Why are trams better than buses

The Government assesses the benefits of transport schemes through an appraisal process which makes it difficult to get approval and funding for a new tram. Government guidance makes it hard for transport authorities to introduce a tram scheme, and encourages them to build road or bus schemes instead.

Skip to main content. Light rail and trams In large towns or cities, trams are often a good solution — they fill the gap between trains and buses. As we explained in our response to a public inquiry in , it's important we work to get more trams because: Trams are very popular and they encourage people to leave their cars behind. At least 22 million car journeys a year no longer happen in the UK because of trams. On average, one in five peak hour passengers on UK trams previously travelled by car.

At the weekends, half of the tram passengers used to travel by car. Trams reduce congestion in city centres by providing people with a quick, reliable, high-quality alternative to the car. Trams can help us tackle climate change. Travelling by car produces over three times as much CO2 as travelling by tram, according to Defra. And no wonder. Buses offer better coverage, but in London congestion has slowed them to a stately average speed of 9.

Trains are faster, but require more expensive infrastructure to be constructed — just look at Crossrail. Also known as streetcars or light rail there's debate around the nomenclature , naturally , trams offer riders speed and reliability, are cheaper though not cheap and easier to install than rail, and offer side benefits like no emissions and can help underpin neighborhood regeneration projects — though the latter's not always welcome, of course.

Yet while light-rail use in England is at record highs of million journeys, the highest since records began in , they make up fewer than 3. In response, TfL pointed us to the London mayor's transport strategy , which does mention boosting the Croydon network. They may be seen by some as the future of transport, but trams are decidedly historical. It was Britain's golden age of cities and tram networks were their transport of choice.

Six of the modern British tram systems now have a total network of km, but in the s, CityMetric notes, the tramways of Birkenhead alone pipped that by two kilometers at km. The glory days didn't last. Buses soon provided competition, as they required no tracks or overhead wires, and petrol driven motor vehicles were seen as more modern.

In , Green says, there were 14, trams in use across the UK. A decade on that halved, and by , there were just 4, Aside from one holdout network in Blackpool, the last British tram was shut down in Glasgow in , with , Glaswegians watching a parade of 20 trams through the city. I think these points have been covered quite clearly. Dudley would agree. Why not be thankful that the commitment of light rail is on the table?

I fully expect services like the L94 to no longer operate as present. Otherwise there will be almost no benefit at all from the entire project. And closing George St to buses will not make congestion better except on George St itself.

The buses are being thrown into Elizabeth St which will become a bigger basket case than George St ever was. I completely agree about the public debate on such things in Sydney being a complete joke. It spends its entire time arguing about things which are tangential to what is important: frequency, speed, span operating hours etc. One more point: while trams might last longer, on a discounted cash flow basis this is almost no effect on reducing their higher effective purchase price.

That is where Simon and I differ in our opinions. There wil be less congestion because as mentioned elsewhere on this page there will be a lot fewer buses entering the CBD from Elizabeth St south and Oxfprd Street. The capacity of the Eastern Distributor option is not near to be constrained. Once the LR is established for all the reasons identified above people will use it in preference to buses if at all possible — and the bus schedules can be trimmed, diverted.

I believe that people will change modes to tram if it easy and more comfortable for them, the evidence being admittedly based on experience and observation rather than surveys.

There is more platform changing at Central in morning peaks than necessary for people to change between City Circle and Harbour Bridge services. Lots and I have done this of people on via St james services change platforms because it gets them to Town hall or Wynyard quicker than going round the CC. At all the bus stops at the southern end of King Street, CBD-bound passengers at peak hours almost universally get on a if it comes before the , and change at Newtown Station to another 42n bus.

In the evening peak lots of passengers change from trains at Newtown station to southbound s, presumably becasue of convenience at the CBD end, when presumably if they were as change averse as the modellers tell us they would have taken the train to St Peters. Trams attract and represent culture that buses could never ever do. Trams are also more easily monitored by command centres, not only because there is less of them but monitoring system are more accurate than the current Ptips system our buses use.

Having less of them needed to carry many more people also helps. All door boarding and alighting with more than twice as many doors in some instances its quadrupled at major termini also means much faster at moving in an out of such termini and stops. There are many, many many, efficiencies of rail vehicles that have been overlooked here in what appears to be a rather biased, one sided view. Buses — you do not get the benefits of trams such as comfortable ride — you are still dependent on roads.

The trains are smooth riding and very comfortable, the buses are NOT. Either you have a reserved track busway or you run the buses on street. The busway costs just about the same amount as a rail track. Electric buses can be powered by overhead wires trolleybuses or by batteries or supercapacitors. Batteries are heavy and have a short life — it is hoped that research is developing batteries with a longer life. Supercaps should have a life as long as the bus but are bulky for the same energy storage capacity.

To get the same service as is proposed for the CSELR you must have the same amount of reserved track, and to avoid the penalties of excess weight you must have continuous overhead. It is possible that with supercaps you can get them recharged at the bus stops, but this is at present a lengthy process. With four bendy buses you will have a very long stretched out bus stop and think about the recharging points for supercaps or batteries!

Pity the poor passenger trying to find one with room — at least with an articulated tram passengers can, and do, move along to less congested compartments, making room for boarding passengers. Certainly the seating capacity could be better, but we have not yet seen how this is to be arranged.

Using single ended trams and decent design should provide a seating capacity of in a 60 m tram. One benefit of the long tram is that the whole unit drives off as one, it slows as one and at a stop all doors open as one and close as one. It thus behaves as a single unit for traffic purposes, just a rather large one. With four buses there would be delays between a bus ahead starting and the following bus starting — this would mean chaos at traffic lights if they were intended always to operate in convoy.

Effectively they would operate as four separate buses — which would alleviate some of the difficulties I have posed above. Partly agree with Dudley. Where busways do have an advantage is that it is possible to go off the dedicated infrastructure.

So I think the suggesting of four buses linked together is ridiculous. The idea is not to have the buses physically linked to each other, merely that they travel in convoy. The four buses would then pick up all together, leave together and stop at each stop together — in convoy. The stops would be approx the same length as the tram stops. The huge benefit is that at Kingsford, the four buses then break out of Convoy and travel straight through to their final destination — no changing.

All of the rest of the work on the project goes ahead, just tracks and wires do not need to be installed, meaning less disruption for the city. The new electric buses are really beautiful — check out this one in Gothenburg — they even did an acoustic vocal recording on it, they are that quiet.

Simon, just to address your comment about not seeing many bendy buses around, except on dedicated corridors:. I commute every day on bendy buses from Maroubra to Circular Quay via Kingsford and Randwick, and thoroughly enjoy the experience, even with some very tight turns small roundabouts etc. I get a seat, catch up on work, meditate, watch the scenery go by, and it only takes usually around mins.

I travel off peak, when most of my services will be abolished when the trams come in. Using trams, i will need to go to Kingsford or Randwick 15 mins wait for up to eight minutes for a tram, and then have a 40 minute journey to the city, and probably be one of the people standing up, not one of the lucky …but who knows :. It would be really great to get a full cost comparison done between what running 4 electric bendy buses instead of a tram would be — anyone know how to find that info?

Addressing Your Comment Dudley: With four bendy buses you will have a very long stretched out bus stop and think about the recharging points for supercaps or batteries! I had an idea about the passenger trying to find room. Given that the idea is that most passengers are already sorted into their final destinations e. Randwick, Clovelly, Coogee, Maroubra — for a Randwick Bus passengers would simply wait at their stop. For all the other passengers only travelling to central, Surry Hills etc.

If all the buses were electronically synched, e. If you have a look at 4 or more buses in convoy next time you are around town, you will see how remarkably quick and efficient they are, and this is even without the electronic synching. Examples of this are at Elizabeth street. Another benefit I could see would be that at some intersections, the buses could pull alongside in pairs, and travel through the intersection with half the length of a tram, and a much greater speed, before reforming in single file.

Buses with a single bending point are commonplace but what I was referring to was ones with two or more bends in them. These are normally confined to dedicated corridors such as on Transmilenio Bogota. Better to spread them out and increase frequency. Also more limited stops stopping patterns. The analysis is that people voted for it.

You wonder if it would be positive with removing all the counter peak s preventing dead running, but who knows? More to the point, who cares? Yes — as Simon points out the argument about bendy buses v. The discussion is a bit more relevant in relation to other transport corridors such as the northern beaches and Parramatta Road upgrade which are still being planned. In some cases I suspect buses are a better solution, in others, light rail.

I am just moving to Sydney next month from Brisbane. The prime example of this is Dominion Rd, it started with buses running in general traffic lanes, was enhanced with simple bus lanes and will soon be upgraded with superior buslanes, high quality stops and some off-street sections. This will function very well I assume, but it might be the case that patronage growth requires further upgrades in the capacity and standard of service in the not too distant future.

At that point it would be prudent to look at all possible modes or technological innovations. So rather than your analogy of demolishing the harbour bridge to build another in its place, it is perhaps more like fitting the existing bridge with a different system to increase its capacity.

Generally I am of the opinion that trams would be an expensive waste of time for most public transport routes, however for some they may be the most useful and cost effective mode and indeed in other corridors they might be woefully insufficient.

The argument is not to go in with preconceived notions about what to put where, but to look at what is most appropriate. As a Melburnian who uses the public transport system daily I agree with your sentiments in regard to some routes, particularly those that simply run on rails set in the road and share the lane with general traffic.

These are slow and presumably a fairly inefficient use of funds and might be best run using buses. But on other routes, particularly those where the trams run in the median of a boulevard, they are fast, efficient and well patronised. The point again is to not get hung up on preconceptions of a technology but look at what is most appropriate for a specific application. It is definitely debatable, but there are some tram lines in Melbourne that are very highly utilised at all hours of the day.

I would argue that replacing these routes with a bus based system would cost more and ensure a greater loss in revenue, not in the least because you would need two or three buses and drivers to carry the same amount of people as one tram with one driver On other less patronised routes I would agree that buses would be more appropriate, while indeed on some of the busiest tram lines upgrading to heavy rail or metro would also be appropriate.

Guys, that so-called bus riders group in LA will be astroturf. You can safely ignore its logic though not its effect. We get this over here, for example, the Gold Coast Light Rail being undermined by astroturfers, conservative politicians and their small business backers. Trams aka Light Rail Vehicles are bad value if ridership per vehicle is less than 50 and if vehicle per hour is less than But if you are consistently bettering that, good time to start looking at trams.

And remember bus freaks also cannibalise and misallocate the market at the micro level too. If PT is going to be cost-effective and flexible, then buses need to know their place — between trams and minivans. No more than people in an uplift. Obviously even the greatest bus nut would have to see the limit. Some of the pro-bus astroturfers and ideologists have it as sine qua non that there will never be enough PT users to justify something better than buses — but they do their best to make sure their will never be by keeping demand down through crap systems.

NickR and Admin: Regardless of your position on trams, you are now debating the validity of a PT technology compared to others. Because there are very real consequences to adopting alternatives, the debate on which technology is used is valuable and absolutely necessary. Christopher, of course we will end up debating what technology is most suitable for each corridor.