01-13-2018, 11:15 PM
(01-13-2018, 10:54 PM)Pheidippides Wrote: KC is not a good comparison. It is only 3.5km in length (although it does have 10(!) stations) and has three vehicles running at a time.
Perhaps someone can explain in another thread how KC ended up with this system. The number of stops per km seems very high, the headways low (10-15min), and it only carries 5,700 riders a day despite being free.
Streetcars are trendy right now. So they get installed even in situations where they aren’t really that useful, or with system designs that make them less useful.
A very interesting and relevant article:
http://humantransit.org/2009/07/streetca...truth.html
I am a railfan and wish there were streetcars (and LRT, and freight and passenger rail) everywhere, so it’s a bit painful for me to say, but some streetcar systems aren’t worthwhile. I can live in both worlds, though: I can appreciate a system for its coolness like a kid, while still evaluating it pragmatically for whether it serves a useful purpose at a reasonable cost.
I suspect that some of them suffer from being insufficient — maybe if the system was massively extended to more destinations it would become more useful. Or maybe they are short because funding for a more extensive system was unavailable and really it would have been better not to build the shorter system. Or maybe they should have reserved lanes, possibly even at the expense of general traffic lanes, but that is politically impossible in certain places.