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  #901  
Old Posted Dec 15, 2020, 1:22 AM
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Originally Posted by ardecila View Post
The REM is a light metro but the tram is something different, looks like it will run east from the city along the waterfront out to Pointe aux Trembles with a branch to Anjou.

So strange that they would not just extend the metro Line 1 rather than building a whole new tramway to downtown.
Extending the metro would be MUCH more expensive for one. The system is fully underground and must remain so since it isn't weather proof. You can build a lot of surface rail for the same cost to lengthen an underground metro with 500ft, 152m long platforms. But even if the money was available, it wouldn't even be as good of service since it would be a slower trip to/from suburban areas because of the number of stops and likely a lower top speed.
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  #902  
Old Posted Dec 15, 2020, 3:32 AM
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Originally Posted by ardecila View Post
The REM is a light metro but the tram is something different, looks like it will run east from the city along the waterfront out to Pointe aux Trembles with a branch to Anjou.

So strange that they would not just extend the metro Line 1 rather than building a whole new tramway to downtown.
Is REM light rail or light metro? Are trams streetcars or light rail?
If light rail can be both, that is a pretty large swat of trains.

How would you distinguish between streetcars, light rail, light metros, and metros?
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  #903  
Old Posted Dec 15, 2020, 5:47 AM
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I'd consider REM metro rather than light metro considering that it's supposed to have 4 car trains with each car being about 3m wide and 23m long. That makes the trains larger than most trains on the Paris metro which i generally don't hear described as a light metro. I think the name came from the original plans for an LRT to cross the new Champlain Bridge but when things were unified into a single new REM project, there were changes
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  #904  
Old Posted Dec 31, 2020, 7:01 PM
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How Public Transit Is Playing A Role In Sun Belt City Growth

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesr...h=26f45578287e

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.....

- Many renters are flocking to smaller cities eager to get away from the high-cost rental areas now that remote work has become the norm. Those coming from large cities, like New York, often do not have a car and are used to relying on public transportation to get around. Also, as jobless numbers rise across the country, many will be looking to downsize expenses and may be reluctant to make a big purchase like a car. — For local residents, the influx of new people to their area could also mean more crowded roads and a strain on existing public transit systems. To avoid frustration from citizens old and new, places like Austin, Texas have voted to expand their public transportation system, which will help as increasingly more people flock to the bustling city. Not only does this help the community access these services but it also helps improve community relations by increasing the likelihood that people will use the system to visit local businesses and attractions more often, further supporting the local economy.

- Public transit also provides job opportunities to residents living outside of a city's business hub. In Phoenix, for example, 2020 ridership goals for their light rail were reached in 2018, two years ahead of schedule and only 10 years after its launch back in 2008. Since its launch, 35,000 jobs along with new development have come to areas within a half-mile of the city's light rail system. — The benefits of improved public transportation programs also extend beyond reduced traffic and access to jobs to include green initiatives as well. These expansions and improvements help the environment by reducing the overall carbon footprint of the city. Many cities across the country are focusing on green initiatives like reducing emissions caused by traffic congestion, cultivating green spaces throughout cities and improving access for cyclists and pedestrians to reduce reliance on cars. This heightened interest in the environment and the large influx of people coming to smaller cities means both usage and demand for public transportation services will likely be on the rise and meeting those demands will be paramount for continued success.

.....



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  #905  
Old Posted Mar 24, 2021, 11:38 AM
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Kansas City streetcar

Kansas City's riverfront streetcar agreement sits penstrokes from approval

By Thomas Friestad
Kansas City Business Journal
Mar 23, 2021

"A cooperative agreement making its way through four Kansas City entities details obligations for funding, building and operating the 0.55-mile new streetcar route between the River Market and Berkley Riverfront..."

https://www.bizjournals.com/kansasci...ment-work.html
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  #906  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2021, 6:12 PM
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Dallas City Council Decides if It Wants a Downtown Subway

https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburne...solution-vote/

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- The Dallas City Council unanimously approved the resolution on Wednesday afternoon, which frees DART to pursue the project’s federal funding. It has to work on other options for the project’s east side. --- The subway would double capacity while giving the light rail system a relief valve in the event of a derailment or some other disruption, as the current system bottlenecks on the single rail line through downtown. --- The D2 line would go from near Victory Park to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science south into downtown. It heads east along Commerce as it makes its way into Deep Ellum. There are four planned subway stops, which DART believes are significant development opportunities. It emerges as a surface line on Good Latimer. When it reaches Swiss Avenue, DART wants to put an above-ground “wye” junction, a Y-shaped confluence of the rail lines.

.....



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  #907  
Old Posted Mar 29, 2021, 2:33 PM
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Originally Posted by electricron View Post
How would you distinguish between streetcars, light rail, light metros, and metros?
You can punch holes in this with plenty of exceptions, but broadly speaking as a rhetorical shortcut I'd say:
  • Streetcars run in the street and have stops every couple blocks.
  • Light rail runs in a mix of street and off-street and goes to the suburbs with stops every half mile outside downtown.
  • Light metro is fully grade separated but trains have 4 railcars or fewer.
  • Metro is fully grade separated but trains are longer.

That said, personally I think we should just say "trams" for anything that has the ability to run in the street, metro for anything that inherently requires its own tracks & row, and regional rail for anything that can run on freight tracks (even if it has its own tracks). But sadly I'm not in charge.
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  #908  
Old Posted Apr 4, 2021, 12:27 AM
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Yup. What was just said... Edmonton for example was originally designed and built as a "pre-metro" using Siemens-Duwag U2 high floor cars operating in a central subway beneath downtown that was designed for 5-car trains which can and do run during peak hours. Each train can in theory move a cool 1000 people in 5 cars at once. This was modelled directly on Frankfurt and there are a couple of cool but hard to find books on the subject that go back. Outside the core, the stations are about 1 km apart or more.

Calgary in theory is also a "pre-metro" however it's closer to an LRT in that its stops are much closer together on most lines and it operates at grade on a transit-way downtown instead of using a subway tunnel (although it's always been planned but not built except for a short abandoned stretch building under the City Hall/Administration Building blue wedge... And until recently it only could use 3-car trains because the downtown stations weren't designed for longer trains. That has since been changed with the rebuilt platforms all upgraded for 4-car trains...

So... Clear as mud! ;-) But as you can tell there's a lot of overlap and blurring of lines even when cities use the exact same rolling stock they are sometimes run entirely differently, although if you look at all the studies the advantages of both systems are virtually identical. They deliver an operating system that runs at about 30 km/h.
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  #909  
Old Posted Apr 4, 2021, 1:00 AM
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  #910  
Old Posted Apr 4, 2021, 3:16 PM
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One more from last night - opening date was Dec 2020 - now TBD still, but likely August/Sept.


my own
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  #911  
Old Posted May 12, 2021, 5:07 PM
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European cities revive tram networks to cut transport emissions

https://www.politico.eu/article/euro...ort-emissions/

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- Many EU countries are making decarbonized urban transport a central pillar of their pandemic recovery fund spending plans, now being sent for approval to the European Commission. — “We’re reinforcing a system that was created over 150 years ago to service residents scattered throughout our seven hills, and which now has the added value of being a decarbonized transit option for our city,” said Lisbon Mobility Alderman Miguel Gaspar. — Many European cities built elaborate tram systems during the first half of the last century, but most of those networks in Western Europe were later scrapped thanks to pro-car policies. “Lisbon only bucked that trend thanks to its unique geography,” said Gaspar. “There were attempts to replace the trams with buses, but these were unable to go up our city’s steep hills or make their way around our narrow streets.” Although the tram system survived, Gaspar said it was ill-funded and that some lines were shut in the 1980s and '90s.

- As in Lisbon, Berlin is revamping its tram network. While carriages still circulate on pre-war rails that were maintained in the Soviet-dominated eastern half of the city, there's a push to restore lines in the west that were phased out by car-friendly municipal governments between 1954 and 1967. The German capital's Transport Senator Regine Günther, a Green, calls projects to expand eastern tramlines into the old West Berlin neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln announced in April an “unprecedented tram offensive" to boost clean mobility. Trams make up a big chunk of the city's €28 billion plan to boost public transport with an extra 70 kilometers of track planned in the coming 15 years. Günther says trams offer a good way to close gaps in the city transport network, as they are cheaper to build than subways. "Trams will become an increasingly important part of the mobility transition in Berlin," she said. — Berlin's case offers a microcosm of the fate of trams across Europe. While cities in former Soviet satellite countries maintained extensive tram networks, think Budapest, Prague and Warsaw many in the capitalist half of Europe uprooted entire networks in favor of extra road space.

.....



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  #912  
Old Posted May 14, 2021, 12:59 AM
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Is there a chance that some of the new downtown streetcars in US cities like Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, KC, etc. could be converted to proper light rail systems?
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  #913  
Old Posted May 14, 2021, 1:08 AM
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Do you mean tied into a larger track network which would function more like a proper light rail system?
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  #914  
Old Posted May 14, 2021, 1:37 AM
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Is there a chance that some of the new downtown streetcars in US cities like Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, KC, etc. could be converted to proper light rail systems?
That would depend mostly on the minimum radius of the various curves in city streets. Generally, streetcars can navigate at slow speeds turns with radius as low as 50 feet (~15 meters), light rail trains trains with turns with radius around 82 feet (~25 meters).
Great places to look how minimum curve sizes look in city streets is Camden, NJ, where Stadler GTWs make 90 degree turns in downtown. Then compare that with NJT light rail minimum curves in Jersey City. Then compare them with streetcars minimum curves in Kansas City.

Of course, a city wishing to change vehicle types could just rebuild the sharpest turns. But there are other things that a different as well, like floor heights and platform heights, and the width of the vehicles. So the costs to change vehicle types can be significant. But not necessarily, a Siemens S70 streetcar is basically the same as a Siemens S70 light rail vehicle - just the length of the light rail trains/streetcars are different.

So the answer to your question is "It depends" or "maybe".
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  #915  
Old Posted May 14, 2021, 2:08 AM
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I'm not sure they where asking about all that highly technical nitty gritty.
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  #916  
Old Posted May 14, 2021, 2:58 PM
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Is there a chance that some of the new downtown streetcars in US cities like Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, KC, etc. could be converted to proper light rail systems?
A streetcar network and a light rail system work at different scales. Streetcar systems can cover a core city, but they're not fast enough to serve the suburbs as well if they are running on streets the whole way (unless you like a 90 minute commute to downtown).

Light rail systems can use dedicated right-of-way, on the ground or buried/elevated, to travel at much faster speeds across a region and from city to suburbs. But those faster speeds also require a much heavier vehicle. If you tried to operate a lightweight streetcar at high speed it would be bone-jarring and vomit-inducing for riders. And with the heavier light rail vehicle comes a requirement for beefier tracks to support the load. Most downtown streetcars were built on the cheap, so they can only support lightweight streetcar vehicles but not heavier light-rail vehicles.

I think the future of streetcars is tied to the future of city buses. If cities invest in their bus systems and build ridership (and encourage new growth near bus routes) eventually some bus routes will be busy enough that a streetcar conversion makes sense. Of course, to have an effective streetcar requires either taking a lane away from cars or having a landscaped median in which to build.
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  #917  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2021, 9:18 PM
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Bring back streetcars to Buffalo? Some lawmakers say yes

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/b...7ac392faf.html

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…..

- Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes sees streetcars as an alternative for those who are reluctant to take the bus. — "I think any level of transportation that has historic value and a level of nostalgia would be good for the City of Buffalo," Peoples-Stokes said. "Any value you add to public transportation that makes it easier for people to get around is a good value." — Transit advocates say it would waste resources better spent on other ways to move people around, especially in Buffalo, where those in 28% of households don't own a car.

- "I think they're over-romanticizing the optics of streetcars," said Simon Husted of Buffalo Transit Riders United, who sits on the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority's citizen advisory committee. — The limits of public transportation in Buffalo, he said, can demoralize people who can't afford a car or whose medical or legal reasons prevent them from owning one. — Husted would rather see funds spent on rapid bus lines that offer high frequency and better quality of service. Besides, he said, bringing back a streetcar system could take decades.

- Still, pursuing streetcars would not make Buffalo an outlier. Twenty-six North American cities have turned to streetcars since 2000, including Milwaukee, Kansas City, Atlanta and Portland, Ore., said Bruce Fisher, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at SUNY Buffalo State. — Fisher suggests a 6.1-mile trek from the downtown Amtrak Station, past Larkinville to Bailey Avenue and then along Bailey, ultimately ending at the Ridge Road Park & Ride lot near Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens. — Fisher estimates the cost at $35 million per mile, or a little more than $210 million for the entire stretch.

- Another route, he said, could follow Amherst Street from Niagara Street to Bailey, a 4.6-mile stretch that Fisher estimated would cost $150 million. — "We can do something transformative that actually meets the needs of our people," Fisher said, and address "the crushing need for reliable, convenient, efficient and frequent public transportation." — The way federal infrastructure dollars will be disbursed could help those seeking to bring streetcars to Western New York. — T This project makes a whole lot of sense in a place like Buffalo, because we already had a full streetcar grid at one time, and we have underutilized hydropower plants to the north of us.

…..
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  #918  
Old Posted Jul 16, 2021, 7:49 PM
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Capital Metro unveils initial plans for six underground rail stations in downtown Austin

https://communityimpact.com/austin/c...wntown-austin/

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- Capital Metro unveiled initial plans July 13, detailing how much of its future light rail network will navigate the downtown Austin corridor. This section, which will likely be the most complicated and expensive portion of Project Connect, will include six underground stops at Republic Square, Congress Avenue, Government Center/Capitol West, the Rainey/Mexican American Cultural Center, Convention Center/Brush Square (currently Downtown Station) and the Auditorium Shores stations.

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  #919  
Old Posted Aug 6, 2021, 1:14 PM
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A light rail line to Houston's Hobby Airport could be one step closer to reality


Jay R. Jordan
Aug. 5, 2021
Houston Chronicle


Here's what light rail could look like in Houston. Solid blue lines are planned line extensions, which include lines to Hobby Airport, Houston's municipal courts building and service up to North Shepherd Drive. (Metropolitan Transit Authority)

"A new light rail line to Hobby Airport could be one step closer to reality as the Senate sets a vote on President Joe Biden's $1 trillion infrastructure plan.

The massive Metro Next bond approved by voters in 2019 is supposed to expand transit all around Houston, Harris County and smaller cities, but few of the planned projects have come to fruition yet – planning routes, conducting environmental studies and coordinating with community members takes time, after all.

When the plan was passed, voters gave the thumbs up for the Metropolitan Transit Authority to borrow up to $3.5 billion to improve local bus routes, create more regional networks and, yes, extend several light rail lines..."

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-t...e-16366484.php
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  #920  
Old Posted Aug 10, 2021, 5:32 PM
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Tampere light rail network opens under budget and ahead of schedule

https://www.railjournal.com/passenge...d-of-schedule/

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- SERVICES on Phase 1 of the new light rail network in Tampare, Finland, were launched on August 9, more than four months ahead of schedule and €34m under budget. --- Construction and operation of the railway has been implemented through an alliance model. Tampere Tramway, a company owned by the City of Tampere, was responsible for building the infrastructure, procuring equipment, and arranging the financing for the project. The track, stops and depot were designed and built by the Tramway Alliance, which included the City of Tampere, VR Track, YIT Rakennus, and Pöyry Finland, with Tampere Tramway and the City of Tampere as client parties in the alliance. Tampere Region Public Transport (Nysse) is responsible for organising public transport in the Tampere region, with VR contracted to operate the services and maintain the fleet. --- As well as the construction of the light rail line, the Tramway Alliance also undertook a number of parallel projects, including water supply works, cable laying, the renewal of street structures and the construction of new cycle paths. The Alliance was also contracted in 2019 to undertake the renewal of Hämeenkatu, Tampere’s main street, with this finished a year ahead of its scheduled completion in 2022.

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