Why new street transit vehicles tend to be low floor

[casper]

Originally Posted by outoftheice

I'd like to flip the question around... what exactly makes the high floor vehicles so superior to going low-floor?

The common arguments I've heard are:

- Commonality with the existing fleet. But we know that's BS because that only works if they order high floor LRVs AND order them from Siemens. Even that argument is tenuous because there's not huge commonality between the various generations of Siemens LRVs.

- Greater capacity. But we know that's BS because the Wikipedia figures posted above show the Citadis low-floor LRVs have a greater capacity than the s200 high floor LRVs we ordered last time.

Soooo..... why exactly do people keep pushing this narrative that high floor LRVs were an obviously superior choice for Green Line that 'silly hall' over-looked?

High floor gives you a passenger compartment that is one big rectangular box. You can arrange seats anywhere you like and put doors in where every you want to.

Low floor has the wheel well going into the passenger compartment space. You have to box that in and then the constrains where you put seats, where we can have doors. How many doors you can have. You lose a lot of flexibility.

I don't know which works best in a snow environment. I would guess like an SUV, having some the vehicle higher up on the tires makes life easier but I don't know.