And presumably farms/gravel quarries and stuff like that that generate massive queues of trucks, whereas the real-life gravel quarry in the next village to me generates maybe 3 trucks per day of traffic and the farms between my town and the neighbouring village generate pretty negligible traffic.
This might be possible. Just don’t mention the city skyline part. It’s a game, not a simulator. The game design makes a lot of compromises to make it fun not realistic, which is good it’s a game. Also it doesn’t take all into account, again a game.
french here. I consider that when a city hit 100 000 inhabitants, it's time to build a tram. They are very useful in towns of that level, Like Orleans or Tours. But for smaller towns, it could be too expensive, and a hight frequency bus is often sufficient enouth.
I agree. Although Tours tramway is a bit of a disgrace, not because the system is bad (I actually love the overall design of the rolling stocks and the tram stops), but because it is way to small of a network. Tours needs probably three tram lines.
I am from Frankfurt and I love our Stadtbahn/U-Bahn. It takes me from the edge of the city to the center in 15 minutes and frequent enough, that I don't need to know the schedule, even late at night. Combined with the Trams, Busses and S-Bahnen it creates a very good public transit system for the whole region.
I live just outside Frankfurt and find that fare integration and timetable integration (from the regional transport authority RMV) together with the app with real-time information on connections make travel soooo easy. Then of course there's the deutschland ticket, which makes everything so affordable. Good bye car.
@@malcolmsmith5482 Personally, i think the deutschland ticket goes a little to far. Germany already has a serious deficit in maintaining the rail network. Going that cheap, will divert funds to rapidly increase passenger volume and even more strain the infrastructure, rather than long term improvements. Long term, more people switch, if you can make it reliable and excellent service, than just making it cheap.
It's a service, not a buisness. It's not supposed to make money. The Autobahn is bleeding money too. The biggest difference tho is that the Autobahn get's more funding while rail get's left behind.
I wouldn't call Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Copenhagen small cities. Apart from that, Copenhagen completely stopped its trams in favour of buses in 1972. In 1996, it was decided to build an automatically operated metro because of the best cost-benefit ratio. Frankfurt and Stuttgart never banned their trams. Whether you plan a metro/tram from scratch or whether something grows historically should also be considered.
@@RMTransit But many commuters from the metropolitan regions: -Frankfurt/Rhine-Main around 5.91 million -Stuttgart metropolitan region 5.4 million and Copenhagen metropolitan region 2 million people.
@@nettcologne9186 My guy, the Stuttgart metropolitan region is a huge chunk of Germany, and so is the Rhine-Main region. Such areas are covered by regional transit, not trams and metros. It's quite irrelevant how many people live 50km away from the city, rather the population of the urbanised area is what matters here. These cities have a population of 500,000 - 750,000, which is just slightly big by European standards, and fairly small by international ones. That distinction is very important by the way, as what seems like a big city to us Europeans, is a village in China and a small city in the US.
@@Ruzzky_Bly4t Depending on whether you look at "metro areas" or individual cities, between 50-87% of Americans live in cities below 500k. I'd love to see content regarding sprawled cities in the 250k range and what might reasonably be done with transit.
@@flopunkt3665 because in most British cities, even large ones like Leeds, they only have buses. Birmingham only has a single tram line with 2.2 million citizens in its metropolitan area. Most UK tram networks have no tunnels with underground stations under the city centre and in some cases, they even have to crawl through pedestrianised areas at 10mph.
@@lazrseagull54 Don't forget the terrible suburban rail which runs half hourly if you're lucky and never has fare integration with other local transit or good branding. It's a shame because if they just sorted that out most British cities *could* then claim to have a respectable S-Bahn-style system.
@@elijahjbennett 💯 fare integration and consistent branding would be appreciated. Needing to buy seperate tickets for bus and rail puts people off UK public transport. Route numbers for the trains would be great too. We don't call the 38 bus "the Arriva service to Clapton Pond calling at Grosvenor Gardens, Wilton Street, Hyde Park Corner, Old Park Lane/Hard Rock Cafe, Green Park Station, etc." requiring passengers to listen through the stops to know which line they're catching.
@@flopunkt3665 because they're all something, most medium sized cities in the UK have woefully inadequate public transport infrastructure, and no intermodal fare integration.
The best system is the one that gets actually built AND is budget sustainable to avoid budget shortfalls that will cut services. I'm looking at you TransLink.
It also really depends on the structure of the city - if your city is sprawling with a lot of lower-density suburbs, you need a Stadtbahn, because you need to cover more area. If your city is more centralised, you will be better served by an automated light metro.
Low density, however, is not good. But despite the name (CityTrain in English), high platform light rail is actually very well suited to interurban applications. These go further without stopping and so interurban stops can easily be located where high platforms are possible and do work.
@@crowmob-yo6ry But what it does not have is CityTrain-like platform height. References to CityTrains in that video are too high floor ones, except for the Karlsruhe tram-trains, with their medium sort of floor height and matching platform height. Reece does also have a whole video on CityTrains and makes it clear in that video that the real ones are high floor, with stepless entrances or dual height entrance steps.
@crowmob-yo6ry Man if only we didn't have the downtown bottleneck. However, the biggest problem the system has is its inability to serve suburb to suburb trips, which a sprawling multi-nodal city like Dallas and it's suburbs really needs. Namely north Dallas into plano, since it's an extremely heavy hitter (almost as much as Dallas) in terms of office employment. Realistically though, the busses should be doing more heavy lifting than they are. But they've sucked for a decade so to the trains people went if at all possible.
Fun fact: Toulouse metro network (two lines of about 15 km each, using VAL rolling stocks) transports daily about as many people as the entire Chicago subway network (each roughly 400000 ppl per day, although Toulouse is building a third line which will dramatically increase this figure in the future).
And the new line will be a 'heavy rail' in North American terminology (and Rennes' metro daily ridership is 225k, the city is building several BRT lines to complement the network)
The new line will have a 27km long span and the metro type will be a Alstom Metropolis, mesurating 36meters it can transport up to 386 passengers to 486 passengers by just adding a wagon between, it can have 9 wagons which is roughly 324 meters. Its 2,70 meters wide and its automatic. Plus not being pneumatic like the 2 first line
A TGV seat can be a very nice office (although I recommend the first class, which is anyway not that more expensive than second class with SNCF). I hope you enjoyed Rennes!
Personally I think automated light metro with ultra high frequency is a better enabler of car free lifestyles. Reliable high frequencies also make trips with transfers a lot more likely. A bus to metro to bus journey can be a lot more palatable if there is barely any wait for the metro. Urban planners are also a lot better at making the areas under elevated rail pleasant environments these days. Which really helps make these systems attractive.
The downside is that with such a system you'll only have a select number of corridors, but cannot really cover a wider area. So it really depends on the structure of the city.
@stephanweinberger Absolutely. While a true star city design would be favorable for higher density, real cities often dont look like that. A rapidly growing city with a lot of space available should probably opt for the Metro. They can focus dense developments further outward and leave out space in between development corridors for green strips or cover that low density space with buses. But existing larger urban areas with medium density, that exceeds the capacity of buses, probably dont have real viability for such corridor centered light metros and might be better off with a web of light rail lines that overlap closer to the core to run as full metros.
@@stephanweinberger There's always a balance cities have to make between investment in transit which caters to current demand and current city strucutre and investment in transit which is designed to induce new demand and influence development structure. ALM a lot of the time falls under the second category. It certainly isn't a magic wand and a lot of other factors have to line up for ALM to be worth it.
@@RMTransit it all depends on the capacity requirements. Also, especially small cities will also have a problem with financing real frequent bus services (labour cost).
Every time Reece covers VAL, it's a great time. A side note: Nuremberg's U3 U-Bahn line has wide and short automated trains, the same capacity as Montreal's REM does, however, it does not implement platform screen doors.
10:26 That's a Frankfurt tram (low-floor), not a Stadtbahn (high-floor). The networks are quite separated, only the maintenance facility is shared. In Stuttgart, the tram system was gradually converted to Stadtbahn - it took ~25 years and included a change from narrow to standard gauge. In Cologne, there are low-floor and high-floor Stadtbahn lines. Many other German cities (like Freiburg and Erfurt) call their tram system "Stadtbahn" for marketing reasons
The term is also used for funding reasons/network design reasons. The german state does fund newly built Stadtbahn-Systems or Tracks with grants that cover up to 90% of the cost, but not Trams (as a rule of thumb). The distinction being further station spacing and, most importantly, as little in-traffic-running as possible. The separate right of way is what distinguished the Stadtbahn term from legacy tram Systems. After WW2 cities in the west had to decide wether to upgrade to Stadtbahn or downgrade to buses - with a few exceptions that kept their legacy systems. As one wouldn't wanna build a "worse" mixed traffic system from scratch today, only Stadtbahn-like designs get federal funds when you build a new tram system
@@GeoSonstHarmlos yes, but fun fact: the tracks of the tram and u Bahn system actually connect in several spots and are interoperable, (e.g.the terminus of what is now U7 at Heerstraße, through which trams pass regularly to access the maintenance depot nearby). Although I don't believe U Bahns ever travel on the tram lines, if only for reasons of their physical size and traffic.
@@KayAwoooo The route that the line U5 runs along used to be a tram-line, that also went underground at Konstablerwache. Due to this fact, it was eventually converted into a Stadbahn line, by, well... just running Stadbahn cars on it instead of tram cars, and adjusting the hights of the stops. You can actually see it in this video as there is a lot of footage of the U5 in there.
I live in a small City near Berlin which has a Population of 28000 people. Weve got our own tram network an S Bahn line which connects us to Berlin and even an Ferry which is a Unique type. It runs on Electricpower. Unfortunately tho some parts of our Tram network has been removed in 2006. They didnt need it anymore because the DB canceled the Rail Connection for our Tram/Trainnetwork. The City is Called Strausberg
There are so many American cities that should have Light Metro systems or Stadtbahns at least. I wish SLC had one or botb of those systems. A downtown tunnel or elevated line through SLC with the trains operating at street level elsewhere would really help the system
@@sawyerhamilton446 Salt Lake City and vicinity are sooo sprawled in their N-S axis, that i can hardly see anything else than light rail or suburban trains to serve this "small-medium metropolis"...
@francoisdandurand a Stadtbahn could easily serve that because so many of the larger cities follow that north-south corridor. But we definitely need to scale up our Regional Rail (FrontRunner) capacity too.
Hell, I live in Chicago, which sounds way too large for a stadtbahn, but our existing transit system is a few outdated metro lines that cannot travel very fast and dozens of overworked bus lines that desperately need dedicated bus lanes on a sprawling but dense - for America - metropolitan area. The north side of Chicago is streetcar suburbs stretching for miles and miles...poorly serviced by transit. The grid pattern stretches into the near suburbs who have very poor transit, and while the middle and outer ring suburbs have the loop-de-loop local street design, their main avenues are still in straight lines great for transit and most have real downtowns. Some are currently connected with commuter rail, but there are several near Chicago proper that could be connected via stadtbahn that then connects to the commuter rail and metro stations in Chicago, which are functionally completely separate systems, with very few of their stations aligning, even when their right-of-ways are within blocks of each other. Where a stadtbahn would be most powerful here I think is along the Fox River, however, where an interurban used to run. The downtowns along the river are starting to revitalize or already have, connect three different commuter rail lines to the city, and just need local officials to approve density increases and mixed-use development for such a line to be economically feasible. Quite often have I found myself traveling from the town my parents live up the river to another riverside downtown to an event or to enjoy the businesses in that town. Or now that I live in the city, taking the commuter rail line to Aurora and then having to get picked up from the station by a friend or family member just to travel five miles...too far to walk and very difficult to bike in the winter.
For Salt Lake City, I'll definitely say one of your best options is to invest heavily in the Front Runner and basically turn it into an Express metro gradually over time. For the Light rail, then some kind of Stadtbahn solution could be a good retrofit in Downtown SLC.
@drdewott9154 that's the long term plan, it's called FrontRunner Forward. They're going to double track (by 2030) then later quadruple track it for express services. They're planning to electrify and grade separate it too so it can operate up to 110 mph and run as frequently as every 5 minutes
Kraków is also planning an "upgrade" to a higher-capacity mode of transit. Currently it has a broad and well-functioning tram network that covers most of the city, with busses doing the rest. However, the capacity in the city centre is running out, as well as time of travel between furthest outskirts is needed to be improved. So a 6km-long tramway tunnel under the city centre is , a premetro/stadbahn projects is under design phase. We just hope that our local politicians don't ruin it. Also, I would recommend looking at Poznań and its "Poznań Fast Tram" ("Poznański Szybki Tramwaj") a completely separated tram route along the biggest pre-fab districts linking it quickly with the main train station and the city centre, where the trams then disperse along different routes.
I'm very happy my hometown starts building its Stadtbahn soon (even though it is not really a tram-metro mix but a tram train, but hey, as long as it moves people around, I'm happy with it)
There is also the word "pre-metro" or "premetro". That one overlaps with Stadtbahn when you really like to focus on having a rapid transit system. So the stops are all platform-level and the street-level sections are ensured to have priority so that trains are timely even when running at high frequency in the morning hours. A pre-metro also tends to have shorter trains as high-frequency was planned from the beginning. In contrast to pre-metro you have U-trams where the tram network only converges into a single city tunnel with trains entering at any time they arrive. That makes the inner city more accessible but you keep low frequency on outer sections, plus you can aovid careful planning, so it is simply cheaper.
Yup. The city needs both along with Hamilton and Winnipeg. It's shocking that cities of this size once they cross the 500,000 mark don't get some form of rail transit. Edmonton certainly did and it's still the backbone of ETS to this day!
Around discussion of the tramway, sometimes I hear people talk about cars as a failed experiment from the 60s. The people I talk to are generally in support of the tramway. I hope it gets built. It's a shame that it became so politicized.
Fun fact²: the fisrt VAL metros built for Lille (VAL206) have a direct lineage with the Paris automated rolling stocks (from the MP89 to the MP14) of line 1, 4 and 14. Both types were built at the "Petite-Forêt" factory near Valenciennes (onwed by Alstom since 1983), and both have an automatic train control made by Siemens Mobility France (which used to be Matra).
@@mindstalk fair! :) BUT here are some important things to note: NYC doesn't have 24/7 on the whole system. also those 2 lines in Chicago are LONG and the most frequently used, they combined host almost 1/4 the total length of the metro system. (Also this is a tangent but the other lines aren't 24/7, they are 22/7 or 22.5/7 which is as close as you can get to total 24/7 without truly being it jaja, something that NYC may not have but Copenhagen does). But again your initial point is true
@@BellaBellaEllaWdym NYC doesn’t have full 24/7 service? All stations and trips are served, just with shuttles on some branches so that the trunk lines don’t have an unnecessarily high frequency overnight. I’d define that as full.
@@Mira-bt3zx i was basing my 'not all NYC subway is 24/7' on my own experience when I lived there, and where I was stayin didn't have trains after like 12 : 30.
I had a chance to live in Toulouse, France, a city with a light automated metro (VAL), and I live now in Germany, where I had experience with StadtBahn systems of Karlsruhe, Hannover or Stuttgart and I have to say as a user, I like more the VAL solution. Nevertheless, there is one huge advantage of Stadtbahn: if you already have a tram system, it's easier to upgrade it this way. Plus, you have a bigger network quickly. But the comfort, frequency and speed are on the VAL side.
Not mentioned in the video but the fact that Germany mostly kept its tracks and invested continuously in their systems stands contrary to France like UK and the US got rid of city public transportation almost entirely but contrary to these two countries got rebuild them a few decades ago
I agree but this is only the case if you live on or near the metro corridor. The advantage of light rail is that it does ideally offer more one or two seat rides which is amazing if you do not live on the central corridor or the densest part of the city that would get a light metro line.
@@etbadaboumFunnily German transit advocates or rather urbanist circles have often convinced themselves the opposite is true and believe France to be the mother of the tramway, forgetting that German cities kept so many more of their trams.
@@bojstojsa7574 France is mother of the modern tramway with 30+ cities equipped with it but Germany is certainly the grand mother of historic tram (and expended a bit then)
Stadtbahn were especially easy to build because they used already existing tram lines. So if your city has already a tram network it is a very powerful tool to convert them.
I was went on Lille's metro about 30 years ago. It was incredible, 2 minutes between trains and right under the centre of the city. Nothing comes close to that. I was in Besancon last year and we experienced the light rail in what is a very small city, again, exemplary. France does a lot of things right
Rouen is the the closest to a Stadtbahn that you can find in France. It is a tram with a city-center section underground, but not connected to the main railway lines
Despite being the second oldest driverless metro system (it opened in 1983) and lacking modern CBTC technology, the Lille metro remains the world's most frequent, with trains every 66 seconds during rush hour. It was also the first system to use modern glass platform screen doors as we know them today.
The VAL automatic train control is truly genius. This is not surprising that Matra (and later Siemens) built an entire business around designing and selling automatic train control systems for many other metro and train networks (Paris RER and GPX, London Crossrail, HK metro etc.).
@@SpectreMk2 I'm really surprized VAL systems don't have more success beyond France. They are fantastically efficient systems. Maybe it is the fact that is rubber-tyred that people dislike, but then they should make a steel-wheeled version of it.
@@Clery75019as a fellow Lille's metro user, they are bit of a gadgetbahn; really expensive, not so efficient as they are narrow, small, and impractical. As a matter of fact, the lenght extension from 26m to 52m is suffering from a 10-year delay. The 2m wideness is awful and Toulouse chose 2m50 for their new line. Their ultra high frequency also means creepy rides when there are not a lot of people inside the metro. Rubber tires are counterproductive (and uncomfortable) as trains accelerate and decelerate faster, the interstations are too small which massively extend the journeys. From Tourcoing to Lille, the tram (which is a sort of early 20th century light rail) is still faster than the metro for the 12km ride between these cities. There also have been no project to create or extend the metro lines which also put a burden on the metropolis for 20 years without investment. Today, the idea is to build trams to actively reduce car surface on the ground.
@@Clery75019 In my opinion Matra was quite a mess in the 90s and probably lost a couple of international contracts because of this. Later on, AnsaldoBreda/Hitachi and Adtranz/Bombardier came up with quite successful designs of automated light metro using steel wheels and brought more competitions to an already tight market. Maybe the biggest miss for the VAL was on the airport people mover market. In my opinion the VAL is a better rolling stock than most of the first generation CX100 from Adtranz and could have scored more sales. For anyone interested in the development of the VAL automatic train control, from the PA135 to SACEM and Meteor, I really recommend reading the following article “VAL automated guided transit characteristics and evolutions” by R. Lardennois.
@@Clery75019 because... Rubber tyred automated people mover/metro in Asia have been served by Bombardier/Alstom (usually assembled by CRRC) Innovia APM, Mitsubishi Crystal Mover, and tons other similar solution by Japanese, Chinese, or Korean companies.
You should a video on irish transit particularly around the dublin area. We have a metro in the design and consultation phase for 20 years, a dart plus scheme that was to provide more frequent electric trains that got held up in planning so long it delayed it by a few years and have our tram the luas expansions being disregarded.
I am from a small city that sort of approximates a larger city. Albany, NY/the Capital District is sort of unusual in the Northeast for how polycentric the region is, but which actually probably looks pretty familiar to someone from Waterloo Region. Even cities like Boston and Providence, where the core municipality only covers a small portion of the core urban area, are more strongly centralized. The three main cities of the Capital District, Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, form a rough triangle, with a little over 400,000 people living around that core triangle, and a total population of around a million in the commuter area. The thing is, this polycentrism makes it very prone to sprawl. While other cities Upstate have been early to prioritize highway removal, infill development, and re-consolidation around the urban core (Rochester was the leader in all of these), the Capital District has not, despite having pretty good bones for that kind of thing. The polycentrism makes the area pretty suited to something combining aspects of a city train, an S-Bahn, and a tram-train. At the very least, a stadtbahn-style line along the Hudson between Waterford and the South End, passing through Downtown Albany, could serve the densest part of the area along the river, while also encouraging infill in this area, and a service between Downtown Albany and Downtown Schenectady, a 15-mile distance which sort of forms the "spine" of the area, would create an incentive for new development to consolidate close to existing population and amenities, but hopefully with a more productive development pattern.
What's really interesting is that the decentralized nature of Germany and the centralized nature of France can be found everywhere: in France, new tram lines and recent TGV lines on a few strategic corridors, and elsewhere, not much; in Germany, a grid network, both in the old tram networks and in the rail network, but few very fast lines, obviously due to the different history and structure of the country.
Another factor is wheter the city's car driver are civilised enough to build a stadtbahn, that's because the stadtbahn will almost certainly share some part of the road with other vehicle and if they lack common sense (which is common in many places) the stadtbahn will face frequent service disruption, people won't trust the service ecc.
I think Frankfurt really nailed the stadtbahn concept. Their new U5 trains can even insert sections into a train to make 100m long trams with just two cabs (or remove the two middle sets for 50m)
It’s the only Stadtbahn in Germany that actually nailed the concept. Most others either failed to increase capacity much beyond what a regular tram could do (looking at you, Cologne) or ended up creating a whole bunch of new problems. I think a large part of its success was keeping the trams around though.
I remember Tours (140k unhabitants city central France) before the tram. The main avenues (Grammont, National, Wilson bridge, La Tranchée) get buses jam ! At somes places 12 or 15 lines at the same place. Tram was needed.
My city, Turin, originally planned a 5 line stadtbahn (metrotranvia) system by upgrading the busiest tram lines and replacing the busiest bus lines, and instead we ended up with one VAL line... The service is awesome, much better than what a stadtbahn could offer, but the trains are so undersized. For this reason Line 2 will use bigger automated trains (see: Milan), oh and we are also getting what's basically a stadtbahn line (but low floor) by recycling an old underground urban rail right of way
That was back in the 1980s, so I have read that you proposed metrotranvia. At that time, low floor vehicles were still in an early stage of development and there was still a market, at least in tram savvy European countries, for standardised high floor trams, and so these could easily be adapted to high platform loading. Turin has apparently ordered new trams from Hitachi rail, and they only offer one tram model, and it is low floor, and so cannot be adapted to high platform loading, in fact, it allows cheaper platforms, and it seems that the market for standardised low floor is larger than the market for standardised high floor, so low floor enables more vendor choices for sourcing standardised equipment.
Lines 3, 4 and 9 could be considered as a sort of Stadtbahn, even if in some traits there's much room for improvements: for example the 4 is really slow in the city centre and this could be fixed for a decent price by using the tunnel under Via Roma for its original purpose, a "sottovia tranviaria". Let's just hope that line 12 and the Metro 2 actually get built...
I'd really like you to come to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and give your opinion about our Metro Transit bus network, and whether a tram system would work in a city that sized.
Automated light or heavy metro has three big advantages: 1 lower labor costs (which are over 50% of operating expenses), 2 no shortage of driver problems (as many places are now having with buses) and 3 no street running or crossing delays.
One of the main reasons, if not the main reason, German cities built Stadtbahn systems in the post-war decades is that they had sprawling tramway systems full of corridors that could be repurposed for a Stadtbahn. Some of these cities would have liked to build a real metro system, but had to make do with limited budgets. They specifically looked at what they could to with the pre-existing infrastructure. So the choice that they were facing was to build a metro system where each line would have required newly built grade-separated infrastructure from end to end, or to build a few strategically located kilometers of grade separation in the city center, and basically get the suburban corridors for free, since they already existed. You can really see that design philosophy in the suburban sections of the German Stadtbahn systems, where the stations are often just prefab concrete blocks on the site of the track (no turnstiles, sometimes not even a shelter) and the right of way was made exclusive by just putting a metal fence around it. Even with the newly built tunnel stations, they often have shallow cut-and-cover tunnels and tiny station boxes that are basically just stairs leading to narrow side platforms. Stadtbahn systems are obviously lower capacity than real metros and I'm not sure Germany would have turned to the Stadtbahn without all those tramway corridors just "lying around".
Hmmm. Actually, some German cities after the war did scrap their tram lines in favour of the automobile, and many tram lines were also using some less common narrow gauge rail, so “reuse existing railways” was not much of an option. I think that this is more of a city-specific thing.
Another thing to consider is why they built high platform stops; At that time, almost all trams were high floor, and certainly all off-the-shelf tram models available at the time were high floor, usually with entrance steps. So it was quite cheap and simple to adapt them for high platform loading.
@@AndersHenke Do you have any one example of a German Stadtbahn system that did not reuse any existing right of way? I'm going through the list, and the only one you could argue that this is the case is if you count the Bochum Stdtbahn as only consinsting of line 35. All other Stadtbahn systems run partially on repurposed right of way.
Some of the larger German tram systems had already expanded into the suburbs or to neighbouring towns with interurban or suburban railway type infrastruucture with a lot of private right of way. So by linking across the increasingly congested centre with tunnels, it was possible to create a system with a high proportion of segregated track at relatively reasonable cost.
@@AndersHenke We‘re talking about a period in which trams were seen as unfashionable. So sure, quite a lot of West-German cities got rid of their networks. That being said @n.bastians8633 is entirely correct in stating that the main reason for the multitude of German Stadtbahn systems is the abundance of pre-existing tram networks, whereas France got rid of theirs quite early on and only started to see the necessity of urban rail by the late 80s / early 90s. By this time there was no system left to build upon so automated light metro made sense. With German cities it was generally more efficient to gradually improve the existing trams by building tunnel sections with the end goal of one day having transformed the entire thing. In fact, every single Stadtbahn network uses pre-existing tram right if way in some capacity. Even the U35 in Bochum! There’s also quite the variety in terms of loading or track gauge all due to the usage of existing infrastructure. No idea where you got the idea from that this wasn’t much of an option.
I often watch your videos and sometimes find your are a bit biased towards automated light metros. But I find this video refreshing and nuanced, clearly explaining positives and negatives of both systems. Great video!
@@peyoprat can you two locals start advocating for an extension of the "TELEO" (Téléphérique) line all the way to Colomiers gare to the north and to Aerospace Campus in the south before 2029? There are plans for it but they should do it in a timely manner So that when the metro line C opens, it's immediately possible to use that téléphérique and transfer to other metro lines. This will surely help increase the number of passengers even more
@@Adrenaline_chaser Not gonna happen, it's way too far. It could be extended to Mirail Univeristé or Basso Cambo (line A) on one side and Montaudran on the other (line C) but Colomiers is very far away. Plus the traffic is lower than expected so I'm not sur that they will extend it at all in the forseeable future
Another thing that makes Stadbahns a better option is if your city already has a tram network that you can connect your tunnels to. German cities preserved a lot more tram networks than French ones, so it made more sense for them to build a Stadbahn.
Thank you, Reece, for giving another shoutout to Seoul! The light automated metros are cost-effective expansions of the overall network to more neighborhoods.
A core factor to factor in looking at France and Germany explaining it might be the major difference in population density distribution, leading to different purposes. And in another aspect automated light metros might also offer simpler opportunities to consider the Interests of Michelin. I mean, could you possibly for example offer a solution to integrate Translohr technology into the german Stadtbahn?
Don't forget buses that drop to hourly or worse after 5:30pm, and only concentrate on the busiest corridors... and are run by different operators so there's no cross-ticketing "network effect" if you need to interchange... and all the routes leave on the hour, so you have long gaps when changing... oh, and you need a different app on your phone for each operator, and the schedules and routes can change with very little warning. Wonderful! 🙄
That explanation of why light metros have to be automated is amazing. I never thought about that: metro systems are so expensive, the only way for them to make financial sense is to make them work at scale with large trains and stations, but automated trains bring the that scale that is needed way down to be able to make them work for trains that aren't much longer than an average articulated bus. That explains basically why every light metro is automated while few "true" metros are automated. It seems like Stadtbahn (or a light rail with a central tunnel) is the best bet for most American cities trying to build a new rail network to maximize coverage. But they just need to execute them correctly and not cut too many corners (which seems like a rarity nowadays). I wish the purple line in Maryland (I live near DC) was a light metro, I believe they fumbled on that one, and it still costs like $9B for 16.2 miles... America
I appreciate that you enjoyed the explanation! Light metros don't always have to be automated of course (Madrid and Paris have lots of light non-automated lines) but they get to benefit from the network effects of being in big cities with dense systems!
Picking up from my talking point on future rapid transit in Halifax, NS from the last video - thank you Reece for answering my question from last time. It seems clear to me now that Halifax will someday be served best by a tram-type network, so I now know where to put my advocacy efforts. At the moment, a BRT system is being planned, and the routes could all be someday upgraded to light rail as needed. Some streets are even already being modified to run bus lanes down the centre for future rail. Hopefully we continue down this path!
However, expect the Halifax light rail to be low floor - cheaper to build, more vendor choices for sourcing standardised equipment and platforms can be shared with buses in places.
Regensburg has 160000 inhabitants and in 2024 voted against introducing a Tram system (which it once already had, until it was scrapped in 1964). Meanwhile, Erlangen (one hour away) with 118000 narrowly voted in favor.
well, the tram also is planned to also serve the neighbouring herzogenaurach with its 25K inhabitants, and will be connected to nuremberg, so basically this is an extension into nurembergs "suburbs". Still, there are also smaller citys like Jena or Rostock about the size of Erlangen with a very versatile Tram system, or Cities like Frankfurt (Oder) with its 60K inhabitants and 4 tram lines. So, very weird that so many people are prefering their busses )(even electric ones) over trams in such large cities like Regensburg. (or they think its better to use their car iunstead)
@@gelber_kaktusIn Regensburg, it was turned into a political issue rather than being analyzed strictly economically or rationally, and populism won in the end, sadly for the citizens (especially the younger ones)
@@cirkmannzirkel8229 yeah, that's why they do referendums, so that everyone can show their 'arguments' instead of the elected representatives do an rational analysis and make possibly some unhappy with the decision. Now they can say: You've chosen so. So they put their responsibility onto the inhabitants...
Great! Two points, though: I'm pretty sure that no stadtbahn can even approach the high frequency of an automated metro (light or not) . VAL systems and equivalent can go as low as a train every 60 seconds (that's between departures, not just between the departure of the previous train and the arrival of the next one). There's also the question of where does medium transit ends and mass transit begins in terms of daily ridership... Because "light automated metros" can carry more than full fledge metros in practice. (That's not theoretical capacity but real ridership). A small light automated metro can and does carry more passengers daily than the entire LA Metro system, thanks to ultra high frequency and high transit modal share.
I know the Manchester metrolink achieves 60tph per direction between cronbrook and deansgate-castlefeild (and about 50 between deansgate-castlefeild and St Peter’s square) so I think crazy high frequencies can be obtained on city-train systems
@@nether_bat How are they doing 60 toh? Do you mean train per hour per direction, or in total? I'm guessing they are doing that visually at slow speeds. What's the daily ridership of this line?
A Stadtbahn isn't supposed to have that frequency, as the vehicles need to be operated by humans, who make errors, so you need bigger margins for error > lower frequency, as automated systems aren't good for the foreseeable future to operate in mixed traffic. You can make up for that in systems that built infrastructure to be possibly metro-grade by using longer trains, Hanover does that (a three car train is a bit above 75m, most trains are 2-car, so 50m). Metro Lille for example usually only uses 55m long trains of 2 cars (and I'm not sure longers fit in the majority of the station).
There’s plenty of Stadtbahns that run up to 30 trains per hour on a single track. Not quite VAL-level, sure, but combined with lengthy vehicles (up to 100 meters in the case of Frankfurt) their capacity easily outperform any automated light metro and wait times aren’t that much worse. Especially if you consider the fact that Stadtbahns usually offer a more direct service whereas automated light metro requires lots of interchanges to and from feeder services with far lower frequencies. Besides, there’s nothing stopping you from implementing CBTC on a Stadtbahn in order to increase frequency even further.
@@KyrilPG it is 60 tph per direction on a completely grade separated alignment with flying junctions at the cronbrook end. Daily ridership is hard as 8 (out of 9 total) lines share track in that section (with one line reversing in a centre platform at deansgate-castlefield) so the majority of users would be changing lines or interchanging with national rail at deansgate. I believe line of sight signalling is used but speeds are quite high (approx 80kmh) due to the grade separation. There aren’t any intermediate stations, but cronbrook is operationaly identical to an intermediate station so I don’t think more stations would affect tph. The reason some trams don’t continue to St Peter’s square is because of a large flag junction and a lot of street running around St Peter’s square.
It's so weird seeing your own city, in my case Frankfurt, featured in a video. I can see my neighborhood and most of the routes I frequently use in here, truly weird.
Portland would benefit from a light metro that runs from St. Johns to North East Portland and then runs underneath César E. Chavez Blvd to Reed College and Sellwood. Portland would also benefit from a stadtbahn/subway-surface network that connects the historic streetcar suburbs to downtown PDX.
The city of Besançon with 100'000 is a good example that LRT from scratch can be even affordable if you make some compromises in design, rolling stock acquisition and technology. I just made a vlog that covers the topic, in case you're interested.
The city of Porto in Portugal (im from there) has a interesting Tram Train metro system called Metro do Porto I think I«it can be considered Medium TRansit because it dont have a high capcity Also it goes underground in the center of the city
@@rodrigomenegucci But they are not CityTrains (English translation of Stadtbahn), Reece does have a video on those. Real City trains are high floor, with high entrances too. Stops and stations for CityTrains had high level platforms, not the low level tram platforms.
Thanks for this - as you say, there are a lot of options for transit systems, and it can be important to be able to upgrade - not only if/when a city expands, but also as its population may change from driving to using transit, maybe because of climate or air-quality worries, or as a healthier option for themselves, or because new management makes the transit better, or more frequent ... etc.! Re frequency, are there any published statistics which show at what level of frequency (excluding other factors, which may be difficult) there is the most significant growth in transfer from driving? My own hunch is 8 per hour: a maximum wait of seven and a half minutes (if you just missed a train/bus) is quite bearable, and the average wait of 3-4 minutes is as long as you'd take to find a place to park the car, actually park it, tidy it, get your bag(s) out, lock it up, pay for parking etc..
Reece, first off I love your videos. Thank you for your dedication to loving transit, it shows in every video you have. I also wanted to ask a question for people living in places that don't have much transit opportunities whose cities are built around car-dependency. I'm a Phoenix, Arizona native now living in Germany where the contrast is stark to say the least. A large problem I see is that there is little opportunity for transit in the Phoenix metro area, with the urban sprawl essentially making it near impossible to serve very large portions of the population without an extensive network. Would you consider doing a transit video on Phoenix or Phoenix-like cities? And the possible ways that transit can still be created in a place that seems to lack any opportunity for it. Anyway thanks for reading
I live in Tallinn, Estonia, a city with approximately 460,000 residents and over 630,000 in the metro area. There have been a couple of proposals to build a light metro system here since the city gets very congested on workdays. These proposals have usually come from the private sector though, including real estate companies. Currently we have a relatively small tram/streetcar system, few train lines that make some stops inside the city (somewhat similar to Stockholm's pendeltåg), but the public transportation is mostly reliant on buses, and they tend to get stuck in the traffic. I can definitely see the need for a light metro here with tunneled sections in the city center. However, the city government has not shown any real interest in creating those light metro lines. Investments into public infrastructure are low although there's actually enough money available. Seems a little bit similar to the situation in North America.
@@etbadaboum I think it has more to do with the fact that local municipalities including towns have pretty small budgets in Estonia. Only a small part of income tax goes straight to the municipality you live in - 12%. The rest of it, and other taxes as well, go to the country's central government who then might give some more money back as 'donations' to the municipalities. Pretty mental and gives the country's government way too much power over local municipalities, in my opinion. The last light metro proposal from earlier this year estimated that building two lines would cost approximately 1.5 billion euros, which is definitely doable, especially if the project is separated into sections throughout 5 or even 10 years. The first and longer line would cut a 50 minute ride from the city's eastern district to the western district to just 25 minutes. The shorter North-South line would cut a 40 minute ride to just 15.
I'm not completely sure either if there's any city which has combined both of these solutions, but Guadalajara could've been that special case. On one side, Guadalajara line 1 is basically a Stadtbahn, with a center tunnel in the downtown and a street level railway as it comes to the suburbs, where it interacts with traffic, it was even planned to be upgraded into a metro someday. On the other side, line 3 was originally intended to be a fully automated Innovia Metro light metro system, but in the end it's come to not be automated, but a regular light metro. However, as far as I'm concerned, it could potentially become automated one day, as it is based on the technology of Barcelona metro line 9 which is fully automated. Anyway, either if line 3 is automated or not, me and a lot of Gudalajarenses think the line 3 was the right choice for the city, which seems quite logic as it serves pretty dense areas of it. It's been such a success that it's now the most important line.
I'd say Barcelona kind of has both. L11 is a French inspired automated light metro. But the tram T5 line has an underground section in Gran Via. Not in city center though, if you go to the trouble of drilling in such a complicated place, you better make it worth it.
Effectively Dublin's planned "Metrolink" will be a light metro, as the 65 metre platform screen-door stations will be somewhat their max lifetime size once built. The future proofing of the whole scheme is that with automation the frequency can be improved over time, not more hole's dug. The existing Luas LRT lines are city trams extended to near maximum length, with the Green line running 56m low floor citadis trams. And the Red line 45m. Not quite stadbahn but certainly core lines where 1 should be metro, and the other and what might be left over in the city centre as a likely backbone for a wider network by the mid-century. But at least for the next 15-20 years, buses pushed to max priority on re-engineered roads are our attempt to keep things moving without super high price tags on fixed infrastructure.
Here in Cambridge (UK) we had a thing called the "Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro" proposed - since scrapped with a change of mayor. Cambridge is a city where buses can only solve congestion issues to a point, and something else is needed beyond that.
In fact, despite the term for them (stadtbahn/CityTrain) high platform light rail could actual make a good interurban. There is already an example in Cardiff, or there will be. Check out the Cardiff metro.
When talking about German Stadtbahn schemes, many overlook the Karlsruhe of the east, Chemnitz. Trains run as trams in the city centre and use the existing Deutsche Bahn rail network for the longer-distance-runs out of Chemnitz.
What distinguishes the most a light metro from a Stadtbahn is the full separation from other traffic. That allows not only a higher commercial speed, but also a higher frequency, because there's no disruption. Certainly that an underground tunnel in the city center can limit the problem for a tram, but there will always be roads to be crossed on the rest of the line, and priority on red lights doesn't solve everything. Also I'm not sure the difference between light and heavy metro is really that meaningful. Yes we assume that we need big trains to have big ridership but we often forget that frequency does that job as well. I would even say that 2 trains are better than a single train that would be twice longer. And with automation, it doesn't make it that more expensive operationally speaking.
My hometown of 25k people in Germany will build a 10km tram which connects it to it's neighbouring town of 100k people and from there the tram will continue to the next bigger town of 550k people just another 12km away, there it will connect to the existing tram and tube network.
Stuttgart Stadtbahn has to be one of the more underrated transit systems out there. Very unique, and fits the city's geography and layout very well. more than enough capacity and pretty good headways for how many branches the central tunnels have.
I‘d disagree with that assessment. Stuttgart has been suffering from capacity constraints for a while now. U1 would desperately need to be operated with 80 m sets but doing so isn’t all that easy due to the high degree of streetrunning. There’s even talks about increasing U6 to 120 m sets but that simply isn’t possible either, because stupid U15 blocks a tunnel extension south of Charlottenplatz. You can tell that the system struggles by the amount of new tangential services and bus relief lines being introduced as of recently. There’s also plenty of bus services that should absolutely be converted to rail but the absurdly large turn radius of a DT8 just doesn’t allow for that to happen. Not to mention the fact that high floor platforms just cannot be built all that easily. Stuttgart made a giant mistake by transitioning the entirety of their remaining tram network. They would be far better off had they kept lines 2 and 15 as regular trams and built a city center surface level relief line and grow a secondary network from there.
Great video, thank you Reece! You could have of course used footage from a few more places, this would have been perfect to incorporate Charleroi (and it's not like Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, and Stuttgart are the only Stadtbahn systems in Germany). Nuremberg actually uses an automated light metro, and they just decided to build a long interurban to Stadtbahn specifications through their northern suburbs. You could argue that the Strasbourg tram almost operates like a Stadtbahn in places, as well. Can't wait for a video on Hanover! :)
I live in cologne and while riding the 16 home from Uni. For some reason a switch was in the wrong position, so i was at "Neumarkt", which the 16 stops at, but instead of underground i was suddenly aboveground. High- and low-floor Stadtbahns share some stations aswell as tracks from the direction i was coming from.
I've always felt cities like Winnipeg, Regina and Darwin, Australia should have a real mass transit solution. But politicians are full of excuses and they don't want to tell you the truth. Helping poor and indigenous people is just not on the agenda.
Paris historical metro is often considered to be light metro compared to what is done now. Of course, given your definition, that would rule out Lines 1, 4 and 14... but they have same coach size. Grand Paris Express is considered heavy metro (except for Lines 16, 17 (despite the same coach width) and 18 because they are shorter but they still set to go faster than usual Paris metro with top speed going well over 100 kph and stops being more than 1.5 km apart. Depending on how the right of ways and the traffic is managed by police, trams can be very slow, especially in Paris, contrary to Nantes where trams cross intersections at full speed... Paris Trams are now slower than how busses were twenty years ago on average and busses are even worse thanks to "ecologists wanting bile superhighways everywhere". I'd argue that for Stadtbahn equivalent, tram trains are that. But not necessarily very well streamlined and the lines depend much on who built them or who upgraded them... Nantes and Bordeaux wanted VALs Automated Light Metros but given the nature of the soil (mostly sand just like in St Petersbourg), the cost of building even a tiny metro was judged prohibitive 40 years ago. So they went for a tram network. Nantes came out quite fine thanks to intelligent traffic regulation. Bordeaux on the other hand... All lines cross in the same postcode and gridlock eachother during rush hours. Even Nantes notices some problems sometimes. Both cities have grown a lot these last four decades and now wonder if a proper metro wouldn't be best... despite the cost. Toulouse didn't want trams, they chose VALs, the third line will be heavier duty, tyreless, more streamlined and normal metro, still quite short in length but larger in width, designed to releive the first two lines of their excess of traffic and link with the airport, thus shortening trips from the center (and the tram line to the airport was quite slow and did not serve the inner city anyway, forcing a transfer). Rennes chose VAL because of the terrain mostly, however the second line has a bad system inspired by Lohr gadgetbahn tech... and the line was closed for six months after an accident. The Neoval idn't wanted anymore by anyone else, hence why Toulouse chose a normal system for their next line. Lyon chose large metros, stations longer than the trains to be able to extend them somehow. Construction was difficult in shallow terrain but is ultimately future proof for the most part. Marseille would need a third line but the city is crippled with debts and corruption. Light metros can benefit greatly from ouver ground construction, adding platform length to a overground station is easier and cheaper than digging thirty meters of tunnel outright if you don't have the finances to do it at first. If your finances allow it, digging longer stations at first is the way to go for future proofing, at least design tunnels and stations for easier works next when you need it.
Paris trams aren't slower than how bus were 20 years ago... I used to be a frequent PC bus rider and these buses were excruciatingly slow, more than the trams are today. The bike lanes are a necessity and help carry more people than the streets previously did with only traffic lanes. The problem is caused by cars, not cyclists. What's lacking is proper control of intersections with cameras to fine drivers that enter an intersection without enough room to vacate it. The checkerboard zones must be enforced.
As I live next to Plovdiv (BG) a city of about 340-400 000 inhabitants and at least 150-200 000 more within a radius of 50 kms I think Stadtbahn (with tram-train capabilities) will perfectly fit the needs of the city and the region. Currently the city transit consists of only private bus operators with poor service. The biggest problem here is the lack of vision of the local authorities who are investing all in car infrastructure.
@@petyobenov I'm also Bulgarian! I think Varna would be a really good fit for a Stadtbahn system considering how centralized it's routes tend to be, and I'm pretty sure that they even had plans for a "light metro" system that bears striking resemblance to a Stadtbahn - but it hasn't gone anywhere yet, sadly.
@@radostin04wastaken I think there is still plan to leave some space for light rail at the Tsar Osvoboditel blvd but there is no plan to put the rails yet. Though the city administration presented a plan for few lines in Varna area which will be built in 4 or 5 stages
One option that smaller cities should consider is the Ottawa Transitway model. The Transitway is a dedicated (private) road but only for transit buses. (It is also used for emergency vehicles such as police, fire, and ambulance.) The transitway road network allows fast movement from the suburbs to the city centre. At both ends, the buses then continue on their planned routes downtown or in the 'burbs. There are even dedicated bus lanes along major city roads to allow for faster transit. I lived in Ottawa and loved this fast, flexible, and affordable transit system. (I left before the disaster of the O-trains.) These dedicated roads could even be upgraded to a light rapid transit model if growth requires. Not as exciting as other models. Just a thought.
I could see the city trains potentially working well in the Region of Waterloo, Ontario. But that means you either need to keep the ION on its own tracks and platforms and have transfers or change the trains and platform heights. So having a transfer seems more feasible unless you choose to limit yourself with the trams they currently have and then it can use new routes.
I'd love to see Halifax, NS, do something. They are looking for funding to do BRT routes, but the growth has been huge, and the terrible transit system is horribly inadequate. Either rail system mentioned here would do wonders for the city, though given the radial nature of the city a Stadtbahn might be better. If anyone with vision had been planning things they would have reserved corridors for transit in all the new developments over the last 20 years, but alas....
I think Stadbahn works well for some of these areas because of how the areas developed. There are fairly centralized towns with large gaps in between, often connected by existing rail. This means that you can connect these towns relatively cheaply on the surface, with the trains running relatively fast. It also means that when it gets into a town there are plenty of riders (enough to justify a train). Only a handful of cities in the US and Canada grew that way, which is why only a handful have something similar to a Stadbahn (Boston being one). Most have steady, medium-density sprawl without centralized towns. You can serve it with a tram, but they are slow and/or expensive and the stops aren't high ridership. They would likely be better with a light automated metro and lots of buses (live Vancouver BC).
I think one of the main advantages of stadtbahns are their ability to change the urban form of huge swaths of the city. They force the redesign of roads, changing traffic patterns and improving street life. Because they do this at all point along the corridor, they don’t lead to the sort of sprinkled development we see in a lot of north american cities like Vancouver or DC. We should make Stadtbahns in every reasonably sized city in the US. Charlotte is an amzing example of how you can create a great service that will remake huge portions of the city, and if they actually get serious about expanding it and adding branches it could easily be the best city in the south.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." I live in the US and we often gripe over our cities having little to no transit, but maybe a really great bus network can work in smaller cities. The problem we have is we can't even perfect that! I think trams and trolleys might be good for small cities, but eventually we outgrow them. They might even work for limited areas of cities if done properly, but we often fail to do that and they end up being useless or only useful for a small sect of people in a city. I like the idea of the light rail to metro conversion, but in the US we are often too short-sighted to see the future potential of a transit system.
Great video. Have you looked at the Australian cities Melbourne and Adelaide? Both have mixes of heavy urban rail (with a subway in Melbourne), trams (light urban rail), and buses. Adelaide also has a guided busway the O-bahn from Germany. Both cities and other Australian cities are expanding their urban rail systems. Cheers 👍
Look at Hanburg in northern germnany, they have both an U-bahn and a S-bahn. maybe an interesting thoing to look at. Berlin has the same if I remember well.
@@reuillois In both occurrences, the train actually managed to come home on its own power to the maintenance depot though. I know the Neoval tech has its issues, but low-floor tram derailment is also something which happen regularly (not for the same reasons, but the result is the same or worse).
I live in Strasbourg and originally there were plans to make a metro network, but during the elections for the city's mayor, there was a camp for the tram and another for the metro, yes it was political situation. In the end the tram was more flexible, allowing more branches and more places crossed by the tram, But today, the tram is saturated, at Christmas and during rush hour it is more than hell and commercial speeds are down. Last year there were passenger congestions for several weeks in the most served stations causing major delays, the big stations saw more than 3 lines out of 6, that's half of the network that is disrupted and that's in the best conditions. Today we wonder which system would be best suited for our city, perhaps a system like in the video or an underground S-Bahn that would pass through strategic locations while still allowing during peak hours a large capacity and during off-peak hours allowing for more flexibility on timetables
Newcastle New South Wales Australia is ripe for tramway extension from Wickham to Newcastle University. The problem is that it is still low density until the state and city governments decide it is safe to increase urban density on an area where a lot of coal was mined underground from 1830s till the late 1980s. There are two or three old rail lines that are used as rail trails but they are well away from built up areas and the main rail lines are the Sydney-Newcastle Interurban with two trains per hour and a similar quantity of freight. Add the main lines to Brisbane and Hunter Valley and it is a busy place. In short we will wait a while for more trams.😮
I would posit that both automated light metro and stat Bahn style systems are just different incarnations of light rail in the broader, engineering-based understanding of the term as being a relatively low capacity railway. I've noticed some manufacturers, most notably Alstom, market some of their technologies as "light rail vehicles", presenting them in much the same way as you describe stat Bahn style systems. The Docklands Light Railway is a good example of just how blurry the lines can get, when one realises that the first generation DLR trains were developed from tram technology, and found subsequent use as stat Bahn trams. Another interesting example of a light metro that is not automated is the Tyne & Wear in Newcastle, England, which shares a short section of its route with the national heavy rail network around around Sunderland, but is fully grade separated from streets, with the suburban sections being mostly repurposed from historic heavy rail corridors; hence the high floors.
I just recently commented in a Discussionnabout Heavy Rail how there seems to be a very different Design Philosophy in France and Germany when it comes to Transit: Coverage-Focus in Germany and Frequency-Focus in France. Personally, I think that in Times where CO2-Neutrality is the Goal, as many People as possible should have Access to Public Transit and be able to reach as many Places as possible, so I think that Stadtbahnen are superior. That being said through, the Cities with Stadtbahnen already belong to the big Boys by German Standards.
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small cities? My Cities: Skylines town has 5 metro lines with just over 150 000 population
Cities Skylines Its nice but in this regard just not realistic
And presumably farms/gravel quarries and stuff like that that generate massive queues of trucks, whereas the real-life gravel quarry in the next village to me generates maybe 3 trucks per day of traffic and the farms between my town and the neighbouring village generate pretty negligible traffic.
Yeah but they are not simulating realisticly. Skyscrapers have Like 20 people living in them.
This might be possible. Just don’t mention the city skyline part.
It’s a game, not a simulator. The game design makes a lot of compromises to make it fun not realistic, which is good it’s a game.
Also it doesn’t take all into account, again a game.
Barely enough
french here. I consider that when a city hit 100 000 inhabitants, it's time to build a tram. They are very useful in towns of that level, Like Orleans or Tours. But for smaller towns, it could be too expensive, and a hight frequency bus is often sufficient enouth.
Brt, bus rapid transit, must be the minimun level for that kind of city. it depends also with inhabitants density.
A bus would be more flexible too.
Still trams have many advantages just alone by the visual impression.
I agree. Although Tours tramway is a bit of a disgrace, not because the system is bad (I actually love the overall design of the rolling stocks and the tram stops), but because it is way to small of a network. Tours needs probably three tram lines.
@@SpectreMk2 indeed, Tours is growing quite fastly, and the network need an improvement.
@SieurBrabantio what would a place of 20,000 need?
I am from Frankfurt and I love our Stadtbahn/U-Bahn. It takes me from the edge of the city to the center in 15 minutes and frequent enough, that I don't need to know the schedule, even late at night. Combined with the Trams, Busses and S-Bahnen it creates a very good public transit system for the whole region.
I live just outside Frankfurt and find that fare integration and timetable integration (from the regional transport authority RMV) together with the app with real-time information on connections make travel soooo easy. Then of course there's the deutschland ticket, which makes everything so affordable. Good bye car.
@@malcolmsmith5482 Personally, i think the deutschland ticket goes a little to far. Germany already has a serious deficit in maintaining the rail network. Going that cheap, will divert funds to rapidly increase passenger volume and even more strain the infrastructure, rather than long term improvements. Long term, more people switch, if you can make it reliable and excellent service, than just making it cheap.
It's a service, not a buisness. It's not supposed to make money. The Autobahn is bleeding money too. The biggest difference tho is that the Autobahn get's more funding while rail get's left behind.
Its a fantastic and very all encompassing system, like many in Germany!
@@beyondEV Then how come the Deutsche Bahn is investing billions into modernizing the network?
I wouldn't call Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Copenhagen small cities. Apart from that, Copenhagen completely stopped its trams in favour of buses in 1972. In 1996, it was decided to build an automatically operated metro because of the best cost-benefit ratio. Frankfurt and Stuttgart never banned their trams. Whether you plan a metro/tram from scratch or whether something grows historically should also be considered.
Not small, but not millions and millions!
@@RMTransit But many commuters from the metropolitan regions:
-Frankfurt/Rhine-Main around 5.91 million
-Stuttgart metropolitan region 5.4 million
and Copenhagen metropolitan region 2 million people.
@@nettcologne9186 My guy, the Stuttgart metropolitan region is a huge chunk of Germany, and so is the Rhine-Main region. Such areas are covered by regional transit, not trams and metros. It's quite irrelevant how many people live 50km away from the city, rather the population of the urbanised area is what matters here. These cities have a population of 500,000 - 750,000, which is just slightly big by European standards, and fairly small by international ones. That distinction is very important by the way, as what seems like a big city to us Europeans, is a village in China and a small city in the US.
@@Ruzzky_Bly4t Depending on whether you look at "metro areas" or individual cities, between 50-87% of Americans live in cities below 500k. I'd love to see content regarding sprawled cities in the 250k range and what might reasonably be done with transit.
German stadtbahns and French mini metros are both amazing and better than anything in any smaller/medium sized city in the UK.
Why?
@@flopunkt3665 because in most British cities, even large ones like Leeds, they only have buses. Birmingham only has a single tram line with 2.2 million citizens in its metropolitan area. Most UK tram networks have no tunnels with underground stations under the city centre and in some cases, they even have to crawl through pedestrianised areas at 10mph.
@@lazrseagull54 Don't forget the terrible suburban rail which runs half hourly if you're lucky and never has fare integration with other local transit or good branding. It's a shame because if they just sorted that out most British cities *could* then claim to have a respectable S-Bahn-style system.
@@elijahjbennett 💯 fare integration and consistent branding would be appreciated. Needing to buy seperate tickets for bus and rail puts people off UK public transport.
Route numbers for the trains would be great too. We don't call the 38 bus "the Arriva service to Clapton Pond calling at Grosvenor Gardens, Wilton Street, Hyde Park Corner, Old Park Lane/Hard Rock Cafe, Green Park Station, etc." requiring passengers to listen through the stops to know which line they're catching.
@@flopunkt3665 because they're all something, most medium sized cities in the UK have woefully inadequate public transport infrastructure, and no intermodal fare integration.
The best system is the one that gets actually built AND is budget sustainable to avoid budget shortfalls that will cut services. I'm looking at you TransLink.
I agree! That being said, I think people are sometimes overly confident about what *can* be built!
It also really depends on the structure of the city - if your city is sprawling with a lot of lower-density suburbs, you need a Stadtbahn, because you need to cover more area. If your city is more centralised, you will be better served by an automated light metro.
Low density, however, is not good. But despite the name (CityTrain in English), high platform light rail is actually very well suited to interurban applications. These go further without stopping and so interurban stops can easily be located where high platforms are possible and do work.
@@Myrtone Well we're not talking about american suburb level of low density
@@crowmob-yo6ry But what it does not have is CityTrain-like platform height. References to CityTrains in that video are too high floor ones, except for the Karlsruhe tram-trains, with their medium sort of floor height and matching platform height.
Reece does also have a whole video on CityTrains and makes it clear in that video that the real ones are high floor, with stepless entrances or dual height entrance steps.
Probably! Though you could also do a hub and spoje bus feeder system!
@crowmob-yo6ry Man if only we didn't have the downtown bottleneck. However, the biggest problem the system has is its inability to serve suburb to suburb trips, which a sprawling multi-nodal city like Dallas and it's suburbs really needs. Namely north Dallas into plano, since it's an extremely heavy hitter (almost as much as Dallas) in terms of office employment. Realistically though, the busses should be doing more heavy lifting than they are. But they've sucked for a decade so to the trains people went if at all possible.
Fun fact: Toulouse metro network (two lines of about 15 km each, using VAL rolling stocks) transports daily about as many people as the entire Chicago subway network (each roughly 400000 ppl per day, although Toulouse is building a third line which will dramatically increase this figure in the future).
And the new line will be a 'heavy rail' in North American terminology (and Rennes' metro daily ridership is 225k, the city is building several BRT lines to complement the network)
The new line will have a 27km long span and the metro type will be a Alstom Metropolis, mesurating 36meters it can transport up to 386 passengers to 486 passengers by just adding a wagon between, it can have 9 wagons which is roughly 324 meters. Its 2,70 meters wide and its automatic.
Plus not being pneumatic like the 2 first line
Currently watching this in the TGV back from Rennes, which I visited today!
A TGV seat can be a very nice office (although I recommend the first class, which is anyway not that more expensive than second class with SNCF). I hope you enjoyed Rennes!
@@SpectreMk2 indeed I used to often book the 1st, but I have TGVmax now…which means 2nd class only but im not complaining for 79€ a month !
@@TransitExplained Smart choice 👍
Seeing this in a ICE going to Frankfurt indeed
Jealous!
Love the abundance of footage from Stuttgart!
We have the best Stadtbahn.
Personally I think automated light metro with ultra high frequency is a better enabler of car free lifestyles.
Reliable high frequencies also make trips with transfers a lot more likely. A bus to metro to bus journey can be a lot more palatable if there is barely any wait for the metro.
Urban planners are also a lot better at making the areas under elevated rail pleasant environments these days. Which really helps make these systems attractive.
The downside is that with such a system you'll only have a select number of corridors, but cannot really cover a wider area. So it really depends on the structure of the city.
@stephanweinberger Absolutely. While a true star city design would be favorable for higher density, real cities often dont look like that. A rapidly growing city with a lot of space available should probably opt for the Metro. They can focus dense developments further outward and leave out space in between development corridors for green strips or cover that low density space with buses. But existing larger urban areas with medium density, that exceeds the capacity of buses, probably dont have real viability for such corridor centered light metros and might be better off with a web of light rail lines that overlap closer to the core to run as full metros.
@@stephanweinberger There's always a balance cities have to make between investment in transit which caters to current demand and current city strucutre and investment in transit which is designed to induce new demand and influence development structure.
ALM a lot of the time falls under the second category. It certainly isn't a magic wand and a lot of other factors have to line up for ALM to be worth it.
@@stephanweinberger Well, thats where frequent bus connections can be very useful!
@@RMTransit it all depends on the capacity requirements. Also, especially small cities will also have a problem with financing real frequent bus services (labour cost).
Every time Reece covers VAL, it's a great time. A side note: Nuremberg's U3 U-Bahn line has wide and short automated trains, the same capacity as Montreal's REM does, however, it does not implement platform screen doors.
VAL is the train of the future. No driver. Platform screen doors. A train every minute.
10:26 That's a Frankfurt tram (low-floor), not a Stadtbahn (high-floor). The networks are quite separated, only the maintenance facility is shared.
In Stuttgart, the tram system was gradually converted to Stadtbahn - it took ~25 years and included a change from narrow to standard gauge.
In Cologne, there are low-floor and high-floor Stadtbahn lines.
Many other German cities (like Freiburg and Erfurt) call their tram system "Stadtbahn" for marketing reasons
The term is also used for funding reasons/network design reasons. The german state does fund newly built Stadtbahn-Systems or Tracks with grants that cover up to 90% of the cost, but not Trams (as a rule of thumb). The distinction being further station spacing and, most importantly, as little in-traffic-running as possible. The separate right of way is what distinguished the Stadtbahn term from legacy tram Systems.
After WW2 cities in the west had to decide wether to upgrade to Stadtbahn or downgrade to buses - with a few exceptions that kept their legacy systems. As one wouldn't wanna build a "worse" mixed traffic system from scratch today, only Stadtbahn-like designs get federal funds when you build a new tram system
@@GeoSonstHarmlos yes, but fun fact: the tracks of the tram and u Bahn system actually connect in several spots and are interoperable, (e.g.the terminus of what is now U7 at Heerstraße, through which trams pass regularly to access the maintenance depot nearby). Although I don't believe U Bahns ever travel on the tram lines, if only for reasons of their physical size and traffic.
Yes, I covered this in my Frankfurt and Stuttgart videos!
@@KayAwoooo The route that the line U5 runs along used to be a tram-line, that also went underground at Konstablerwache. Due to this fact, it was eventually converted into a Stadbahn line, by, well... just running Stadbahn cars on it instead of tram cars, and adjusting the hights of the stops. You can actually see it in this video as there is a lot of footage of the U5 in there.
I live in a small City near Berlin which has a Population of 28000 people. Weve got our own tram network an S Bahn line which connects us to Berlin and even an Ferry which is a Unique type. It runs on Electricpower. Unfortunately tho some parts of our Tram network has been removed in 2006. They didnt need it anymore because the DB canceled the Rail Connection for our Tram/Trainnetwork. The City is Called Strausberg
Bester See!
@@FlorianGampe-z1c Meinste du den Straussee? Wenn ja dann hast du recht, Liebe das klare Wasser und eben die Fähre
@@NickelBlase Ja! Genau den
@@FlorianGampe-z1c Jo der ist schon was besonderes leider mit viel weniger Wasser
There are so many American cities that should have Light Metro systems or Stadtbahns at least. I wish SLC had one or botb of those systems. A downtown tunnel or elevated line through SLC with the trains operating at street level elsewhere would really help the system
@@sawyerhamilton446 Salt Lake City and vicinity are sooo sprawled in their N-S axis, that i can hardly see anything else than light rail or suburban trains to serve this "small-medium metropolis"...
@francoisdandurand a Stadtbahn could easily serve that because so many of the larger cities follow that north-south corridor. But we definitely need to scale up our Regional Rail (FrontRunner) capacity too.
Hell, I live in Chicago, which sounds way too large for a stadtbahn, but our existing transit system is a few outdated metro lines that cannot travel very fast and dozens of overworked bus lines that desperately need dedicated bus lanes on a sprawling but dense - for America - metropolitan area. The north side of Chicago is streetcar suburbs stretching for miles and miles...poorly serviced by transit. The grid pattern stretches into the near suburbs who have very poor transit, and while the middle and outer ring suburbs have the loop-de-loop local street design, their main avenues are still in straight lines great for transit and most have real downtowns. Some are currently connected with commuter rail, but there are several near Chicago proper that could be connected via stadtbahn that then connects to the commuter rail and metro stations in Chicago, which are functionally completely separate systems, with very few of their stations aligning, even when their right-of-ways are within blocks of each other. Where a stadtbahn would be most powerful here I think is along the Fox River, however, where an interurban used to run. The downtowns along the river are starting to revitalize or already have, connect three different commuter rail lines to the city, and just need local officials to approve density increases and mixed-use development for such a line to be economically feasible. Quite often have I found myself traveling from the town my parents live up the river to another riverside downtown to an event or to enjoy the businesses in that town. Or now that I live in the city, taking the commuter rail line to Aurora and then having to get picked up from the station by a friend or family member just to travel five miles...too far to walk and very difficult to bike in the winter.
For Salt Lake City, I'll definitely say one of your best options is to invest heavily in the Front Runner and basically turn it into an Express metro gradually over time. For the Light rail, then some kind of Stadtbahn solution could be a good retrofit in Downtown SLC.
@drdewott9154 that's the long term plan, it's called FrontRunner Forward. They're going to double track (by 2030) then later quadruple track it for express services. They're planning to electrify and grade separate it too so it can operate up to 110 mph and run as frequently as every 5 minutes
Kraków is also planning an "upgrade" to a higher-capacity mode of transit. Currently it has a broad and well-functioning tram network that covers most of the city, with busses doing the rest. However, the capacity in the city centre is running out, as well as time of travel between furthest outskirts is needed to be improved. So a 6km-long tramway tunnel under the city centre is , a premetro/stadbahn projects is under design phase. We just hope that our local politicians don't ruin it.
Also, I would recommend looking at Poznań and its "Poznań Fast Tram" ("Poznański Szybki Tramwaj") a completely separated tram route along the biggest pre-fab districts linking it quickly with the main train station and the city centre, where the trams then disperse along different routes.
I heard it wont be fast Tram instead its goin to be an real metro. But maybe I'm wrong
I'm very happy my hometown starts building its Stadtbahn soon (even though it is not really a tram-metro mix but a tram train, but hey, as long as it moves people around, I'm happy with it)
There is also the word "pre-metro" or "premetro".
That one overlaps with Stadtbahn when you really like to focus on having a rapid transit system. So the stops are all platform-level and the street-level sections are ensured to have priority so that trains are timely even when running at high frequency in the morning hours. A pre-metro also tends to have shorter trains as high-frequency was planned from the beginning. In contrast to pre-metro you have U-trams where the tram network only converges into a single city tunnel with trains entering at any time they arrive. That makes the inner city more accessible but you keep low frequency on outer sections, plus you can aovid careful planning, so it is simply cheaper.
Québec City needs both ! A train that would serve both sides of the river and a automated light metro for the city center.
Yup. The city needs both along with Hamilton and Winnipeg. It's shocking that cities of this size once they cross the 500,000 mark don't get some form of rail transit. Edmonton certainly did and it's still the backbone of ETS to this day!
Bet we could make it a hybrid car and Fully robotic
what if it could also run in the river as a ferry boat
Around discussion of the tramway, sometimes I hear people talk about cars as a failed experiment from the 60s. The people I talk to are generally in support of the tramway. I hope it gets built. It's a shame that it became so politicized.
Fun fact²: the fisrt VAL metros built for Lille (VAL206) have a direct lineage with the Paris automated rolling stocks (from the MP89 to the MP14) of line 1, 4 and 14. Both types were built at the "Petite-Forêt" factory near Valenciennes (onwed by Alstom since 1983), and both have an automatic train control made by Siemens Mobility France (which used to be Matra).
7:02 Obligated to mention Chicago also has 24/7 service on its metro (and the Hamburg s-bahn also has 24/7 service, though that one's not a metro)
Though Chicago had it only on some lines, at least when I was there, what became the Red and Blue lines.
@@mindstalk fair! :) BUT here are some important things to note:
NYC doesn't have 24/7 on the whole system.
also those 2 lines in Chicago are LONG and the most frequently used, they combined host almost 1/4 the total length of the metro system. (Also this is a tangent but the other lines aren't 24/7, they are 22/7 or 22.5/7 which is as close as you can get to total 24/7 without truly being it jaja, something that NYC may not have but Copenhagen does). But again your initial point is true
@@BellaBellaEllaWdym NYC doesn’t have full 24/7 service? All stations and trips are served, just with shuttles on some branches so that the trunk lines don’t have an unnecessarily high frequency overnight. I’d define that as full.
@@Mira-bt3zx i was basing my 'not all NYC subway is 24/7' on my own experience when I lived there, and where I was stayin didn't have trains after like 12 : 30.
@@BellaBellaElla Huh, I never had that experience outside of construction related shutdowns
I had a chance to live in Toulouse, France, a city with a light automated metro (VAL), and I live now in Germany, where I had experience with StadtBahn systems of Karlsruhe, Hannover or Stuttgart and I have to say as a user, I like more the VAL solution. Nevertheless, there is one huge advantage of Stadtbahn: if you already have a tram system, it's easier to upgrade it this way. Plus, you have a bigger network quickly. But the comfort, frequency and speed are on the VAL side.
These tiny VAL are awesome. I just wish that they were not so crowded during the morning peak.
Not mentioned in the video but the fact that Germany mostly kept its tracks and invested continuously in their systems stands contrary to France like UK and the US got rid of city public transportation almost entirely but contrary to these two countries got rebuild them a few decades ago
I agree but this is only the case if you live on or near the metro corridor. The advantage of light rail is that it does ideally offer more one or two seat rides which is amazing if you do not live on the central corridor or the densest part of the city that would get a light metro line.
@@etbadaboumFunnily German transit advocates or rather urbanist circles have often convinced themselves the opposite is true and believe France to be the mother of the tramway, forgetting that German cities kept so many more of their trams.
@@bojstojsa7574 France is mother of the modern tramway with 30+ cities equipped with it but Germany is certainly the grand mother of historic tram (and expended a bit then)
Stadtbahn were especially easy to build because they used already existing tram lines. So if your city has already a tram network it is a very powerful tool to convert them.
I was went on Lille's metro about 30 years ago. It was incredible, 2 minutes between trains and right under the centre of the city. Nothing comes close to that. I was in Besancon last year and we experienced the light rail in what is a very small city, again, exemplary. France does a lot of things right
Rouen is the the closest to a Stadtbahn that you can find in France. It is a tram with a city-center section underground, but not connected to the main railway lines
Despite being the second oldest driverless metro system (it opened in 1983) and lacking modern CBTC technology, the Lille metro remains the world's most frequent, with trains every 66 seconds during rush hour. It was also the first system to use modern glass platform screen doors as we know them today.
The VAL automatic train control is truly genius. This is not surprising that Matra (and later Siemens) built an entire business around designing and selling automatic train control systems for many other metro and train networks (Paris RER and GPX, London Crossrail, HK metro etc.).
@@SpectreMk2 I'm really surprized VAL systems don't have more success beyond France. They are fantastically efficient systems. Maybe it is the fact that is rubber-tyred that people dislike, but then they should make a steel-wheeled version of it.
@@Clery75019as a fellow Lille's metro user, they are bit of a gadgetbahn; really expensive, not so efficient as they are narrow, small, and impractical. As a matter of fact, the lenght extension from 26m to 52m is suffering from a 10-year delay. The 2m wideness is awful and Toulouse chose 2m50 for their new line. Their ultra high frequency also means creepy rides when there are not a lot of people inside the metro.
Rubber tires are counterproductive (and uncomfortable) as trains accelerate and decelerate faster, the interstations are too small which massively extend the journeys. From Tourcoing to Lille, the tram (which is a sort of early 20th century light rail) is still faster than the metro for the 12km ride between these cities.
There also have been no project to create or extend the metro lines which also put a burden on the metropolis for 20 years without investment. Today, the idea is to build trams to actively reduce car surface on the ground.
@@Clery75019 In my opinion Matra was quite a mess in the 90s and probably lost a couple of international contracts because of this. Later on, AnsaldoBreda/Hitachi and Adtranz/Bombardier came up with quite successful designs of automated light metro using steel wheels and brought more competitions to an already tight market. Maybe the biggest miss for the VAL was on the airport people mover market. In my opinion the VAL is a better rolling stock than most of the first generation CX100 from Adtranz and could have scored more sales.
For anyone interested in the development of the VAL automatic train control, from the PA135 to SACEM and Meteor, I really recommend reading the following article “VAL automated guided transit characteristics and evolutions” by R. Lardennois.
@@Clery75019 because... Rubber tyred automated people mover/metro in Asia have been served by Bombardier/Alstom (usually assembled by CRRC) Innovia APM, Mitsubishi Crystal Mover, and tons other similar solution by Japanese, Chinese, or Korean companies.
You should a video on irish transit particularly around the dublin area.
We have a metro in the design and consultation phase for 20 years, a dart plus scheme that was to provide more frequent electric trains that got held up in planning so long it delayed it by a few years and have our tram the luas expansions being disregarded.
I found this video helpful as I'm from Maine, which is full of small cities that currently have good to mediocre bus transit
Which cities in Maine please I’m looking for a new place to live
@@elizabethdavis1696 Portland, the Lewiston-Auburn area, and Bangor, and those are only the ones that I am sure of
@@crowmob-yo6ry yes, most cities in Maine are extremely walkable
Eglinton Xtown with a mississauga extension would be the perfect canadian stadtbahn
I am from a small city that sort of approximates a larger city. Albany, NY/the Capital District is sort of unusual in the Northeast for how polycentric the region is, but which actually probably looks pretty familiar to someone from Waterloo Region. Even cities like Boston and Providence, where the core municipality only covers a small portion of the core urban area, are more strongly centralized. The three main cities of the Capital District, Albany, Schenectady, and Troy, form a rough triangle, with a little over 400,000 people living around that core triangle, and a total population of around a million in the commuter area. The thing is, this polycentrism makes it very prone to sprawl. While other cities Upstate have been early to prioritize highway removal, infill development, and re-consolidation around the urban core (Rochester was the leader in all of these), the Capital District has not, despite having pretty good bones for that kind of thing. The polycentrism makes the area pretty suited to something combining aspects of a city train, an S-Bahn, and a tram-train. At the very least, a stadtbahn-style line along the Hudson between Waterford and the South End, passing through Downtown Albany, could serve the densest part of the area along the river, while also encouraging infill in this area, and a service between Downtown Albany and Downtown Schenectady, a 15-mile distance which sort of forms the "spine" of the area, would create an incentive for new development to consolidate close to existing population and amenities, but hopefully with a more productive development pattern.
5:47 youre showing Wiesbaden hahaha not Frankfurt, but the stations look kinda similar
What's really interesting is that the decentralized nature of Germany and the centralized nature of France can be found everywhere: in France, new tram lines and recent TGV lines on a few strategic corridors, and elsewhere, not much; in Germany, a grid network, both in the old tram networks and in the rail network, but few very fast lines, obviously due to the different history and structure of the country.
True, this is also seen on population density maps
Another factor is wheter the city's car driver are civilised enough to build a stadtbahn, that's because the stadtbahn will almost certainly share some part of the road with other vehicle and if they lack common sense (which is common in many places) the stadtbahn will face frequent service disruption, people won't trust the service ecc.
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you Reece!!!
This is the video I've been longing for, as a resident of a small-and-growing-city.
I think Frankfurt really nailed the stadtbahn concept. Their new U5 trains can even insert sections into a train to make 100m long trams with just two cabs (or remove the two middle sets for 50m)
It’s the only Stadtbahn in Germany that actually nailed the concept. Most others either failed to increase capacity much beyond what a regular tram could do (looking at you, Cologne) or ended up creating a whole bunch of new problems. I think a large part of its success was keeping the trams around though.
I remember Tours (140k unhabitants city central France) before the tram. The main avenues (Grammont, National, Wilson bridge, La Tranchée) get buses jam ! At somes places 12 or 15 lines at the same place. Tram was needed.
My city, Turin, originally planned a 5 line stadtbahn (metrotranvia) system by upgrading the busiest tram lines and replacing the busiest bus lines, and instead we ended up with one VAL line... The service is awesome, much better than what a stadtbahn could offer, but the trains are so undersized. For this reason Line 2 will use bigger automated trains (see: Milan), oh and we are also getting what's basically a stadtbahn line (but low floor) by recycling an old underground urban rail right of way
That was back in the 1980s, so I have read that you proposed metrotranvia. At that time, low floor vehicles were still in an early stage of development and there was still a market, at least in tram savvy European countries, for standardised high floor trams, and so these could easily be adapted to high platform loading.
Turin has apparently ordered new trams from Hitachi rail, and they only offer one tram model, and it is low floor, and so cannot be adapted to high platform loading, in fact, it allows cheaper platforms, and it seems that the market for standardised low floor is larger than the market for standardised high floor, so low floor enables more vendor choices for sourcing standardised equipment.
Lines 3, 4 and 9 could be considered as a sort of Stadtbahn, even if in some traits there's much room for improvements: for example the 4 is really slow in the city centre and this could be fixed for a decent price by using the tunnel under Via Roma for its original purpose, a "sottovia tranviaria".
Let's just hope that line 12 and the Metro 2 actually get built...
The Paris system uses trains that are mostly 75m. There are a few exceptions on busy but generally that is true.
I'd really like you to come to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and give your opinion about our Metro Transit bus network, and whether a tram system would work in a city that sized.
Automated light or heavy metro has three big advantages: 1 lower labor costs (which are over 50% of operating expenses), 2 no shortage of driver problems (as many places are now having with buses) and 3 no street running or crossing delays.
One of the main reasons, if not the main reason, German cities built Stadtbahn systems in the post-war decades is that they had sprawling tramway systems full of corridors that could be repurposed for a Stadtbahn. Some of these cities would have liked to build a real metro system, but had to make do with limited budgets. They specifically looked at what they could to with the pre-existing infrastructure. So the choice that they were facing was to build a metro system where each line would have required newly built grade-separated infrastructure from end to end, or to build a few strategically located kilometers of grade separation in the city center, and basically get the suburban corridors for free, since they already existed.
You can really see that design philosophy in the suburban sections of the German Stadtbahn systems, where the stations are often just prefab concrete blocks on the site of the track (no turnstiles, sometimes not even a shelter) and the right of way was made exclusive by just putting a metal fence around it. Even with the newly built tunnel stations, they often have shallow cut-and-cover tunnels and tiny station boxes that are basically just stairs leading to narrow side platforms.
Stadtbahn systems are obviously lower capacity than real metros and I'm not sure Germany would have turned to the Stadtbahn without all those tramway corridors just "lying around".
Hmmm. Actually, some German cities after the war did scrap their tram lines in favour of the automobile, and many tram lines were also using some less common narrow gauge rail, so “reuse existing railways” was not much of an option. I think that this is more of a city-specific thing.
Another thing to consider is why they built high platform stops; At that time, almost all trams were high floor, and certainly all off-the-shelf tram models available at the time were high floor, usually with entrance steps. So it was quite cheap and simple to adapt them for high platform loading.
@@AndersHenke Do you have any one example of a German Stadtbahn system that did not reuse any existing right of way? I'm going through the list, and the only one you could argue that this is the case is if you count the Bochum Stdtbahn as only consinsting of line 35. All other Stadtbahn systems run partially on repurposed right of way.
Some of the larger German tram systems had already expanded into the suburbs or to neighbouring towns with interurban or suburban railway type infrastruucture with a lot of private right of way. So by linking across the increasingly congested centre with tunnels, it was possible to create a system with a high proportion of segregated track at relatively reasonable cost.
@@AndersHenke We‘re talking about a period in which trams were seen as unfashionable. So sure, quite a lot of West-German cities got rid of their networks. That being said @n.bastians8633 is entirely correct in stating that the main reason for the multitude of German Stadtbahn systems is the abundance of pre-existing tram networks, whereas France got rid of theirs quite early on and only started to see the necessity of urban rail by the late 80s / early 90s. By this time there was no system left to build upon so automated light metro made sense. With German cities it was generally more efficient to gradually improve the existing trams by building tunnel sections with the end goal of one day having transformed the entire thing. In fact, every single Stadtbahn network uses pre-existing tram right if way in some capacity. Even the U35 in Bochum! There’s also quite the variety in terms of loading or track gauge all due to the usage of existing infrastructure. No idea where you got the idea from that this wasn’t much of an option.
I often watch your videos and sometimes find your are a bit biased towards automated light metros. But I find this video refreshing and nuanced, clearly explaining positives and negatives of both systems. Great video!
Watching this from Toulouse automated light metro!
Interesting avatar, who's that?
Oh ! Un autre tolousain !
I love our metro here
@@peyoprat can you two locals start advocating for an extension of the "TELEO" (Téléphérique) line all the way to Colomiers gare to the north and to Aerospace Campus in the south before 2029? There are plans for it but they should do it in a timely manner So that when the metro line C opens, it's immediately possible to use that téléphérique and transfer to other metro lines. This will surely help increase the number of passengers even more
@@peyoprat it's the best but I'm afraid the line C won't be as perfect as the two others, given its weird route
@@Adrenaline_chaser Not gonna happen, it's way too far. It could be extended to Mirail Univeristé or Basso Cambo (line A) on one side and Montaudran on the other (line C) but Colomiers is very far away. Plus the traffic is lower than expected so I'm not sur that they will extend it at all in the forseeable future
Another thing that makes Stadbahns a better option is if your city already has a tram network that you can connect your tunnels to. German cities preserved a lot more tram networks than French ones, so it made more sense for them to build a Stadbahn.
Thank you, Reece, for giving another shoutout to Seoul! The light automated metros are cost-effective expansions of the overall network to more neighborhoods.
A core factor to factor in looking at France and Germany explaining it might be the major difference in population density distribution, leading to different purposes.
And in another aspect automated light metros might also offer simpler opportunities to consider the Interests of Michelin.
I mean, could you possibly for example offer a solution to integrate Translohr technology into the german Stadtbahn?
Hey, my station in Karlsruhe got included in the video.
The UK solution for small cities is to not have anything. Maybe 1-3 mainline rail stations if you're lucky.
Don't forget buses that drop to hourly or worse after 5:30pm, and only concentrate on the busiest corridors... and are run by different operators so there's no cross-ticketing "network effect" if you need to interchange... and all the routes leave on the hour, so you have long gaps when changing... oh, and you need a different app on your phone for each operator, and the schedules and routes can change with very little warning. Wonderful! 🙄
The US solution for small cities is freeways. Bring your own car.
That explanation of why light metros have to be automated is amazing. I never thought about that: metro systems are so expensive, the only way for them to make financial sense is to make them work at scale with large trains and stations, but automated trains bring the that scale that is needed way down to be able to make them work for trains that aren't much longer than an average articulated bus. That explains basically why every light metro is automated while few "true" metros are automated.
It seems like Stadtbahn (or a light rail with a central tunnel) is the best bet for most American cities trying to build a new rail network to maximize coverage. But they just need to execute them correctly and not cut too many corners (which seems like a rarity nowadays).
I wish the purple line in Maryland (I live near DC) was a light metro, I believe they fumbled on that one, and it still costs like $9B for 16.2 miles... America
I appreciate that you enjoyed the explanation! Light metros don't always have to be automated of course (Madrid and Paris have lots of light non-automated lines) but they get to benefit from the network effects of being in big cities with dense systems!
Picking up from my talking point on future rapid transit in Halifax, NS from the last video - thank you Reece for answering my question from last time. It seems clear to me now that Halifax will someday be served best by a tram-type network, so I now know where to put my advocacy efforts. At the moment, a BRT system is being planned, and the routes could all be someday upgraded to light rail as needed. Some streets are even already being modified to run bus lanes down the centre for future rail. Hopefully we continue down this path!
However, expect the Halifax light rail to be low floor - cheaper to build, more vendor choices for sourcing standardised equipment and platforms can be shared with buses in places.
@@Myrtone oh yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Essentially the eglinton crosstown but with smaller platforms.
Regensburg has 160000 inhabitants and in 2024 voted against introducing a Tram system (which it once already had, until it was scrapped in 1964). Meanwhile, Erlangen (one hour away) with 118000 narrowly voted in favor.
well, the tram also is planned to also serve the neighbouring herzogenaurach with its 25K inhabitants, and will be connected to nuremberg, so basically this is an extension into nurembergs "suburbs". Still, there are also smaller citys like Jena or Rostock about the size of Erlangen with a very versatile Tram system, or Cities like Frankfurt (Oder) with its 60K inhabitants and 4 tram lines. So, very weird that so many people are prefering their busses )(even electric ones) over trams in such large cities like Regensburg. (or they think its better to use their car iunstead)
Thanks for the info.
@@gelber_kaktusIn Regensburg, it was turned into a political issue rather than being analyzed strictly economically or rationally, and populism won in the end, sadly for the citizens (especially the younger ones)
@@cirkmannzirkel8229 yeah, that's why they do referendums, so that everyone can show their 'arguments' instead of the elected representatives do an rational analysis and make possibly some unhappy with the decision. Now they can say: You've chosen so. So they put their responsibility onto the inhabitants...
Great!
Two points, though:
I'm pretty sure that no stadtbahn can even approach the high frequency of an automated metro (light or not) .
VAL systems and equivalent can go as low as a train every 60 seconds (that's between departures, not just between the departure of the previous train and the arrival of the next one).
There's also the question of where does medium transit ends and mass transit begins in terms of daily ridership...
Because "light automated metros" can carry more than full fledge metros in practice.
(That's not theoretical capacity but real ridership).
A small light automated metro can and does carry more passengers daily than the entire LA Metro system, thanks to ultra high frequency and high transit modal share.
I know the Manchester metrolink achieves 60tph per direction between cronbrook and deansgate-castlefeild (and about 50 between deansgate-castlefeild and St Peter’s square) so I think crazy high frequencies can be obtained on city-train systems
@@nether_bat How are they doing 60 toh?
Do you mean train per hour per direction, or in total?
I'm guessing they are doing that visually at slow speeds.
What's the daily ridership of this line?
A Stadtbahn isn't supposed to have that frequency, as the vehicles need to be operated by humans, who make errors, so you need bigger margins for error > lower frequency, as automated systems aren't good for the foreseeable future to operate in mixed traffic. You can make up for that in systems that built infrastructure to be possibly metro-grade by using longer trains, Hanover does that (a three car train is a bit above 75m, most trains are 2-car, so 50m). Metro Lille for example usually only uses 55m long trains of 2 cars (and I'm not sure longers fit in the majority of the station).
There’s plenty of Stadtbahns that run up to 30 trains per hour on a single track. Not quite VAL-level, sure, but combined with lengthy vehicles (up to 100 meters in the case of Frankfurt) their capacity easily outperform any automated light metro and wait times aren’t that much worse. Especially if you consider the fact that Stadtbahns usually offer a more direct service whereas automated light metro requires lots of interchanges to and from feeder services with far lower frequencies. Besides, there’s nothing stopping you from implementing CBTC on a Stadtbahn in order to increase frequency even further.
@@KyrilPG it is 60 tph per direction on a completely grade separated alignment with flying junctions at the cronbrook end. Daily ridership is hard as 8 (out of 9 total) lines share track in that section (with one line reversing in a centre platform at deansgate-castlefield) so the majority of users would be changing lines or interchanging with national rail at deansgate.
I believe line of sight signalling is used but speeds are quite high (approx 80kmh) due to the grade separation. There aren’t any intermediate stations, but cronbrook is operationaly identical to an intermediate station so I don’t think more stations would affect tph.
The reason some trams don’t continue to St Peter’s square is because of a large flag junction and a lot of street running around St Peter’s square.
It's so weird seeing your own city, in my case Frankfurt, featured in a video. I can see my neighborhood and most of the routes I frequently use in here, truly weird.
Portland would benefit from a light metro that runs from St. Johns to North East Portland and then runs underneath César E. Chavez Blvd to Reed College and Sellwood.
Portland would also benefit from a stadtbahn/subway-surface network that connects the historic streetcar suburbs to downtown PDX.
The city of Besançon with 100'000 is a good example that LRT from scratch can be even affordable if you make some compromises in design, rolling stock acquisition and technology. I just made a vlog that covers the topic, in case you're interested.
The city of Porto in Portugal (im from there) has a interesting Tram Train metro system called Metro do Porto
I think I«it can be considered Medium TRansit because it dont have a high capcity
Also it goes underground in the center of the city
metrô do Porto is definitely a Satdbahn
And they killed a lot of old tram lines to build it and replaced them by busses 😢
@@rodrigomenegucci No it is definitely not, consider the platform height.
@@Myrtone completely irrelevant. it uses a low floor tram because the system is brand new its was cheaply avalilable by the time
@@rodrigomenegucci But they are not CityTrains (English translation of Stadtbahn), Reece does have a video on those. Real City trains are high floor, with high entrances too. Stops and stations for CityTrains had high level platforms, not the low level tram platforms.
Thanks for this - as you say, there are a lot of options for transit systems, and it can be important to be able to upgrade - not only if/when a city expands, but also as its population may change from driving to using transit, maybe because of climate or air-quality worries, or as a healthier option for themselves, or because new management makes the transit better, or more frequent ... etc.!
Re frequency, are there any published statistics which show at what level of frequency (excluding other factors, which may be difficult) there is the most significant growth in transfer from driving? My own hunch is 8 per hour: a maximum wait of seven and a half minutes (if you just missed a train/bus) is quite bearable, and the average wait of 3-4 minutes is as long as you'd take to find a place to park the car, actually park it, tidy it, get your bag(s) out, lock it up, pay for parking etc..
To be so lucky to find parking that quickly on a busy day. 😅
Reece, first off I love your videos. Thank you for your dedication to loving transit, it shows in every video you have. I also wanted to ask a question for people living in places that don't have much transit opportunities whose cities are built around car-dependency. I'm a Phoenix, Arizona native now living in Germany where the contrast is stark to say the least. A large problem I see is that there is little opportunity for transit in the Phoenix metro area, with the urban sprawl essentially making it near impossible to serve very large portions of the population without an extensive network. Would you consider doing a transit video on Phoenix or Phoenix-like cities? And the possible ways that transit can still be created in a place that seems to lack any opportunity for it. Anyway thanks for reading
I live in Tallinn, Estonia, a city with approximately 460,000 residents and over 630,000 in the metro area. There have been a couple of proposals to build a light metro system here since the city gets very congested on workdays. These proposals have usually come from the private sector though, including real estate companies. Currently we have a relatively small tram/streetcar system, few train lines that make some stops inside the city (somewhat similar to Stockholm's pendeltåg), but the public transportation is mostly reliant on buses, and they tend to get stuck in the traffic. I can definitely see the need for a light metro here with tunneled sections in the city center. However, the city government has not shown any real interest in creating those light metro lines. Investments into public infrastructure are low although there's actually enough money available. Seems a little bit similar to the situation in North America.
Does the money situation also come from the fact that Tallinn's public transportation is free?
@@etbadaboum I think it has more to do with the fact that local municipalities including towns have pretty small budgets in Estonia. Only a small part of income tax goes straight to the municipality you live in - 12%. The rest of it, and other taxes as well, go to the country's central government who then might give some more money back as 'donations' to the municipalities. Pretty mental and gives the country's government way too much power over local municipalities, in my opinion. The last light metro proposal from earlier this year estimated that building two lines would cost approximately 1.5 billion euros, which is definitely doable, especially if the project is separated into sections throughout 5 or even 10 years. The first and longer line would cut a 50 minute ride from the city's eastern district to the western district to just 25 minutes. The shorter North-South line would cut a 40 minute ride to just 15.
@@carleryk Thanks.
In Italy we have metro systems (subways) in Roma, Milano, Napoli, Torino, Genova, Catania, Brescia.
I consider Line 1 in Lausanne a Stadtbahn Line and Line 2 an automated light metro. So I guess we have a city with both systems.
I'm not completely sure either if there's any city which has combined both of these solutions, but Guadalajara could've been that special case. On one side, Guadalajara line 1 is basically a Stadtbahn, with a center tunnel in the downtown and a street level railway as it comes to the suburbs, where it interacts with traffic, it was even planned to be upgraded into a metro someday. On the other side, line 3 was originally intended to be a fully automated Innovia Metro light metro system, but in the end it's come to not be automated, but a regular light metro. However, as far as I'm concerned, it could potentially become automated one day, as it is based on the technology of Barcelona metro line 9 which is fully automated.
Anyway, either if line 3 is automated or not, me and a lot of Gudalajarenses think the line 3 was the right choice for the city, which seems quite logic as it serves pretty dense areas of it. It's been such a success that it's now the most important line.
I'd say Barcelona kind of has both. L11 is a French inspired automated light metro. But the tram T5 line has an underground section in Gran Via. Not in city center though, if you go to the trouble of drilling in such a complicated place, you better make it worth it.
Nürnberg in Germany has metro with 2/3 lines being driverless
Not exactly a “light” metro though. Its trains feature similar dimensions to something like the REM.
Effectively Dublin's planned "Metrolink" will be a light metro, as the 65 metre platform screen-door stations will be somewhat their max lifetime size once built. The future proofing of the whole scheme is that with automation the frequency can be improved over time, not more hole's dug.
The existing Luas LRT lines are city trams extended to near maximum length, with the Green line running 56m low floor citadis trams. And the Red line 45m. Not quite stadbahn but certainly core lines where 1 should be metro, and the other and what might be left over in the city centre as a likely backbone for a wider network by the mid-century.
But at least for the next 15-20 years, buses pushed to max priority on re-engineered roads are our attempt to keep things moving without super high price tags on fixed infrastructure.
Here in Cambridge (UK) we had a thing called the "Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro" proposed - since scrapped with a change of mayor.
Cambridge is a city where buses can only solve congestion issues to a point, and something else is needed beyond that.
Sounds like Halifax needs it's own Stadtbahn
In fact, despite the term for them (stadtbahn/CityTrain) high platform light rail could actual make a good interurban. There is already an example in Cardiff, or there will be. Check out the Cardiff metro.
would love a video on Dublin!
When talking about German Stadtbahn schemes, many overlook the Karlsruhe of the east, Chemnitz. Trains run as trams in the city centre and use the existing Deutsche Bahn rail network for the longer-distance-runs out of Chemnitz.
What distinguishes the most a light metro from a Stadtbahn is the full separation from other traffic. That allows not only a higher commercial speed, but also a higher frequency, because there's no disruption. Certainly that an underground tunnel in the city center can limit the problem for a tram, but there will always be roads to be crossed on the rest of the line, and priority on red lights doesn't solve everything.
Also I'm not sure the difference between light and heavy metro is really that meaningful. Yes we assume that we need big trains to have big ridership but we often forget that frequency does that job as well. I would even say that 2 trains are better than a single train that would be twice longer. And with automation, it doesn't make it that more expensive operationally speaking.
My hometown of 25k people in Germany will build a 10km tram which connects it to it's neighbouring town of 100k people and from there the tram will continue to the next bigger town of 550k people just another 12km away, there it will connect to the existing tram and tube network.
Stuttgart Stadtbahn has to be one of the more underrated transit systems out there. Very unique, and fits the city's geography and layout very well. more than enough capacity and pretty good headways for how many branches the central tunnels have.
I‘d disagree with that assessment. Stuttgart has been suffering from capacity constraints for a while now. U1 would desperately need to be operated with 80 m sets but doing so isn’t all that easy due to the high degree of streetrunning. There’s even talks about increasing U6 to 120 m sets but that simply isn’t possible either, because stupid U15 blocks a tunnel extension south of Charlottenplatz. You can tell that the system struggles by the amount of new tangential services and bus relief lines being introduced as of recently. There’s also plenty of bus services that should absolutely be converted to rail but the absurdly large turn radius of a DT8 just doesn’t allow for that to happen. Not to mention the fact that high floor platforms just cannot be built all that easily. Stuttgart made a giant mistake by transitioning the entirety of their remaining tram network. They would be far better off had they kept lines 2 and 15 as regular trams and built a city center surface level relief line and grow a secondary network from there.
Great video, thank you Reece! You could have of course used footage from a few more places, this would have been perfect to incorporate Charleroi (and it's not like Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, and Stuttgart are the only Stadtbahn systems in Germany).
Nuremberg actually uses an automated light metro, and they just decided to build a long interurban to Stadtbahn specifications through their northern suburbs. You could argue that the Strasbourg tram almost operates like a Stadtbahn in places, as well. Can't wait for a video on Hanover! :)
I live in cologne and while riding the 16 home from Uni. For some reason a switch was in the wrong position, so i was at "Neumarkt", which the 16 stops at, but instead of underground i was suddenly aboveground. High- and low-floor Stadtbahns share some stations aswell as tracks from the direction i was coming from.
I've always felt cities like Winnipeg, Regina and Darwin, Australia should have a real mass transit solution.
But politicians are full of excuses and they don't want to tell you the truth.
Helping poor and indigenous people is just not on the agenda.
Paris historical metro is often considered to be light metro compared to what is done now. Of course, given your definition, that would rule out Lines 1, 4 and 14... but they have same coach size.
Grand Paris Express is considered heavy metro (except for Lines 16, 17 (despite the same coach width) and 18 because they are shorter but they still set to go faster than usual Paris metro with top speed going well over 100 kph and stops being more than 1.5 km apart.
Depending on how the right of ways and the traffic is managed by police, trams can be very slow, especially in Paris, contrary to Nantes where trams cross intersections at full speed...
Paris Trams are now slower than how busses were twenty years ago on average and busses are even worse thanks to "ecologists wanting bile superhighways everywhere".
I'd argue that for Stadtbahn equivalent, tram trains are that. But not necessarily very well streamlined and the lines depend much on who built them or who upgraded them...
Nantes and Bordeaux wanted VALs Automated Light Metros but given the nature of the soil (mostly sand just like in St Petersbourg), the cost of building even a tiny metro was judged prohibitive 40 years ago. So they went for a tram network. Nantes came out quite fine thanks to intelligent traffic regulation. Bordeaux on the other hand... All lines cross in the same postcode and gridlock eachother during rush hours. Even Nantes notices some problems sometimes. Both cities have grown a lot these last four decades and now wonder if a proper metro wouldn't be best... despite the cost.
Toulouse didn't want trams, they chose VALs, the third line will be heavier duty, tyreless, more streamlined and normal metro, still quite short in length but larger in width, designed to releive the first two lines of their excess of traffic and link with the airport, thus shortening trips from the center (and the tram line to the airport was quite slow and did not serve the inner city anyway, forcing a transfer).
Rennes chose VAL because of the terrain mostly, however the second line has a bad system inspired by Lohr gadgetbahn tech... and the line was closed for six months after an accident. The Neoval idn't wanted anymore by anyone else, hence why Toulouse chose a normal system for their next line.
Lyon chose large metros, stations longer than the trains to be able to extend them somehow. Construction was difficult in shallow terrain but is ultimately future proof for the most part.
Marseille would need a third line but the city is crippled with debts and corruption.
Light metros can benefit greatly from ouver ground construction, adding platform length to a overground station is easier and cheaper than digging thirty meters of tunnel outright if you don't have the finances to do it at first.
If your finances allow it, digging longer stations at first is the way to go for future proofing, at least design tunnels and stations for easier works next when you need it.
Paris trams aren't slower than how bus were 20 years ago... I used to be a frequent PC bus rider and these buses were excruciatingly slow, more than the trams are today.
The bike lanes are a necessity and help carry more people than the streets previously did with only traffic lanes. The problem is caused by cars, not cyclists.
What's lacking is proper control of intersections with cameras to fine drivers that enter an intersection without enough room to vacate it. The checkerboard zones must be enforced.
As I live next to Plovdiv (BG) a city of about 340-400 000 inhabitants and at least 150-200 000 more within a radius of 50 kms I think Stadtbahn (with tram-train capabilities) will perfectly fit the needs of the city and the region. Currently the city transit consists of only private bus operators with poor service. The biggest problem here is the lack of vision of the local authorities who are investing all in car infrastructure.
@@petyobenov I'm also Bulgarian! I think Varna would be a really good fit for a Stadtbahn system considering how centralized it's routes tend to be, and I'm pretty sure that they even had plans for a "light metro" system that bears striking resemblance to a Stadtbahn - but it hasn't gone anywhere yet, sadly.
@@radostin04wastaken I think there is still plan to leave some space for light rail at the Tsar Osvoboditel blvd but there is no plan to put the rails yet. Though the city administration presented a plan for few lines in Varna area which will be built in 4 or 5 stages
Toulouse has a great "Lille-style", light-rail metro, and also a mildly convincing tram. It's not bad at all, worth checking out!
The automated guideway metros typically serve new development areas
One option that smaller cities should consider is the Ottawa Transitway model. The Transitway is a dedicated (private) road but only for transit buses. (It is also used for emergency vehicles such as police, fire, and ambulance.) The transitway road network allows fast movement from the suburbs to the city centre. At both ends, the buses then continue on their planned routes downtown or in the 'burbs. There are even dedicated bus lanes along major city roads to allow for faster transit.
I lived in Ottawa and loved this fast, flexible, and affordable transit system. (I left before the disaster of the O-trains.) These dedicated roads could even be upgraded to a light rapid transit model if growth requires.
Not as exciting as other models. Just a thought.
With the Regional Connector, you could argue that Los Angeles now has both a Stadtbahn (A & E Lines) and a subway (B & D Lines)
I could see the city trains potentially working well in the Region of Waterloo, Ontario. But that means you either need to keep the ION on its own tracks and platforms and have transfers or change the trains and platform heights. So having a transfer seems more feasible unless you choose to limit yourself with the trams they currently have and then it can use new routes.
I'd love to see Halifax, NS, do something. They are looking for funding to do BRT routes, but the growth has been huge, and the terrible transit system is horribly inadequate. Either rail system mentioned here would do wonders for the city, though given the radial nature of the city a Stadtbahn might be better. If anyone with vision had been planning things they would have reserved corridors for transit in all the new developments over the last 20 years, but alas....
Today I learned that the MBTA Green Line is essentially a Stadtbahn
It is.
I think Stadbahn works well for some of these areas because of how the areas developed. There are fairly centralized towns with large gaps in between, often connected by existing rail. This means that you can connect these towns relatively cheaply on the surface, with the trains running relatively fast. It also means that when it gets into a town there are plenty of riders (enough to justify a train).
Only a handful of cities in the US and Canada grew that way, which is why only a handful have something similar to a Stadbahn (Boston being one). Most have steady, medium-density sprawl without centralized towns. You can serve it with a tram, but they are slow and/or expensive and the stops aren't high ridership. They would likely be better with a light automated metro and lots of buses (live Vancouver BC).
I think one of the main advantages of stadtbahns are their ability to change the urban form of huge swaths of the city. They force the redesign of roads, changing traffic patterns and improving street life. Because they do this at all point along the corridor, they don’t lead to the sort of sprinkled development we see in a lot of north american cities like Vancouver or DC.
We should make Stadtbahns in every reasonably sized city in the US. Charlotte is an amzing example of how you can create a great service that will remake huge portions of the city, and if they actually get serious about expanding it and adding branches it could easily be the best city in the south.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." I live in the US and we often gripe over our cities having little to no transit, but maybe a really great bus network can work in smaller cities. The problem we have is we can't even perfect that! I think trams and trolleys might be good for small cities, but eventually we outgrow them. They might even work for limited areas of cities if done properly, but we often fail to do that and they end up being useless or only useful for a small sect of people in a city. I like the idea of the light rail to metro conversion, but in the US we are often too short-sighted to see the future potential of a transit system.
Great video. Have you looked at the Australian cities Melbourne and Adelaide? Both have mixes of heavy urban rail (with a subway in Melbourne), trams (light urban rail), and buses. Adelaide also has a guided busway the O-bahn from Germany. Both cities and other Australian cities are expanding their urban rail systems. Cheers 👍
Look at Hanburg in northern germnany, they have both an U-bahn and a S-bahn. maybe an interesting thoing to look at. Berlin has the same if I remember well.
The Rennes' metro is terrifying, it goes just fast enough for you to make you feel it is too fast as it zooms through the tunnel.
The most terrifying is that the new line almost derails twice !
@@reuillois In both occurrences, the train actually managed to come home on its own power to the maintenance depot though. I know the Neoval tech has its issues, but low-floor tram derailment is also something which happen regularly (not for the same reasons, but the result is the same or worse).
I live in Strasbourg and originally there were plans to make a metro network, but during the elections for the city's mayor, there was a camp for the tram and another for the metro, yes it was political situation.
In the end the tram was more flexible, allowing more branches and more places crossed by the tram,
But today, the tram is saturated, at Christmas and during rush hour it is more than hell and commercial speeds are down.
Last year there were passenger congestions for several weeks in the most served stations causing major delays, the big stations saw more than 3 lines out of 6, that's half of the network that is disrupted and that's in the best conditions.
Today we wonder which system would be best suited for our city, perhaps a system like in the video or an underground S-Bahn that would pass through strategic locations while still allowing during peak hours a large capacity and during off-peak hours allowing for more flexibility on timetables
More local transit would be amazing. Might take a conversion of meter gauge to standard gauge, but then it would be set
In Arizona. For most places. like The mountain terrain of cympo district would need something That hybridizes both systems,
Stadtbahns are really just another name for an interurban
No. A Stadtbahn can run as an interurban, but it can also run just within one city perfectly fine.
Newcastle New South Wales Australia is ripe for tramway extension from Wickham to Newcastle University. The problem is that it is still low density until the state and city governments decide it is safe to increase urban density on an area where a lot of coal was mined underground from 1830s till the late 1980s. There are two or three old rail lines that are used as rail trails but they are well away from built up areas and the main rail lines are the Sydney-Newcastle Interurban with two trains per hour and a similar quantity of freight. Add the main lines to Brisbane and Hunter Valley and it is a busy place. In short we will wait a while for more trams.😮
I would posit that both automated light metro and stat Bahn style systems are just different incarnations of light rail in the broader, engineering-based understanding of the term as being a relatively low capacity railway. I've noticed some manufacturers, most notably Alstom, market some of their technologies as "light rail vehicles", presenting them in much the same way as you describe stat Bahn style systems. The Docklands Light Railway is a good example of just how blurry the lines can get, when one realises that the first generation DLR trains were developed from tram technology, and found subsequent use as stat Bahn trams. Another interesting example of a light metro that is not automated is the Tyne & Wear in Newcastle, England, which shares a short section of its route with the national heavy rail network around around Sunderland, but is fully grade separated from streets, with the suburban sections being mostly repurposed from historic heavy rail corridors; hence the high floors.
I’d call the Paris T3 tram lines stadtbahns, altho’ they have a lot of dedicated ROW.
But they don't have platforms above the wheel tops, no, those are not city trains. CityTrains are high floor for high platform loading.
I just recently commented in a Discussionnabout Heavy Rail how there seems to be a very different Design Philosophy in France and Germany when it comes to Transit: Coverage-Focus in Germany and Frequency-Focus in France. Personally, I think that in Times where CO2-Neutrality is the Goal, as many People as possible should have Access to Public Transit and be able to reach as many Places as possible, so I think that Stadtbahnen are superior.
That being said through, the Cities with Stadtbahnen already belong to the big Boys by German Standards.
Can you make video about Tampere Finland
@@aaro4224 There's one tram line...
babe wake up, new rm transit vid just dropped