The Glider Bus Rapid Transit System | Translink Belfast
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 มี.ค. 2022
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In the UK there has been many attempts at a proper Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system however it must be said that Belfast has certainly nailed the concept. In this video I review their Glider network with new vehicles, infrastructure and a set of routes that interwork perfectly with the existing network to improve passenger figures!
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Great video! I subscribed. Hopefully I will get on the Gliders in the summer as last week I didn't get a chance to ride them.
Thank you so much! Rather scared of travelling this way, in case I got lost. But sounds good. Thanks
Hope You Enjoyed Your visit!
Wow. These look very similar to our trams in Nottingham - doubtlessly a damned sight cheaper than the ridiculously expensive £500m+ for our recent extension.
Aye I believe this BRT scheme was done as the geography of the city won't fit in trams. It does make you wonder if this has been successful why other UK cities haven't adopted it properly.
The ride is definitely not as good as trams, plus ultimately you can't beat wired electric high capacity transit on steel rails.
As someone from Belfast who lives in Nottingham, I can confirm the trams are way better! Ride quality on the Glider is much worse (exhausting if you have to stand), they are polluting diesel vehicles and the system is terribly planned:
1. There aren't enough seats: vehicles are too short for a city the size of Belfast (they should at least have bought the double-articulated ones) so there is less seating capacity than when double-deckers ran the route. Because the routes have so little churn (most passengers are going to/from the city centre), you often have no chance of a seat freeing up. Double-deckers with 2 doors would have been better.
2. The Gliders cannot get you quickly and reliably to your destination: there is no signal priority and the stops are every 400m, so Gliders constantly stop and start, get stuck in traffic and 'bunch' at peak times. Neither the existing routes nor the planned extension will connect to Belfast's new central train and bus station, which is madness.
@@legoinventions6056 if they solved the solvable issues you have raised, how would it then compare to the tram?
@@Alto53 The only things that can’t be ‘relatively’ easily solved are ride quality and emissions. The tram will always have better ride quality than any kind of bus (although it must be said trams do squeal around corners, which buses don’t). As for zero emission buses, trolley buses are the way to go; green hydrogen is still too expensive and batteries are bad for the environment and would probably limit the use of the buses between charging (not sure what the range of a BEV double decker is). One solution could be hybrid trolley buses with smaller batteries which charge on the wires. This way the wires don’t have to cover the entire network. However the minuscule likelihood of Translink investing in wires was always going to rule out a tram or trolleybus for Belfast.
Many thanks for this - I've been wanting to see a detailed review of the Glider system. I agree with your point about cross city services; I've never understood why most bus companies don't do this as a general policy. They seem hung up on the idea that you must 'grade' bus routes by what they see as their 'milkability' - how much custom/money the route makes. So some routes get buses every 10 minutes, others every 20 minutes etc., which makes linking them up across the centre problematical. I think this is an error of judgment - the London Underground, with frequent cross-city trains on most lines, works brilliantly. In fact people's transit needs don't go by the kind of area they live in, and maybe hard-nosed commercial bus operators are just not capable of running a service which gives everyone a frequent service which runs more than just 9am-6pm.
Thank you for watching, I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed the video! Cross-city services do have a mix of pro and against arguments. Personally, if researched they can be very successful however the opposing point to this is delays can have a larger effect with these style of routes, usually when services are cross-city for operational ease rather than commuting patterns. Examples of Leeds and Nottingham can demonstrate this two sided argument very well.
@@AndMoreCentral Thanks for replying. Yes, I'm sure that in specific circumstances 'one-legged' routes can make sense. I just feel that there should be a lot more cross-town routes, in an attempt to gain more share of total traffic for public transport. An important part of this is to make as many journeys possible/practical by bus & train, and this can best be done within an urban area by cross-town routes, run frequently, with good quality interchanges (easy/quick/comfortable/accessible/well-signed/through-ticketing etc.). Unfortunately the bus-managers' response often seems to be 'most of our passengers only travel between home and the centre, and we don't really care about the rest'!
Obviously making longer journeys is even more difficult when frequency is less than every ten minutes, and all journeys are cut short at the centre. This at a time when for reasons of climate, congestion, air quality etc. we need to get maximum transfer from cars to public transport. I gather from Roger French's 'BusandTrainUser' blog that there is a bus industry '10-percent Club' think-tank (ways and means to increase bus patronage by this amount): this seems a woefully low-level aim in view of the urgency; providing decent cross-town links might give a 10% lift in passenger numbers simply by providing travel opportunities - before they start considering plush seats, phone chargers and whatever...
Very many thanks for your series of enjoyable and informative videos
Glider started in September 2018 the stop you were getting on at on the G2 at titanic quarter into city centre is a Further education collage called belfast Met so it can be a very busy stop at Times
Aye its been going a fair while then, the presentation was still very impressive too. I can imagine as a few G2 runs I caught off camera did showcase how busy they can get
Glad you finally got around to bussing in Northern Ireland! have you any plans to come to Dublin? and maybe check out some of the NTA Bus Connects project?
Aye this is the first of 5 of this style of video covering bus related stuff in Belfast and Dublin so hopefully you'll enjoy the upcoming stuff
@@AndMoreCentral Nice one. I'll be make sure to comment on those ones 😉
Sprint is getting some of these vanhools, 20 of them I believe operated by National Express along with their hydrogen streetdecks and mmcs upon launch of sprint and these vanhools being rolled out on the service, when that happens maybe you could do a video on them.
Aye the new Sprint BRT will be very good and hopefully follow on the success of the Glider network, if that does become the case I'll certainly be down to check the network out
@@AndMoreCentral Yeah, it will be the first of its kind sonce the withdrawal of streetcars and most articulated buses on the mainland. I do hope that sprint is a success wich if everything is on track its believed to be around may time that sprints going to launch.
I really hope you can do buses down in Cornwall, it is really awkward with the narrow lanes
nothing really special going on there though
Cornwall is a bus museum designed to torment enthusiasts with the amount of body filler on display, with a gert arterial line funded by the EU running down the middle of it with MMC's
It was better before they withdrawn the president's
Hopefully some Cornwall content will be appearing later this year...
Glider would pretty much be what would happen if FTRmetro wasn't bad
Wow they do look like the old Hyperlink/FTR StreetCars. Maybe with Tap On and Tap Off they might work over here without the need of a Bus Conductor. Still much better than the older Volvo B10LA. One fault with the Hyperlinks was you had to board them through front entrance but could depart from front or rear.
Aye it was very strange to see how similar they actually were aha. It could work but I think a lot of infrastructure work would have to be untaken somewhere like Leeds to facilitate these, bearing in mind too a lot of the Glider network is flat roads with very few hills
In September we are staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Belfast. Does the Glider or other busses frequent the Belfast City Airport?
That location full of refugees
Hello! All the bus stops has this translink machine?
Love it it looks like a tram
Aye that is the intended feel for these ones
To be honest they seem old fashioned these days, reminds me of the awful bendy buses in Aberdeen run by First. Even more surprising they run with diesel. Our entire bus fleet in Inverness is completely electric and really nice to travel on and seem far more advanced. Even Aberdeen has a mixture of Hydrogen double decker bus fleet with First and electric bus fleet with Stagecoach.
I saw these on Wyca as possibly proposed for the mass transit. I hope we dont get these and we go for Light Rail like Gm as the high platforms makes it nice.
In the current economic climate it would make sense to get something like this as the infrastructure costs are drastically lower than a light rail project unfortunately
Glad to see they have the Irish language on the speaker system .
Progress towards a unites Ireland!
Oh fuckin hell, is that what they are? That's what they're getting in Walsall
These are VanHool hybrid vehicles that I must say were very nice. The Birmingham BRT is set to get hydrogen vehicles so unsure if they'll be the same style as these
I was at here at sunday
I like to think that Glider has started the comeback of bendy buses in the UK.
This might mean that other places in the country could get them too.
Do you think Bendy buses should make a comeback in the uk?
How do I get routes ?
How many can they carry?
About 30 seated and 50 standing about 80 people I think.
@@declangaming24 not as many seated as I thought
@@declangaming24 no it’s about 180.
Pretty much FTRmetro the second
How long are you or were you in Belfast for?
I was there for a week, with a number of other Belfast and Dublin related videos on their way very soon
Just imagine if swansea got a new bus transport system
Do you know in China, they have a trackless tram which follows dotted lines?
Imagine if we got one of them In the uk!
Guided buses. They're still buses. It's what Liverpool may be getting. I think it's a cheap alternative to trams. Won't do
Showing the machines but no explanation how to buy a ticket-then what? tap off?
A day ticket for all Metro services including Glider is available to purchase from the machines, believe it was £4.20 on my visit
Just tap in. On every metro bus there’s a pay cap of £3.50 per day. Idk what it’s like on the glider but there might be a pay cap