>

> There is just so much nonsense posted about 'metro' vs 'heavy' rail, and

> speed vs capacity, and the dwell-time myth.

>

Sydney's 'metro' does nothing which the existing designs couldn't do.
Convenience needs frequency and short station spacing.
People who focus on dwell time state that Town Hall needs 5 minutes,
therefore every station needs 5 minutes. Town Hall doesn't need 5 minutes:
it needs only 70 s per train, and that only because trains are so
infrequent than numbers build up.
The sock puppet premier boasts that the 'metro' will have a train every 5
minutes, and soon every 4 minutes.
Paris has been running double-deck on 2 min headways for well over 10 years.
In the age of the wheelchair, dwell times of 60 s are often needed anyhow.
In the age of door locking and platform barriers, 10 s dwell times have
vanished. Even Paris metro is onto 20 s.
Now we have the razzle-dazzle of 130 km/h for suburban train: useless. I
have a spreadsheet through which I can run any parameters.
At the moment I have it on a Hitachi: 992 kW for 181 t. I have set a
braking rate of 0.7 m/s/s. Of course 1.0 is achievable, but Victoria's PTV
claims that maintenance is so hopeless that it can't achieve designed specs
reliably; all signalling overlaps are based on degraded performance. I
have held station spacing at 1.5 km. Anything more isn't a real metro.
All of the time saved by going fast is lost in getting to the station.
The train reaches 90 km/h before it is time to start braking again. Start
to stop is 101 s; cycle time is 130 s and average speed is 41 km/h.
I have done lots of variations a few years ago. Powering all axles proved
to be a waste of money: the amount of extra acceleration wasn't available
for sufficiently long to make any difference. Reducing dwell time is
useful, but too hard to achieve in the age of the wheelchair. For most
stops, a double-deck train would need no more dwell time than a single
deck, and the performance need be no worse. The fact that Sydney is so
sluggish is nothing to do with deckedness. Even if double-deck can't run
at the headways of single deck (a myth which I dispute vehemently),
double-deck at 24 tph provides more capacity per track per hour than
single-deck at 30 tph. The problem in this nation is lack of capacity, not
lack of speed. Double deck at 30 tph (as in Paris) is the winner, but the
useless NSW government built its toy to prevent that.