T3G
Senior Member
No, but it shows that speed is not an inherent property to one traction type or another. The CLRVs were slower to accelerate than the PCCs; while the PCCs accelerated at a speed of 4.3 MPHPS, while the CLRVs were neutered down to 3.3 MPHPS and the ALRVs even worse at 2.65 MPHPS.PCCs are extremely small vehicles that are built extremely similarly to busses, and guess what, nobody is manufacturing anything remotely like them anymore. Modern LFLRVs are a completely different beast.
I don't have any stats on hand for the Flexitys, but point of bringing this up is that all three of those vehicles were in the same size category, and despite that, performance was markedly downgraded. It has nothing to do with vehicle type and everything to do with the specifications the project calls for. If you wanted to, I'm sure you could get an LRV with hot rod acceleration. And framing it is a bus vs. LRV issue is also problematic, because again, it comes down to the specifications called for. Remember the GM New looks and how slow they were compared to more modern buses?
The only reason you don't have to sit through a jingle on those buses is because they only have two, max 3 doors, so the driver has to focus on less doors and there is much less chance of him shutting the door on someone. Bringing up the TTC Flexity doors is also neither here nor there, because the doors were intentionally slowed down right before covid broke out, because safety trumps common sense at that organization.the typically opens door significantly faster than LRVs. Just compare the TTC busses opening and closing doors with the Flexity Outlooks where the doors are typically slower and occasionally you even have to sit through a jingle.
It's definitely not a universal problem. Here's a video from an old tram in my hometown, right as the doors close. The amount of time the jingle takes is completely negligible. And remember, new LRTs are low floor, so the added dwell time of people climbing the stairs wouldn't be there, either.
It's also not universal to buses... the Orion VII doors take a lot longer to close than Nova doors. And that's before I get into the fact that the Hurontario bus doesn't have bus only lanes, while the LRT will.
Again, all this tells me is that North America is extremely bad at building transit. Even new transit projects are many miles behind older European ones. If we forced anyone proposing a transit project to travel to Europe and study their systems extensively before proceeding to develop the nitty gritty aspects of the project, we would be a lot better off. None of the problems you allude to are inherent to rail transit, nor would they be difficult to deal with, if there only existed the political will to do so.