To ensure that any public transport vehicle purchased at any point in time
has the capacity to meet future growth of demand during its service life,
which is at least 30 years for a tram. In other words, you don't buy a tram
to meet today's requirements, you buy it to meet the requirements that city
planners tell you will be needed 20-30 years ahead. The only other option
you have with a tram is to expand its length because trams are modular.
However that's a politically risky option because when it gets to the time,
there might be a government in office that doesn't give financial priority
to doing that and then you're up the creek. There's also the risk that the
tram model may not be supported by the manufacturer that far down the
track. Best to do it now and, frankly, larger trams barely cost any more to
operate.

With buses it's a little easier to adjust capacity in the shorter term as
you might be looking at a front-line service life of maybe 15-20 years.
Vienna and Prague 30-40 years were only operating mainly 12 metre buses,
now in each case some 50% of the fleet is artics, such has been the growth
in demand. Sydney became a transport textbook of what not to do, first
replacing a fleet of 120 passenger trams with 70 passenger buses on a one
for one basis, then creeping up to 12 metre buses capable of carrying 80
(though later restricted to less than 60 by the union). Now there is a
huge crisis of capacity and less than 15% of the city-wide fleets are
artics - and the crisis goes on while the bus boys convince Ministers to
stop buying artics in favour of their beloved (but highly inefficient)
double deckers. Meanwhile there is a struggle to belatedly reinstate
tramways through a morass of implementation disasters. Anybody who believes
in limiting capacity to what is required only today should look at Sydney.

Tony P

On Saturday, 1 December 2018 13:41:25 UTC+11, 1040melbtram wrote:
>

> Future proofed? Oh you mean to cover the next five minutes or next

> political term whichever is shorter.

>

>