Zhuzhou, Hunan, China has deployed a segment of `trackless trams’ (map – it runs on the north-south route in the center of the map in this Olympics district). The technology, explained in this video, is an articulated, rubber-tired on road, electric vehicle that carries passengers on a marked right-of-way adjacent to traffic. The interior has a layout typical of trams or LRT vehicles, and it has tramlike doors. The stops are at stations with protective gates aligned with platform doors like modern LRT and Metro systems so people are less likely to be on the track. The vehicle, though billed as “autonomous” is in fact merely “driver assist”, as the video plainly shows a driver and steering wheel and explains. The markings on the road are used to help the guidance system (and the driver) stay centered in the lane.
There is a lot of hype about such systems. It is being widely promoted by Prof Peter Newman out of Perth (Curtin University), who has long been influential in transport policy in Australia, and has had government positions. (You may remember him from Sustainability and Cities).
In Australia, `trackless trams’ keep getting suggested for various corridors, two in particular are”
From the City of Liverpool (Western Suburb) to the now under construction Western Sydney airport Links: (1) (2) (3) The Liverpool – airport corridor has been mooted for public transport, and BRT seems perfectly logical there, trackless tram loses the ability to feed the line from side streets.
Parramatta Road from the City of Sydney to Parramatta. This is a suburban strip/car sewer for much of its length, and could be so much more. With the construction of the tunneled motorway project (WestConnex), there have been promises made to rejuvenate the road and create an exclusive transit lane for its length (it exists in places but not continuously), but commitments are fluid. The route once had trams, and today has many many buses. Links: (1) (2) (3)
One broader issue of course is that it is a bit of vapourware. There is a Chinese line as noted above (so it is decades ahead of Hyperloop), but essentially no one here has ridden on it, and many people/professionals are naturally skeptical of performance and reliability and real costs.
Politicians however are especially vulnerable to the new and shiny (the TV series Utopia/Dreamland is a documentary), anything that gets them above the fold in the newspaper or on the local news at 6, so it attracts more attention than more mundane ideas like bus electrification and exclusive bus lanes and transit signal pre-emption, in short Rapid Bus or Bus Rapid Transit.
And there is a strong anti-labour thread in these discussions, so any opportunity to automate and get rid of drivers and of the risk of labor work actions is seen as attractive. That said, the technology isn’t actually automated yet. Not to say it won’t be in the indefinite future, but not for the initial deployment.
Trams in Sydney especially are seen as expensive, and the two of the most recent tram projects (Newcastle LRT, and the City and Southeast LRT in Sydney) have had huge cost blowouts (and were poorly scoped), so naturally there is searching for other modes.
Perhaps electric bus rapid transit needs a rebranding, but no one should be confused about what a `trackless tram’ actually is. It is an advanced, electric bus in an exclusive bus lane operating like gold standard bus rapid transit. There is nothing wrong with advanced buses. There is nothing wrong with bus lanes. There is nothing wrong with bus rapid transit. Cities should deploy more of these things, and if politicians need to use the silly phrase “trackless tram” or anything else to get this popularly accepted by a political class, media, and public with the attention of a gnat, there are worse indignities the profession suffers.
Once upon a time (1888 to be precise), the United States and the world launched a huge building boom for urban streetcars. Companies like Twin City Rapid Transit laid miles of track in fast-growing cities, extending well past the built areas to serve greenfield sites for emerging suburbs waiting to be platted and built. They did this because the streetcar promoters benefited directly from the land sales. The availability of a new, fast transit system connecting to downtown made houses much more valuable. The fares from the new passengers covered the operating costs of the system.
I am a notedstreetcar skeptic. I have written blog posts about their issues. As an objective analyst, I will however admit an advantage streetcars or trams have over buses.
This is not the ‘permanence’ justification that is often heard and easily disproved (i.e. where are they now if they were so permanent?). But it is related, once laid down, tracks are harder to move than buses, and tracks are more expensive, so it is harder to make routes circuitous. Many bus routes look like they were designed by drunk transit planners. One local bus the 370, which runs near my office and my home is so circuitous it is faster to walk even ignoring schedule delay. (It is not quite faster to walk end-to-end though, walking time is 2:30 vs. 1:14 on the bus, so the effective bus speed, assuming schedule compliance, is about 9.6 km/h vs. 4.8 km/h walking.) I have written about this before in Minneapolis, (and nearby Rosedale) and circuity is hardly an unknown problem.
370 Bus Route on Google Maps
Now there are undoubtedly reasons for every indirect deviation that diverts buses from the straight and narrow. However, every circuitous zig also loses passengers, and bus routes in the US are much more circuitous than travel by road. Serve this building, serve that one, cover this street, reduce pedestrian walking time.
In contrast, trams in practice are much more straight-laced, paragons of transit routing virtue. The historic Sydney Tram Map, as this map in wikipedia shows, gives a sense of routes that were pretty much as direct as possible.
Now it can be argued this particular bus provides and east-west service that no tram did, which is true in part. But that doesn’t mean trams could not. It also could be argued that almost no one rides the 370 end-to-end. Though I have not checked the Opal data, this is probably true as well. But a well-structured suburb-to-suburb transit network (my fantasy map is here, Jarrett Walker has done this as well) could avoid this. To be fair as well, the Sydney frequent network is not nearly as circuitous as the 370 bus, which has a roughly 20 minute headway
In the beginning was the path. It was undifferentiated, shared by people and animals alike, and eventually wheeled vehicles pulled by humans and animals. While dating the First Path is impossible — the very first First Path must have been a path that was reused once, and slightly better than the unimproved space around it — it operated both in early settlements and on routes connecting nearby settlements.
Today’s version of that is the sidewalk or footpath. It is now used for people walking, sometimes for people moving goods, and occasionally for people on scooters and bicycles. It should not be used for storing cars, though it is. New uses will include low speed delivery robots, as shown in the photo from Starship.
When we see a raised crosswalk, we know the First Path is given the pre-eminance its venerable status warrants. When we see shared spaces, we know those harken back to the early undifferentiated path-spaces of earlier centuries. When we see pedestrian-only zones, we see a First Path that has grown up.
The Second Path diverges from the first path with the emergence of the first street or roads with sidewalks (footpaths). Spiro Kostof (1992) dates it to about 2000 BCE in Anatolia. And it is clear many Roman and Greek cities separated sidewalks from streets, which the Romans called Semita.
Post-Rome, sidewalks were rare, making appearances in London after the Great Fire, and in Paris after Haussman.
But to be clear, today’s sidewalk is not the second path, it is the first. The second path is the road which is largely free of pedestrians, intended for the movement of vehicles. Originally these were animal powered vehicles, as well as human. Later fuel-powered machines took over the street and roads.
It is easier for a camel to go through the eyeof a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Third Path
Cyclists Avenue Sydney (1900)
The Third Path actually emerged well before the Second Path was colonized by motorized vehicles. It is for bicycles, and initially was paved in contrast with the unpaved streets and roads of its time. Given the first Velocipede was only 1817, and the first bike chain (which we associate with modern bicycles) was 1885, these came relatively quickly compared with the First and Second Paths. While ascertaining the first bike lane or separated bike path is tricky (there are many claims, differing in nuance), I have compiled some claimed firsts and earlies here (thanks to people who replied on Twitter):
While bike lanes have now been around as a technology for well more than a century, throughout most of North America and Australia, bike lanes are not provisioned, so bicyclists have the Hobson’s Choice of driving in traffic with much heavier and much faster automobiles and trucks on the Second Path, the roadbed or illegally in many cases on the First Path, the sidewalk.
With the advent of the smart phone, new modes are becoming feasible, most notably dockless shared bikes and scooters.
Regulations in many places limit the use of bikes on footpaths. The reasons for this are clear from the pedestrian’s point of view, bikes are traveling up to 4 times faster than walkers, and collision can create injury. Dockless shared bikes emerged in Australia in 2017, after a few years on the road in China. Their main contribution has however not been transport (they are used about once every 3 days) but instead as a the recipient of complaint about sidewalk clutter (unlike say cars, which are always parked perfectly). As a consequences they have been targets of vandalism. The obvious solution will eventually get adopted, geofenced corrals for parking bikes (shared and private), taking away one parking space per block perhaps.
Given the disparities of speeds on the first (5 km/h) and second paths (30-120 km/h), there is a clear market niche for an infrastructure network for vehicles faster than foot and slower than cars. Physically, one imagines it generally lying between the existing kerb and removing a lane now devoted to the storage or movement of cars. And for many if not most urban places globally, this has been recognized and networks of third paths have been, or will be, built out.
This Third Path is important not just for bikes, but for electric bikes (which are becoming increasingly feasible with progress in battery technology) and electric scooters.
Fourth Path
A Fourth Path for buses (and other high occupancy vehicles) is also now considered. The first bus lane emerged in Chicago in 1940. The reason for bus lanes again is in part operational differences compared with existing road users. Buses start and stop in traffic much more frequently than cars. But a second reason is in fact the opposite, not because buses would block cars, but because cars would block buses. Buses carry more passengers than cars, and so should move faster, and can do so if they are not stuck in queues behind cars.
Interfaces
The Kerb – Once a nondescript piece of concrete now forms the edge (both physically and metaphorically) of the sharing economy: taxis, Ubers, autonomous mobility services. The Kerbspace differentiates and separates paths, but we now have new questions:
Who manages kerbspace?
How is it regulated?
Is it even mapped?
Comp(l)ete Streets
The complete streets movement advocates for streets with sidewalks, bike paths, and are otherwise designed to promote safety and efficiency. The figure below is not exactly what they have in mind.
(Kiss Me) On the Bus, by the Replacements, is one of the great transit songs about public displays of affection. Today I was on the Replacement Bus for the T1 train, which was closed for works between Strathfield and Epping. This is a train route I take with my kids weekly to their Saturday class, we board the train in Redfern at 12:56 and arrive at 1:25 or so in Eastwood. Add about 10 minutes on either side for access/egress costs.
Historic Sydney Bus. Ours was newer, but less well ventilated.
We took the train from Redfern to Strathfield. The signs were excellent at both stations. At Strathfield we were easily routed to the replacement T1 bus with stops at West Ryde, Eastwood, and all stops to Hornsby. So this was in one sense more direct than a train, which had additional stops. In another, more important sense, it was not.
The bus runs in traffic along Concord Road [Map] from Strathfield to Ryde. Concord Road is heavily congested most of the time, aligning with one of too few bridges across the Parramatta River, the great tributary of Sydney Harbour. With the trains out-of-service, traffic is probably worse than normal.
More to the point, there were several other issues besides it being slow:
The temperature was 24C (about 80F), with a humidity of about 100%.
The aircon was not working on the bus (or rather it worked fine for the driver, not for the passengers.
The windows were all closed. Someone eventually opened the emergency access on the ceiling to vent the bus.
The bus was pretty crowded. I counted about 50 passengers, all the seats were taken and there were a lot of standees. It was hard to get an accurate count because that required me to face backwards. I have seen more crowded conditions, but obviously I would tend to avoid them if I can.
The traffic was not merely slow, the bus driver was a lurcher, moving the bus to gain a couple of meters and than braking hard, as if maximizing physical jerk was a performance measure. That no one fainted or was actively vomiting I consider a minor miracle Perhaps the song should have been titled (Sick Me on the Buss)
We made the strategic error of sitting facing backwards.
The Replacement Bus arrived at Eastwood station at about 2:05 pm, so 45 minutes slower total. (To be clear, this is significantly faster than scheduled local bus services between these destinations, as we avoided local stops.) Given we caught the bus almost immediately from Strathfield, that 45 minute extra travel time is compared to 15 minutes of train travel from Strathfield to Eastwood, meaning the effective bus speed (and for that matter car speed, since the bus was in traffic almost the entire time) would be about 3x slower.
Why would anyone drive when they can take the train in Sydney?
Now of course the train cannot serve every origin-destination pair, but it serves many of them, and people self-organize to take advantage of the services.
I don’t have any brilliant suggestions for what to do when the tracks are closed for works. Ideally that could be minimized, conducted automatically at night by robots, or some such. However given that they need to be shut down at least sometimes, this is where dynamic lane control might be useful. Ours was far from the only Replacement Bus, there was a veritable convoy. A dynamic bus-only lane would have sped the many thousands of people using buses on Concord Road, stuck in traffic behind many more vehicles carrying many fewer people. Similarly it might have been possible to reverse lanes from one direction to another in places. I realize this is a temporary condition, and trains will likely be back in service next Monday. On the other hand, there might be other conditions where these controls could be useful. Futher, I don’t think the buses had balanced loads, judging from an eyeball observation through the windows. Two buses made the same trip at the same time. Our was full, the following bus was not. This might have been managed better at Strathfield.
On Sunday June 12 I took the A-Line from Snelling and University to 46th Street Station, switched buses, took the A-Line to Rosedale, switched buses, and took the A-Line to Snelling and University Avenue again, making a full circuit on 3 buses. Smelling that new bus smell, it smells like victory.
Stand tall traveler information pylon.
The waiting at the stops is better than your conventional post in the dirt stop. There is a full gamut of stop features, including shelter, accurate NextBus information, pre-payment mechanism, and benches to sit. Everything you would want except maybe trees. Pre-pay is nice and saves time boarding, though I didn’t get to take advantage of it since it was free anyway today, and I was (and would always be) a free transfer, but it would still save time for a free transfer. Interestingly, the A-Line stations provide more information than the LRT stations. More importantly the real-time information was working on day one.
For the opening weekend, Metro Transit had a full complement of assistants waiting at each station, who were helpful, but mostly not busy. Some (maybe a third) of the stations were just passed by (if there are no passengers boarding and alighting, no need to stop, unlike a train).
The boarding process is mostly smooth. All-door boarding is good, people seemed to distribute themselves across all the doors. The low floor buses made it easy for a lady using a walker to board.
Pay Before Boarding
However bikes on buses take too long. While it seems a nice feature to allow bikes on buses, it added 38 seconds to the stop (see video). I saw 3 of these on my round trip, this was the slowest. I don’t mean to pick on the bicyclist, he is following the rules and doing what is allowed. Now maybe with experience this gets down to 20 seconds. If it were only 30 seconds for the bicyclists, who cares, but when it is 30 seconds multiplied by the number of people on board, this gets expensive. For a fullish bus of 50 people that is 25 person minutes of delay. Granted no one cares on a Sunday morning, and it was far from full, but during peak times this can be a considerable deal.
Oddly, A-Line buses can cross the Green Line without stopping and the driver looking both ways, but must stop and loop before proceeding at the Blue Line.
Not having exclusive right-of-way seems to be the major criticism from national transit critics, saying it doesn’t deserve the rank of BRT. However neither Snelling Avenue nor Ford Parkway are typically congested enough to justify an exclusive lane for only 8 buses an hour (6 x A-Line, 2 x 84). A few stretches have some other routes as well, but still not enough. It would be nice to see some transit signal pre-emption action happening though. We stopped twice in both directions at Snelling and I-94.
Not all of the 84 signs are up-to-date in the way they should be. Some still indicate the route number, but do not provide maps. Some still record the 84 as a high-frequency route. One assumes those will come down shortly. As far as I could tell, all 84 stops have notices about change in frequency. Still, some folks have not gotten the message despite the hard work of Metro Transit on this. I saw (sadly too quickly to film) a guy flipping the bird to the A-Line bus not stopping at an old 84 stop a few blocks north of Snelling Avenue, and not at a new A-Line station. I think he and his friends/family expected the bus to stop.
The buses seemed (I did not document against posted schedules) to be running fast (It’s Sunday with little traffic) and so when they arrive at their end, the next bus is still waiting there with a few minutes before departure. There did not seem to be any holds along the route to ensure schedule adherence, only at the ends. This makes sense, but means that this is a turn-up-and-go service more than a scheduled service. But at worst, you wait 10 minutes.
Nice transit map, but I missed No Smoking station somehow.
In addition to that new bus smell, the buses have Wi-Fi. Good. However, you have to accept terms and conditions each time. Unfortunate that it cannot remember that I did this already and auto-log me on.
The buses have nice on-board “press to signal” stops, although I miss the cable which rings a bell because I miss the great story as to why it’s a cable. That cable, back in horsecar days, used to be connected to the driver’s arm, so you were basically tugging on the driver to get him to stop, since he couldn’t hear the passengers through the cacophony and when he was outside a carriage and passengers were inside.
The ride quality was better than most local buses. Snelling has recently been reconstructed and these are new buses. I did not do the full Hicksian analysis, so cannot say that it was smoother than LRT (it surely wasn’t), but it was clearly better than most buses.
The route at Rosedale is far less circuitous than the 87 Bus I have complained about before, it was in and out about as well as could be expected.
I expect the A-Line will hit ridership targets quickly. While some of the riders were lookie-loos like me (A lady in front of me was Instagramming about the A-Line, after Instagramming about Northern Spark), other passengers seemed to be engaging in their daily business, aware of course it wasn’t the 84, but not doing anything different. I am guessing an average of 20 persons boarding per run (for the 2 full runs) (I didn’t actually count), which is 240 boardings per hour or maybe 3000 per day, for a Sunday. The projected 3500 for a weekday seems well within grasp. I look forward to published ridership numbers.
Most of the traffic appears to be on the middle part of the route, from Snelling just north of University down to Highland Park. Very few people were transfers to the Blue Line LRT or alighting at Rosedale. Even the Snelling and University passengers were not mostly transfers to the Green Line today.
There are more grocery stores on the A-Line than the Green or Blue Lines. Lunds & Byerlys and Whole Foods had patrons riding the bus on Sunday. There are more movie theaters on the A-Line than the Green or Blue Lines. Someone counted 4 Dairy Queens. Which is to say, the A-Line, which runs past neighborhood retail (as well as a regional mall) better serves people on their daily non-work activities, rather than being designed foremost as a commuter route. Given the declining roles of downtowns in American life, this is important.
I have driven this route (in pieces) dozens of times. It feels different on the bus. I have ridden through other cities on buses in similarly scaled neighborhoods and they feel like cities. This has always felt like the suburbs before. It’s a bit more urban now, with stuff along the way that is perceived through the eyes of a bus passenger differently than through the eyes of a car driver (or passenger). In part it’s the idea I might get out and walk around and see something interesting, which I would do in a city I was visiting, but I would never do in St. Paul. The A-Line gives confidence that I can get off and easily find my way back in a way that the 84 bus did not. I however did not do that this trip, since it was about the bus, not the neighborhood. But it is something I imagine doing, which is progress.
This is about the best that can be done with buses short of an exclusive right-of-way and full electrification, and that would just be overkill here.
In short, the A-Line is the best new investment Metro Transit has done since I have moved here. As a new capital investment, it is not as high quality as some routes with exclusive right-of-way, but it finds the optimal trade-off between quality and cost, maximizing benefit/cost and minimizing dollars spent per rider. This is important. It means more things can be done. It’s just too bad this wasn’t opened sooner. For the important high-frequency corridors, the sooner they can be upgraded the better. This corridor nicely serves existing demand, and can induce additional transit travel from neighbors. It also nicely connects the upcoming Ford plant redevelopment, with the Blue and Green lines, without any additional expenditures. While low volume/low-frequency bus routes are going to be further disrupted in the coming decade, high volume/high-frequency routes should be upgrade. There may actually come a time when this is a 5 minute route, at least during peak times, and with some help from transit signal priority, it beats the new mobility companies (e.g. Uber and Lyft) and AVs on-demand in terms of waiting time and convenience.
The A-Line is the first in a proposed indeterminate series of ALPHABET routes. (I have backronymed ALPHABET to mean Arterial Lines Producing High Accessibility By Efficient Transit). Now you might say, but that means there can be only 26 routes. I disagree, after the Z-Line, MetroTransit can start to use Greek letters, which adds 24 (although many are similar, but think about the Ψ-Line (it knows you are coming) ), and then to emoticons. Imagine how happy everyone will be on the :)-Line.
More importantly, St. Paul is missing an opportunity with their quixotic quest for streetcars on 7th, and could have had the B-Line under construction already were they not continuing to dither. In fact it has been truncated on the official map. Instead, it appears the C-Line is next in queue. Since the letters in the alphabet don’t appear to have any geographical relationship to the lines they represent, there is no reason for them to be chronological either I suppose.
8:55 Arrive at Green Line station (WestGate)
9:05 Arrive at Green Line station (Snelling)
9:14 Board A-Line Bus SB (Snelling and University)
9:35 Board A-Line Bus NB (46th St. Station)
10:10 Alight/Board A-Line Bus SB (Rosedale Center Station)
10:29 Board Green Line train (Snelling). Round Trip Time 75 minutes.
I will be talking, over the Internet, in Raleigh-Durham on January 8 about accessibility and transit at the RTA Transit Innovations Series.
The Regional Transportation Alliance has launched a new RTA Transit Innovations Series to support and advance current discussions on transit in Wake County.
The sessions include in person and/or videoconference presentations from experts on bus rapid transit and related innovations and research including express lanes, freeway caps, land use, circulators, and periodic comparisons with various rail transit options such as commuter rail, streetcars, and light rail.
(Download pdf overview of the RTA Transit Innovations Series here).
With the exploration of new and emerging transit innovations, the development of a bus rapid transit-based alternative(s) as a basis for comparison with the current draft plan, and the clarification and prioritization of goals and objectives, our community can evaluate the potential mobility and economic benefits of transit for our community and make an informed decision on our enhanced regional transit future in Wake County.
There will be no cost to attend any of the events in the RTA Transit Innovations Series. Scroll down or click here if you are interested in sponsoring either an individual session or the entire RTA Transit Innovations Series.
Detailed schedule of all past and future RTA Transit Innovations Series events.
Next Session RTA Transit Innovations Series
Session 2: Research on land use and tradeoffs
Wednesday, January 8, 2014, 3:30 pm EST
Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce
Presenters, via Cisco WebEx videoconference:
David Levinson, Ph.D., University of Minnesota
– Editor of the Journal of Transport and Land Use and Director of the NEXUS research group
Stephanie Lotshaw, Manager, U.S. and Africa, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
– Author of More Development for your Transit Dollar
As part of some recent investigation about Bus Stops in the Twin Cities, I wanted to find out how many bus stops there are in various cities. Sadly this information has not been pre-compiled on the Web … until now.
This is the first list of bus stops by transit system that I know of. It is of course, incomplete. Feel free to add information in the comments (with references, and system definitions as necessary), I will try to update the list periodically. Also feel free to add this information to Wikipedia to preserve this information for posterity.
David Levinson, Transportist 
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