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Comment by tigershark | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? 2800 passengers per day? On the Crossrail just two trains can transport more people (3000). And at peak time there will be 2 trains per minute...

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Per game. Still it is a weird design choice for something where you need a lot of people to move at the same time. They need to decrease the distance of the skates, chain them together or get bigger ones. Automatic people movers are nothing new, but if this is what it takes for the US to be excited about infrastructure then I am all for it. Half of the utility if these types of systems tends to be in the overall design though. The interior of the vehicles, the location and design of the terminus, how long you have to wait etc.

There can't actually be 2 crossrail trains per minute surely? Keeping the tube lines consistently running ~2 minutes apart is barely achieved...

Like, I'd be incredibly impressed if they pull it off - I'm just dubious.

> There can't actually be 2 crossrail trains per minute surely?

Official docs actually say "A train every two and a half minutes at peak time through central London ... trains accommodating up to 1,500 passengers"

http://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/

So it looks like no. It will actually take crossrail 5 minutes or more to exceed that daily capacity of Dugout loop.

You are right I didn’t remember correctly. Still 5 minutes to exceed the daily capacity of this loop is a quite good result I think.

I would say that crossrail will be much higher capacity than that, since it aims to have 41 stations and London is a big city, so there is potential for the same train to carry one group from Station A to Station D, someone else from station C to Station G, another group to replace the first from station D to station K, etc. Large networks are just more useful than ones with 2 nodes.

Most subway lines will have peak scheduled throughputs of about 26-30 trains per hour, or a train every 2 minutes or so. The tracks can support more, but it's a good idea to have some schedule slack so you can send more trains through if things go wrong. Moscow's Metro does manage 45TPH, but that is achieved mostly by having a simplified track layout with no revenue branching.

Prague's metro C has a 90 second interval during rush hour.

I was always wondering about people running to get the next metro.

"Keeping the tube lines consistently running ~2 minutes apart is barely achieved..."

The Victoria line has been quite successfully running 36 trains per hour (100 second headway) at peak times for the past year. Peak = about 3 hours each in the morning and evening.

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