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Well the standard response to this kind of "do it the way everyone does it" is "... change has to start somewhere". It's hard to tell, without hearing a report from a council of open-minded-rigorous-experts, whether some claimed innovation on a particular is actually worth doing or not---but certainly neither of "innovation is always good" and "innovation never works" is true.

Anyway everyone is pretty sure that that something is wrong with the standard train economics as you describe them, because if there wasn't something wrong with it there'd be a lot more trains. I can't tell from the site, or from your comment, if this is the solution, or even worth doing as an experiment... but "don't change anything ever" doesn't strike me as productive either.

The problems with trains are well known and they are not addressing them. There might be unknown problems an well, but the things they are talking about have already been tried and failed for reasons they don't seem to be aware of.

Innovation should require some knowlegde of what is already done - otherwise you invent square wheels.

They're addressing one problem, and one problem only.

Adding a bus line isn't sexy, even bus rapid transit (BRT) sounds like a wet fart. They work, they can work extremely well, but nobody gets excited about it.

This thing is just like a monorail; something worse than a bus but that sounds sexier.

Interestingly, in public policy, how sexy something sounds tends to be directly proportional to how much the public is willing to spend. It's often easier to get 10-100x the money of a bus for a rail link.

CVRT is proposed to replace existing BRT for cost, environmental, and safety reasons.

What is CVRT? I'm getting "Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked)" and though that sounds like it would be cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and safer than a bus ;) I doubt it's what you're talking about.

Hah, I used to work with a CVRT squadron (Scorpions) back in the day, so I think it was muscle memory. It should read CVLR - my apologies!

They are addressing the problem of cost by 1) using BEVs to reduce overhead wire cost, 2) using tighter turn radii to reduce retrofitting needs, and 3) reducing the depth needed to avoid costly subservice infrastructure disruption

There is no evidence that wires are expensive. There is evidence that wires are cheaper if you are running frequent service.

> There is evidence that wires are cheaper if you are running frequent service.

Given the rapid progress in battery and battery charging tech, I doubt that evidence still applies today.

Also, they may be cheaper in the long run but require more up-front investment. Depending on the interest rate, that can swing the answer to the ”what’s cheaper?” question

You’re talking about trains, but this is about trams. The design constraints of building into an existing and very dense road network are complex.

I agree with much of your sentiment, and hope that the Coventry council is being challenged in these sorts of ways, but at the same time I recognise that each city is going to have quite different requirements for trams driving down the roads in its centre.

Perhaps a better push back is: why isn’t this just a better bus network?

A tram and train are the same thing. No difference at all.

There are different modes of operation that differentiate them but fundamentaly they are all trains and face the same issues

They operate in completely different scenarios. They’re the same shape, but they’re a different set of hardware, constraints, accessibility, need to be scheduled in a different way to account for traffic, different safety concerns, different signalling systems, different distances, different surroundings.

Again I sorta see what you mean, but feel you’re massively over simplifying this.

I mean trams basically are street-running trains. The light rail/heavy rail distinction is more one of weight and size than actual issues.

Ceci n'est pas une tram: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kMUANU9H6aw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_bus also exist.

(For me, the big thing about trams and trains and subways, etc is that the track is a kind of social construct - the track tells me that eventually a vehicle will come for me - no need to really worry about timetables, etc. A bus, a bus may come, maybe it won't. It's all psychoillogical but it's there the same.)

The fundamental operational principle is different. Trams operate (typically, on street running sections) on sight - they are responsible for monitoring traffic, and stoping if necessary. Contrast with the block-based approach used for trains, especially in combination with Euro-style positive train control systems.

A tram is just a bus running on smaller, steel, roads.

Maybe another analogy:

A tram is a golf cart or ATV A train is a highway bus

They have different applications and contexts in which they operate, even if they have core similarities

Your comment contradicts itself.

The second sentence is partially true: they do have different modes of operation.

But no, they don’t face entirely the same issues. Trains should hopefully never routinely encounter cars sharing their track and they don’t have to make tight turns to follow existing roadways.

Modern European trams are increasingly grade-separated. See what Marco Chitti has to say about European road design.

Well then there's no difference between overground and underground trains. But it's pretty clear that there are different issues facing building new metro lines.

You’re grossly oversimplifying and ignoring knock on effects.

Eliminating overhead wires isn’t about cost. It’s about being able to build in existing urban areas that don’t want high voltage live wires everywhere, and likely already have above ground infrastructure they would interfere with.

Unfortunately the Coventry VLRT is all about aesthetics over actually transit benefits. If the they were concerned about being useful transit the vehicle would have capacity higher than an articulated bus. Instead the main benefit of Trams/LRT over buses, capacity, is sacrificed leaving no real benefits. You can see the same thing with the Obama ere streetcars in the USA where most of them proved no real benefits over the buses the run alongside them but at least they retained the capacity even if it was never needed.

London’s DLR is a gadgetbahn. For all its obvious limitations it’s been quite successful. Lots of new stations, lots of expansions, decent integration with traditional rail. VLR would work similarly.

I don't think it's gadgetbahn

>something that claims to be innovative but in fact doesn't do anything not thought of before and doesn't solve any problems

The DLR was I think about the first decent scale autonomous rail system and provides a lot of transport.

I mean things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Tran... predated it by a decade but is dinky in comparison.

Kobe’s Port Island Line is generally considered the first fully automated metro and opened in 1981. Lille Metro is about the same scale as the DLR and opened in 1983.

Finding the right balance of capacity is a tough problem because cities generally intend to grow, and it's expensive to to have unused capacity. As well if you actually build for that, people will say the project is a failure since ridership will seem low.

> If you want to build a train the best way to save money is to build exactly the same as everyone else does: standard off the shelf trains, running on standard off the shelf rails, and standard off the shelf overhead rail.

You are speaking like a naive person that thinks that most the challenge is the physical world

But in UK most of the challenge is archaic and idiosyncratic laws, disproportionately powerful NIMBY’s and the treasury brain.

The treasury brain will approve a project with 1X capex and 10x opex instead of one that has 2X capex and 1X opex

The NYMBY is wild and unpredictable, they just killed project for a data centre placed on top of a literal dump because it would ruin the view of that dump from a motorway (nobody lives there)

A project to re-open 3 miles of railway that already exists took 5 years to approve and 80,000 pages of environmental accessment

But if it’s innovate and designed in UK it might just slip through

These shelves must be huge!

In Australia, highest cost is buying up required land and construction of buildings. We spent ~100mil USD on a single, open air platform for a line extension of exactly that one station. It was about 5 km of extra track. It is amazing we have any trains at all.

Have I encountered a fellow Rail Natter enjoyer?

Never heard of him until now. Looks interesting but I don't have tine for anouther hour long podcast in my life... I suspect he is drawing on similer sources as me - there are many other transit advocates saying what I am in greater detail.

Ah yeah it's likely he's distilling various ideas that are often discussed within the rail/transport industry in a form suitable for a more casual audience