Light Rail Vehicles - LRT, ICTS, Monorail, and more

[ijmorlan]

....hugely outweighs the infinitesimal risk of collision.

Houston says hi

You cut some pretty important qualifiers from what I wrote.

I gave an example of a low-speed, low-traffic situation — a carhouse access — where I suggested it might be handy to have a level crossing, and suggested the risk of collision in those circumstances was tiny. I did not suggest the risk of collision with on-street trackage was infinitesimal. I was specifically trying to avoid a discussion of just exactly why certain systems seem to have a regular problem with collisions and others don’t, even among systems that have significant lack of grade separation.

But in any case this is all irrelevant to my question, which you give the appearance of avoiding and which I now re-word: say you have a city which is considering CityVal. In what way are the concrete tracks and rubber-tired vehicles better than steel rails and standard LRVs? I would argue that they have to be quite a bit better in order to justify their use, because of the reduced flexibility in future extensions of the system, specifically in imposing an absolute requirement for total grade separation on all parts of the system.