Hipster Duck
Senior Member
WK Lis, citing bus ridership stats from www.lightrailnow.org is like getting your news from Fox. It's incredibly biased and prone to truth-bending. The paragraph comparing LA's Gold and Orange lines, in particular, is completely disingenuous.
I've rode the Prague system and it's hardly "mixed traffic". There are a lot of streets where the streetcar runs on a disguised right of way: road cul de sacs, streetcar tracks mounting sidewalks to cut across intersections, etc. The grid layout of the North American city largely precludes this kind of operation. The King west streetcar proposal of about 9 years ago was about the closest we got to operating a streetcar like they do in Continental Europe.
I'm having a hard time visualizing these new, long streetcars on Toronto's roads. It's not that I've never rode one in Europe, it's that in Europe almost all of these anaconda-like trams run in their own ROW or in a disguised-ROW like the one I described above. It's hard enough getting drivers to stop behind the rear doors of an ALRV; imagine what it will be like behind one of these suckers. Although I understand that the new streetcars will be all-door loading, a part of me thinks that the TTC's paranoia about fare evasion will step in and nix this.
A city like Prague manages a bigger mixed traffic streetcar system with short headways. The bunching problem isn't a limitation of the vehicles; buses are prone to that too.
I've rode the Prague system and it's hardly "mixed traffic". There are a lot of streets where the streetcar runs on a disguised right of way: road cul de sacs, streetcar tracks mounting sidewalks to cut across intersections, etc. The grid layout of the North American city largely precludes this kind of operation. The King west streetcar proposal of about 9 years ago was about the closest we got to operating a streetcar like they do in Continental Europe.
Much of the delay is caused by slow loading, with people filing past the driver and paying. The new streetcars will have all-door loading so they should speed up even the mixed traffic lines. The loading will be faster than any bus.
I'm having a hard time visualizing these new, long streetcars on Toronto's roads. It's not that I've never rode one in Europe, it's that in Europe almost all of these anaconda-like trams run in their own ROW or in a disguised-ROW like the one I described above. It's hard enough getting drivers to stop behind the rear doors of an ALRV; imagine what it will be like behind one of these suckers. Although I understand that the new streetcars will be all-door loading, a part of me thinks that the TTC's paranoia about fare evasion will step in and nix this.