Frank Krygowski writes:

On 9/23/2018 8:15 PM, AMuzi wrote:
On 9/23/2018 6:33 PM, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Sun, 23 Sep 2018 10:14:27 -0500, AMuzi wrote:

https://maggionews.com/1-man-killed-...ings-saturday/


But he probably wasn't wearing a helmet.
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Cheers

John B.


Bring your 4" tires to ride in Milwaukee:
https://fox6now.com/2018/09/23/cycli...kee-streetcar/
And a helmet to keep your head out of the track.

Street cars puzzle me. They have much higher first cost than buses,
they have much less route flexibility than buses. Their tracks
introduce new hazards.

Sure, they're trendier, and fashion is ridiculously powerful, but
buses could be made just as fashionable.

https://humantransit.org/2009/07/str...ent-truth.html

There is a social status aspect to trams vs buses, at least in the US,
but there are also practical and political aspects. I just ran across
this comment on website, which addresses some of them.

From http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/02...comment-674523

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po8crg says:
October 3, 2018 at 4:19 am

The big advantage of first-generation trams over trolleybuses is that
they were invented first, so lots of cities built tram systems before
trolleybuses were invented.

Trams require less overhead wiring than trolleybuses (trams have one
pickup and do a neutral return through the rails; trolleybuses need two
wires, both a live and a neutral). This means that they can use the
(simpler and more reliable) pantograph rather than a trolley pole for
electrical pickup. Trolleybuses get dewired much more often than trams
do, and take longer to connect back up. A mechanical arm with a camera
and a bit of AI is probably capable of doing an auto-pickup while moving
these days, which makes that much less of a problem – until very
recently a dewired trolley had to stop and the driver had to hook the
poles back up manually.

The big advantage of second-generation trams (ie post-1970s) over
trolleybuses is that they can be much longer. Because of the rails, a
long, multiply-articulated tram will stay in lane when going around a
corner, which is a problem for buses/trolleybuses even with a single
articulation.

Trams are regularly over 50m long, which is far longer than any
trolleybus can be safely – which means that a single tram can carry far
more passengers, making them a useful intermediate-capacity system
between bus/trolleybus and metro.

The other advantage for trams is one that isn’t much talked about – Bus
rapid transit like Bogota or Brisbane, whether petrol buses or
trolleybuses, is a big improvement over normal buses. But BRT schemes
can be squeezed politically or financially – add a short section of
buslane that’s just paint and not physical segregation; add a section of
mixed traffic; cross a road through a signalled junction rather than
grade separation; take away signalling priority at a junction; etc. The
danger for a BRT scheme is that it gets cut down to a few improvements
for the existing buses. Trams, because you have to lay track, can’t be
cut back that much – either there is track somewhere or there isn’t. The
worst cases are the US cities that have unarticulated trams in mixed
traffic; those are completely pointless. But tram schemes work out much
better on average because it’s harder to chip away at a tram scheme
without cancelling large bits of it (the worst is generally taking
dedicated lanes and letting buses in, or replacing grade separated
junctions with at-grade ones with signal priority for the trams). This
is not something that politicians talk about, because it involves an
admission of how crap politicians are, but when politics turns against
trams, they tend to get cancelled; when politics turns against BRT, they
tend to get cut back to pointlessness, which results in lots of really
bad BRT schemes which then gives BRT a bad name.
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