Crazy take by ABC news' Alan Kohler "Why Melbourne's trams were a big mistake"
cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/36550420
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He’s right – trams are fine if you’re only going a few stops. As a means of commuting to work in the city from the suburbs, they’re pretty awful: they’re slow, overcrowded, and unreliable.
He’s right – the best time to build a metro is a hundred years ago, and Melbourne blew their chance. But pausing or canceling the suburban rail link means that we’ll be even further behind. We need to keep going and get it finished. The more connections around the city, rather than radiating out, the less congestion there will be for train commuters going into the city.
We need more public transport, more often, going to places that people want to go, and preferably without going into the city and out again. The longer we wait to do this properly, the more expensive and disruptive it will be.
Trams are some of the most well-liked transit here in Hungary, this is a bit wild to me.
Most of this sounds like local design issue. Trams here are often on separated tracks and so zip through traffic, and are reliable.
Metros are good, but they're for serving longer distance. Trams are easy to hop on and off. Trams cover short to medium trips, metro for trips that take you across the city or nearly, trains for anything longer than that, and buses when nothing else is available.
no, he's not
in a well designed city a few stops is all you should need 80% of the time, in fill with medium density housing and business people want eg shopping, healthcare, eateries etc
coming in from the burbs should not exist as there should be no 'burbs, they're a stain on city design.
Coming from another city should exist via heavy, fast rail for sure
But Melbourne is mostly suburbs, what are you going to do about that?
He's not right about trams being a mistake though.
Saying "we shouldn't have kept our trams and just built more metros" is silly. We should have done both, and not given over so much of our roads to car traffic. We should definitely not cancel SRL, and the changes the premier is pushing through to it are very stupid also.
Alan Kohler said that trams clog up the roads, which is an objectively stupid thing to say if you listen to any town planners.
The whole reason trams are slow IS BECAUSE OF CARS, and the fact that trams don't have priority signalling. Cars are clogging up the roads, not trams.
The only solution to traffic is providing viable alternatives to driving, and trams play a great part in that. Obviously they can't replace the role of trains, but they serve their own function of street-level transport much better than busses. We need trains AND trams.
Here's a great video on why trams are great https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw
Alan Kohler should stick in his lane of finance only, unless he actually wants to read about how public transport works...
trams clog up roads is so laughable
okay so let’s do a thought experiment… you also say trams are crowded? well those people still need to get from a to b within the 10min window that the tram runs, so let’s remove the tram and put them all in their own car: what do you reckon? roads are gonna flow better? or na?
now take that image you had and double the trams and take that many cars off the road… reckon the roads would flow better? i’m thinking probably
If you don't have trams, then you need more buses,and in good old Sydney, guess what they put in on major roads? Bus lanes, which -you are not gonna believe this- clog up the other traffic!
I can't watch the video at work, but yes - this is a dumb take. Trams don't clog up roads, cars do. And that problem addresses the other criticism of trams as well: Trams are only slow when they are stuck behind cars. Trams are quite speedy when they have dedicated lanes/light rail to travel on.
So many people forget that trams and bikes pre-date cars on the roads. Somewhere around 100 years ago, people started to think roads were for cars, rather than cars being the newest things on the road.
Agreed, trams do fill a necessary niche in public transport, and if we could reduce the amount of car traffic, the roads wouldn’t be as clogged. Maybe more tram lines in circles around the city, connecting to major roads and train stations? We still have many of the land reservations where those tram lines were foolishly removed. Anything to reduce one person, one car traffic is a good idea.
Yeah absolutely, there are so many low-cost opportunities to better connect the tram network (routes 3, 5 and 67 should all be slightly extended to connect with the train network for example).
As well as changing existing tram routes to have tram-only lanes, so they don't get slowed down by traffic.
Further, all traffic lights trams go through should be changed for tram priority to reduce time wasted at lights.
And the quality of the track needs to be somewhat improved to allow for high tram speeds (trams can go like 70-80km/h, and do so in sections where they can, like the St Kilda line. But in many places they don't.
Basically, there's a lot of not that expensive (compared to heavy rail) changes we could make if we wanted to. But instead we spend billions building more lanes, which will never fix traffic.