Re: Melbourne's free tram zone - time to go
  TP

The whole argument is ignoring the real problem - the chronic and years-old
under investment in trams, infrastructure (including power supply),
priority and, most importantly, capacity. There are too few full sized (30
metre) trams and the reason for this and the compromise to 24 metre trams
with batteries is, I understand, down to power supply issues. Perhaps
there's some political agenda here to adapt to the future power drought
that we're going to experience. I guess that's one way of riding it out,
but it doesn't do much for capacity and will add even more grief to the
present neglect of public transport and continue to encourage driving.

Even worse, the new trams are not only lower-capacity, but they cost twice
as much as a 30 metre tram imported from Europe. Encouraging local
manufacture is a great objective, but this has a devastating effect on any
public transport budget. If there is another political agenda being pursued
which is not directly related to public transport but to much broader
objectives, it should come from another, more appropriate budget. With
electric buses you could probably justify a small margin of about 20% over
import, using the public transport budget, but with trains (current example
in Queensland) and trams, they cost twice as much to build locally. Much
criticism is made of the NSW government importing a lot of PT vehicles over
the last decade, but the reason was that the huge catch-up and expansion
agenda would have made it unachievable to buy locally, apart from the issue
that local industry didn't have the capacity to supply the volume in the
required time. Now that we're mostly over that hump, they can consider
local manufacture more seriously. But at least we don't generally have a
shortage of capacity.

Don't reduce the passengers, increase the capacity.

Tony P

On Wednesday, 27 July 2022 at 09:50:21 UTC+10gregsut...@...
wrote:

>

>

> You are failing to take into account a number of important factors.

>

> Firstly approximately 80% of the cost of transporting a passenger is the

> wages of the driver. Larger trams means greater productivity per driver

> and more available seats in off peak periods. Its a major factor

> locally (Gold Coast, Sydney are examples) and internationally leading to

> providing trams in heavily used corridors rather than buses.. One has

> to question why Melbourne is not providing greater funding for trams,

> surely they should be preparing for significant increases in public

> transport demand. Many small trams will significantly push up operating

> costs. Where will this money come from?

>

> Small trams actually lead to increased traffic congestion, both tram and

> motor vehicles. Two small trams will take 50% longer than a large tram

> to cross an intersection (safety separation between operating trams).

> Two or more small trams occupy a larger road footprint than one large

> tram and road space is a limited resource. Today trams in Sydney's

> George Street are significantly larger than Melbourne's and run at a

> greater frequency than Swanson Street. Even historically Sydney

> operated larger trams than Melbourne (coupled 80 seat cars compared to

> single W cars) but they had to as the Sydney system was moving virtually

> twice the number of passengers as Melbourne (check out the annual

> patronage between World War 1 and World War 2).

>

> Greg

>

>

> On 26/07/2022 7:41 pm, espee8800 wrote:

> > I would like to think that many small trams should mean a vastly

> > better read shorter headways. Past experience has shown that larger

> > trams mean longer headways. But then what would I know, I'm just a PT

> > user.

>