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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

London still has one of the most extensive underground railway systems in the world, as well as the most iconic buses.

Notwithstanding the nostalgia that we often associate with them, trams are not a magical method of transportation. Nothing of value is lost if you can get the same job done with trains underground and buses above. Underground railways have the additional benefit of not taking up precious urban space that could be used by e.g. bicycles. It just happens that digging tunnels is much more expensive than embedding a pair of rails in the pavement, so cities have to think harder about short-term costs vs. long-term benefits.

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Being on the surface adds a lot of value for short trips in a tram (or similar). To reach the subway takes 2-4 minutes of travel down to platform level and back up. To cross the car lane to the tram station in Zurich takes 10-30s if you see the tram coming or read the digital signage, and a few minutes later you can be at your intended destination. Zurich has of course large parking garages, and if you bring your car in to the city you would leave it there and be able to hop around on the trams & buses, taking only a few minutes between your different shopping and eating destinations. I also think as a wealthy car driver you can differentiate yourself from the poor public-transport-dependents by choosing to stand on the tram, showing off your high-end branded shopping bags.

I would very much love to agree with you. But London’s public transportation system, while very good considering its age and the extensiveness of deployment is not perfect; it is not a stretch to call it overburdened.

I lived there for 5 years and absolutely dreaded commuting.

A quick win would be to prevent the morning and evening rush. But that’s another discussion entirely.

If you have ideas on how to prevent that daily nightmare there are 10 million pairs of ears ready to listen :-)

I've done the London commute for 6 years now.

My solution : work out flexible hours with my employer. If I have the stand-up at 11 I can jump in the underground at 9:30, after the worst of the rush is done. Likewise in the evening, work until the worst of the rush is done.

My SO solution: live in the city, work on the outskirts. The commute is effectively against the traffic. Can get a seat and plenty of space at 8:30, top of the rush hour.

There are some solutions but I'm not sure that they scale, though.

Trams are actually a strange beast that's not as cheap and flexible as a bus, and not as efficient as the underground but still quite expensive to build and maintain, which is the main reason many cities abandoned them. A big advantage is that they are electric but once electric buses really take off they'll be a much better compromise for public transport overall. Much of the surface traffic would have to be reduced anyway.

The main advantage of trams over a bus is that in general, the layout is more conducive for rapid boarding and alighting, and the trams can physically be longer and have more room for people.

The main advantage of trams over an underground is that they can be much cheaper to build. Crossrail 2 in London is expected to cost 32 billion GBP; you could build quite a lot of tram for that kind of money.

Only the fact that trams can be larger is inherent in trams. The rest could easily be applied to a bus if someone had the vision to do so.

The on-boarding/off-boarding efficiency of trams would be very hard to replicate in a bus design.

Low floor and equivalent disabled access would be hard too.

The efficiency of metal on metal movement is harder to match with buses.

Big heavy vehicles on bitumen and rubber particulate have environmental costs and maintenance costs (I haven't looked at this one, but people frequently ignore that tyres themselves being used create air particulate pollution).

You can have the equivalent shared pedestrian zone with a tram: search Bourke st mall Melbourne or watch how pedestrians jaywalk with abandonment down Brunswick st Fitzroy that you can't get with heavy rail because of the start/stopping times, and that you don't get with buses because pedestrians don't have the psychological certainty of their travel direction and momentum.

And lastly there is a real psychological town planning point with fixed rail that sees density and value build up around better around permanent paths and installments. It's well and good to dismiss that as someone could do it differently if they wanted to, but its arguing using "shoulds and coulds" against empirical reality.

Aren't most modern city buses with low floors and wheelchair ramps?

Like the other pros and cons, it's a matter of degree and trade off.

We have buses as well (I still use them locally for trips too). I don't have a wheel chair, but I do have a stroller and no car, so I'm using then both heavily. In my old city I often put my bike on the front of the buses and relied on the express bus with commuter dedicated lanes that came every 5 minutes for a commute which worked very well in a town of 400,000 of mostly car drivers. But does it scale?

You can get several prams practically straight onto and off of a flat bottom tram without almost any stopping or logistical penalty.

On buses, not only is it comparatively awkward to get on and off, you have to nod, thank, praise every other passenger for getting out of the way, and you spend most of your time praying you'll be the only one using that particular aspect of the bus, because otherwise it becomes a lot more complicated.

Could you run three times as many buses to accommodate? Sure, but then you end up running into increasing start-stop-merging problems and the bus bunching problem presents itself earlier along the supply curve than with the tram.

Getting the bike on a (small) bus is not the best experience. But that's what trains or subways are for. They take hundreds of people longer distances to the general destination area. Perfect use case if you cycle.

> a flat bottom tram

Only modern trams have this, just like any modern bus. But consider this, a single bus costs several hundreds of thousands of E/$ (double if it's electric). A single tram costs several millions. That's before laying track.

At least in the US, buses tend to only be partially low floor, with a higher section where the engine and fuel tank are in the back.

Bus tires also are generally larger diameter and wider than the wheels of a tram, so the wheel well physically juts out into the low floor section and reduces available space.

And (this may be fixable) the doors on a bus tend to be narrower, almost but not quite wide enough for two people to walk off simultaneously, and are more poorly laid out to minimize distance for passengers to the door.

They are and it takes all of two minutes for the buss driver do deploy the ramp and secure the wheelchair to the cabin

Two minutes is a long time in an individual person's commute, especially if it is done multiple times on the route.

Two minutes is often the difference between making a timed connection to another route and missing it.

> but its arguing using "shoulds and coulds" against empirical reality

Not every city sees it this way. Maintaining the existing infrastructure is very expensive (and even disruptive), not to mention building more. Many cities use it as a backbone to connect several main nodes which makes sense. But they are not very suited to having short stops, can't take you everywhere, and it's hard to re-plan. So in the end they still have to maintain some pretty massive bus fleets that can use already existing road infrastructure.

Vehicle features like accessibility depend on the model of bus or tram, modern ones all have them. And many cities find it a bad idea to mix any kind of traffic with pedestrian zones. The explanation of "travel direction and momentum" doesn't really make sense to me. Buses have a very obvious "front" while trams are usually perfectly symmetrical. And trams are far more dangerous in any accident (weight, stopping distance, metal wheels). If you ever saw a tram breaking down, an accident on the track, or works on the road you know how much more disruptive this can be compared to regular traffic (with trolleybuses coming in a close second). I lived in places where this happened every few days in the morning rush hour.

For cities with deep pockets and which can interleave tram and subway lines to have as much coverage as possible it may be easier. But most cities don't really have deep pockets. Which is why the are many bus-only cities, probably none or very few tram-only cities (none that I've heard of anyway).

If the goal is to replace personal cars a city has to offer something "close" in comfort. Electric buses are a good clean alternative and they're as close to personal car comfort as public transport will ever be.

It's not always _just_ about objective features. I really like trams and trains in general, because they feel "solid" – like an immovable part of the city infrastructure. There are mental benefits to this, I feel. Buses jostle around, abrupty change speeds, etc. Trams... just glide. You are on a movable walkway, seeing the cityscape unfold on both sides as you commute to work.

Trams do not glide. The trams in portland sound like nails on the chalkboard when they round a turn. They also vibrate and thud and have to deal with traffic all the same if they aren't grade separated.

You should see what busses are like now. They are twice as long with an accordion in the middle to round right angle turns. If you need more length you just run more of these busses on the lines. Some of the buss lines I take also accept paying fare at all three doors with the tap card (although fare dodgers are at least 50% of the riders on my bus).

Smartphones have probably changed that a bit. What you say absolutely used to be a factor in my not taking buses. I still don't take them much but it is easier to figure out the routing and where you are these days.

Those buses in the US tend only to be 60 feet long.

To put this in perspective, the longest single tram unit is 183 feet long in Budapest: https://welovebudapest.com/en/2016/04/14/budapest-now-has-th...

And because trams are basically just street legal trains, they can be coupled together like a tram. Seattle eventually plans to couple 4 96 ft units together, for a total length of 384 ft. You couldn't run a bus that long safely in mixed traffic; trams are able to do this because the vehicle is fixed to the tracks.

My untested theory re: trams over buses is that trams are predictably less random.

You’re a tourist. You board a bus. Where does the bus go? A: literally anywhere.

You’re a tourist. You board a tram. Where does the tram go? A: where those tracks, that I can see, go.

This is obviously less relevant for non-tourists but I wonder if it’s a factor nevertheless. It’s hard to go disastrously wrong on a tram, whereas on a bus you might find yourself inadvertently half way down the freeway.

In the US the only thing that stopped municipal trams was bribes from auto manufacturers

In LA they were run by a private company that was mandated by the city to keep fares the same as in like 1910 despite costs being far higher in the 1950s. Service was cut and cut and ridership therefore fell and fell until the company folded and the city ripped out nearly all the rails.

By contrast, nearly the exact same thing happened in NYC. All the trains there were private, went bankrupt, but the city bought and expanded the system instead of tearing it out.

Of course it's far from perfect. It's an ancient, organically grown city that contains roughly the same number of people as the entire country of Switzerland.

Instead of romancitizing about European cities that are 1/20 of their size, I wish Londoners and New Yorkers would look to China and Japan for better examples. Those guys know how to build and maintain 21st century infrastructure for millions.

Transport For London itself doesn't look to small cities. They even offer consulting to large cities (Hong Kong, Sydney, Boston) to share their experience.

https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/business-and-commercial/commerci...

> Those guys know how to build and maintain 21st century infrastructure for millions.

Maybe Japan? Haven't visited. But China has lots of terrible city planning and they are way too into cars. I lived in Beijing for 2 years and Beijing traffic is just the worse.

Beijing is also not a very good city to be a pedestrian in, as every major street typically has 12-16 lanes and waiting at intersections takes forever. It feels like walking along a motorway. Finding shortcuts throughs the alleyways of a city block is also really hard as many of them are gated. Same goes for any major Chinese city really, except for the ones with surviving colonial city centres like Shanghai. The metro is pretty good, but definitely not pleasant to use during rush hour, and changing lines usually entails a lot of walking around underground tunnels.

Besides cost there is also time. Many of London's lines are very deep, and so it takes significant time just to get down there & back up again.

">Nothing of value is lost if you can get the same job done with trains underground and buses above."

I would argue that seeing day light is a thing of value. Also the ability to look out a window and see life is also much more interesting than staring out into dark lifeless subway tunnels. Berlin and Amssterdam both have trams and neither seems to have impinged on space for bicycles.

Trams have the advantage of not being blocked by traffic. You can achieve the same with dedicated bus lanes, but motorists don't always respect those and they take more space.

Not all trams have dedicated tracks. Usually some main lines, otherwise they share the road with cars.

The worst part is that they share intersections with regular roads, exactly where most accidents tend to happen. And the accidents can be a bit more disruptive because a tram can easily block even bigger intersections.

I think a cyclist would feel more safe and less gassed alongside a tram, than a bus (the majority of buses not being electric).

Why not trains underground and trams on the surface in the pedestrian environment like Melbourne CBD :p

(See my other post in this thread for real benefits and design choices trams make over buses and rail)

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