From: 'Richard Youl'

On the electric trains, passengers may press the door open button in advance of the train stopping so that the doors open the instant the train has stopped.

Not on Melbourne trains, nothing can happen until the train has stopped (Comeng excepted) and the release button is pressed. The closing sequence, drivers presses door close, chimes sound for three seconds then door starts closing taking another three seconds. Traction power then becomes available, once ALL doors have proved closed. If a knucklehead forces a door then the doors release and attempt go through the closing cycle again. Average stoppage time (in Melb) is 20 seconds.

But with the tram, you must wait for the driver to activate the button which occurs only after the tram has stopped. Most certainly there is no possibility for the doors starting to open before the tram has completely stopped.. Door movements are not as fast as a Z.

Regards,

On 5 Jan 2019, at 7:21 am, Prescott lenkaprescott@... mailto:lenkaprescott@gmail.com > wrote:

Doors should take about 1 second to open and not much longer to close on a well-designed tram. Richard's observation of a 7 second dwell is not unusual for light load situations. Dwell time is significant because when you add it up over the length of a journey it can make a difference of a few to several minutes to a journey time. Certainly in Australia, the situation with the long traffic light cycles used in this country doesn't help though and the only way past that is light priority since the traffic engineers profession here shows no signs of changing its ways.

Tony P

On Friday, 4 January 2019 17:11:29 UTC+11, Dudley Horscroft wrote:

Even more interesting was the reference to the average stop length of 8 seconds. On modern cars I think it takes about that length
of time just to open and shut the doors, let alone allow passengers to board or alight.

Time to get rid of doors on trams!

Regards

Dudley Horscroft