live, we know a bit more on how to build a good public transport system that is adapted for the local needs.
Yeah, not sure that’s the best approach haha
Thanks for this video. Very interesting. Making me think about Manchester metrolink all the way through. I can only ever think of it as a compromise - can't think where the light rail part of it works apart from you don't have to go down escalators. The whole system is painfully slow and congested. The airport link's only real purpose that I can see is to serve Wythenshawe - surely one or two metro stops would do the job better though.
I'm thinking about how this relates to Boston's Green Line, which started out using something like the "strategic stadtbahn tunnel" approach at a choke point for surface trams over 120 years ago, then extended that to a few kilometers of tunnel across the downtown. But Boston didn't build any subsequent metro lines that way.
I wasn't aware that the Boston T beat the Stadtbahn of Vienna Austria by one year...
Actually the Blue Line got started as a "strategic stadtbahn tunnel" which fed East Boston trams under Boston Harbor into the city center.
@@edwardmiessner6502 Now that is interesting!
@@edwardmiessner6502 Yup, the reason with the Blue Line trains uses catenary & third rail. Switching between the modes at Airport station
Boston has been putting trams into tunnels since 1897. It was arguably the first stadbahn system.
Which gives the reason why cities have trouble understanding the function & usefulness of tunnels for light rail trams. And Boston is built on marshlands...
There is a place on Oslo's tram network where the tram runs on the metro's track. There is both OHLE and the quite fat, elevated 3rd rail for about 2.5km, or 1.5 freedom units.
I honestly must agree. Edmonton ran it's first LRT line through an extensive tunnelled section in the down-town core, which was a huge expense that annulled most of the cost savings of using light rail in the first place. Ultimately, it is a very good pre-metro or light metro line, but it was costly to build and took decades to finish. tunnels are very expensive, and I would certainly advocate to avoid them when possible. It's probably cheaper to close a thoroughfare to car traffic and run your line along that right of way. with grade crossing priority via crossing arms, a light rail/pre-metro system operating entirely at grade should have no problem keeping pace with a much more expensive tunnel.
Tunnels can be a good choice in the dense urban core, of course, but if you choose a partially tunnelled line, careful consideration must be given to what that line will do on the surface. a surface line that operates in mixed traffic like a tram will not be able to saturate and take advantage of that tunnel. if the tunnel is not going to be used to it's capacity, then you probably should have just run the light rail line along the surface, at far less cost.
I think it depends on how your city is laid out. Trams in the city centre running through pedestrian areas are usually speed restricted for safety. If you don't have too much foot traffic, you might get comparable speeds to a tunnel, though in my experience that's generally not the case. There's also the route itself, if you have lots of sharp corners it's inevitably going to be slower than a tunnel with much shallower curves.
The Edmonton tunnel section was planned before the term "Light Rail" was adopted. Called the "rapid transit project" it was originally modeled after Montreal pedestrian access, Toronto dimensions, and Cleveland use of a standard railway right-of-way with bus features. The name was changed to the British term "Light Rail" (from "Light Railway") in 1977, when the city planners incorporated public input for the surface lines that have now and are going to be built.
The operating rules were copied from Boston's Green Line and of course, the most significant event was the strong-arming of Siemens Canada to overcome their reluctance to build rail transit cars for such a small market. They were in Alberta to sell electrical equipment to the oil companies. Edmonton chose the Frankfurt U--2 cars as the best to fit into a high-floor environment that was already determined.
Instructors and inspectors for San Diego and Sacramento were trained in Edmonton. One trace of this history in other systems is the use of the word "Control" instead of "Dispatcher." That's what Denver calls it, but it arrived from the UK via the Edmonton Police and Fire radio procedures, which were adopted by Edmonton Transit.
Calgary was able to build a much larger system by using street-running in the downtown instead of a tunnel. However, Calgary also has more streets in downtown than Edmonton did. And Edmonton's noted timed-transfer feeder bus system of that era would not have worked as well with street traffic delays on the rail core line.
The “they wanted a metro, but they didn’t want to pay for a metro” category.
Love your new background!
The central isthmus of Auckland is of a volcanic base and the only cost-effective tunnelling method is via TBM
Funny thing is, most of the crenshaw extension in LA is gonna be light rail but will mostly be underground, although Crenshaw Blvd does shrink in size so this does make sense
The whole line is light rail
Auckland should look at medium capacity like Vancouver did with the Skytrain