> The vehicle is battery-powered, eliminating the need for overhead wires. It features an innovative turning system, enabling it to handle 15m radius curves. This allows for installation in tight corners within the existing highway. The Council intends for it to operate at a high frequency, providing a turn-up-and-go service. The vehicle has a capacity of 56, is comfortable and has low floors to enable passengers to embark and disembark easily. The vehicle has been developed to allow autonomous operation in future.
> The new track is laid just 30cm within the road’s surface, minimising the need to relocate pipes and cables, which is time-consuming and expensive. It achieves this by leveraging cutting-edge materials science, while still utilising standard rail parts to ensure ease of manufacture.
Battery powered trams have real potential, now that batteries with 5 to 7 minute charging and large numbers of charging cycles are a thing. That's compatible with typical end of line holding times. Steel wheel on steel rail is low friction, and you get most of the energy used to go uphill back when you go downhill. This could work out.
If you were going up and down hills, would you still use steel wheel in steel rail unless you had some sort of cable to work with? I always thought the Muni did relatively level routes for that reason? The Lausanne m2 for example uses rubber (well, ideally you’d be able to just balance the train going up with the train going down, but that only works for simple inclines with limited stops). Actually, a battery powered rubber wheeled tram service on some sort of steep incline like SF’s cable car routes could get some wicked regen going down.
Even if level, they could still get some regen from making stops.
A rack rail is also an option, though tends towards the noisy and slow.
But yeah usually light rail keeps under 5%, and can’t really go above 10 on pure adhesion.
> While many streetcar lines were converted to bus lines after World War II, the J Church avoided this due to the private right-of-way it uses to climb the steepest grades on Church Street, between 18th Street and 22nd Street.[9]
I was told the tires are to reduce noise but I wonder if part of it is to handle some of the steeper sections like Vendome up to Villa Maria.
Care to point out a source that supports a hypothetical link between rubber wheels and lung cancer?
Its not hard to find out where they are, Michelin is quite proud of them.
Revolutionary as the turning circle will be used at speed with passengers to traverse roundabouts in-lane. CVLR doesn't need turning loops, as the vehicles can be driven from either end.
At last they were not trying to use agile!
Another common pitfall seems to be engineering teams choosing agile when the business engagement model is waterfall. This puts you in the unfortunate situation of trying to change requirements without being able to get paid for those changes.
It feels like that's putting this into a really awkward place in the tradeoff space. Trams work because they can scale higher than buses. That scale comes at the cost of more up-front infrastructure, much less flexibility, and needing dedicated lanes. So cities don't have trams everywhere, but they're only installed on routes that can support the scale.
For these you still have the up-front investment (just less of it) and inflexibility, but don't get the efficiencies of scale due to how small the capacity is.
Is this really just a bet that they can get autonomous tram-driving on city street approved a decade+ sooner than autonomous buses?
Buses however are slow (in London about the same as walking) and (outside London) prone to vanishing on timetable changes. Closing a rail link is tricky, you can be confident that if you live near a tram stop it will be there in 10 years. 60% of our local (say 10 mile radius) buses have been removed in the last decade, removing entire villages from service.
A rail solution allows you to read, a bus throws you around everywhere and makes you sick.
I also observe that this is an average speed, which night be useful for statistical summarization but is not as useful as knowing whether the portion of the route that you want to take is in the faster part or the slower part of the data readings.
For example, if I took a bus from Aldwych up Holborn to Euston I might expect that the first mile would indeed be walking pace but the second mile I would be zipping along. It's important as a bus rider to not let the slow parts color your perception of the whole ride.
[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...
I definitely feel like trams are a weird technical solution to a policy/perception problem. On a technical level I don't think there's that much to recommend them over buses with bus lanes. It's just that governments never put bus lanes the whole way like you are forced to do with a tram.
I got exactly the opposite impression the first time I rode a tram in my life. The tram is really really shaky and the connection with the overhead line is flaky, leading to all sorts of strange noises.
My experience has been the opposite: every vehicle on rails has offered a superior ride quality to every vehicle on rubber tires. I can't read on a bus, but on a train it's no problem.
The ability for the tracks to be laid so shallow is in my view, the entire innovation and cost is the reason for this approach.
But rather, this is giving up the benefit trams have over buses, without gaining any new edge to replace it. So why is it a good tradeoff? And why now, not 20 years ago?
The autonomous driving angle is the only idea I have.
PDF: https://www.bernmobil.ch/sites/default/files/2025-02/ah_0201...
For comparison, the most frequent London underground service is 100 seconds per train and the system moves about 50k passengers an hour (based on a 21% increase representing 10k passengers, I couldn't find a direct figure), presumably that being both directions.
[0]: https://brtdata.org/location/latin_america/brazil/rio_de_jan...
Also, because of the expensive infrastructure that can only be used by trams, there’s a permanence there that prevents future politicians from ripping it out to put more cars on for a quick political win with drivers.
Going back to point 1: having a line means that any route needs to be properly planned because you never have an escape hatch of “just stick them on the road.” Example: where I live, the council installed a bus lane and a cycle lane. Where it pinches in (planning fuck up), it dumps all the traffic into a shared route with 2 roundabouts and 5 exits, each with an insane amount of traffic coming to or from them. Buses that are forced to use that route are always late. It takes me just as long to drive as it does to take the bus, faster if you factor in me waiting for a late bus.
Trams here in Berlin share the street with the cars on some streets. So, it's exactly like a bus that can get stuck in traffic (and they do). Dedicated tracks are also common but they take up a lot of space and it's expensive infrastructure to install. Mostly trams are limited to the former East Berlin, though they've started to spread to some parts on the west side.
With electrical buses and bus lanes, you get most of the advantages of trams. There are probably still some advantages to dedicated tram lines. But they are expensive to install. I'm not sure it's worth the investment.
> Also, because of the expensive infrastructure that can only be used by trams, there’s a permanence there that prevents future politicians from ripping it out to put more cars on for a quick political win with drivers.
A few things to further this:
- I’ve seen bus lanes get ripped out and moved around, you can see where the paint was cut off.
- Taxis use bus lanes, usually.
- People use bus lanes illegally if they’re not enforced with cameras (political cost of installing the cameras).
This is definitively not true. It's something people said about the Washington, DC streetcar and it turns out they are about to remove the streetcar in order to replace it with buses:
https://www.railwaygazette.com/light-rail-and-tram/dc-street...
Like many tram lines, CVLR is being laid in-road and not segregated. In fact, while not mentioned here, the it's 15 m turning radius is so important is because it's planned to traverse roundabouts in-lane.
The tram they show in the animation also very much has a driver in the front.
If they can deliver on what they show in their demos, I don't see why the size of the trams or the infrastructure should be a problem. All the expensive stuff has been thought about, the system barely takes up any extra space, and the system is capable of scaling up by just sending more vehicles into service.
Lower flexibility is actually a feature when it comes to mass transit: People will build density along rail lines because they assume the town won't rip them up, making the rail line more valuable over time. A bus route can be cancelled the day after a disruptive mayor is voted into office.
I also don't see why you can't scale up the tram with additional cars, as long as you keep the lbs/sqft the same. 3 car trams are fine, 3 car busses are... not
You can run them at high frequency though.
It's tiny, how it possibly carry all those 2x4s, powertools and sheets of plywood when I'm out doing manly things. I'd better go buy that monster truck so I can look like a real man.
Those teeny tiny little carriages have a capacity a quarter of what the trams in my city provide. If one of them pulled up in peak hour here, I imagine it would fill up after two stops and be a nuisance from there on.
Yes, this is smaller than the double-deckers in Coventry, that you can even do an eyeball comparison with if you watch the ironic publicity video mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217231 and keep your eyes peeled for the buses queued up at those temporary traffic lights in the background.
No, it's roughly on a par with the single-deckers, though, and there are quite a lot of those used by the local bus operators.
I definitely agree that the dedicated right of way is the main thing. It's why some of San Francisco's trams are so slow outside of the city centre (where they run in a tunnel) and why Manchester's trams are so slow through the city centre (where they run at surface level sharing the street with pedestrians.)
I believe the new Trafford line improves things somewhat but Manchester really needs much more heavy rail capacity.
Having to hold on to something discards it from my preferred list of solutions.
Even if all that falls through, I'm not gonna complain about it. We sorely need more public infrastructure in the UK. Even if an experiment like this fails, at least you actually get a tram line and experience out of it. Much better than a project which sucks up million then gets cancelled. (Cough cough HS2.)
It’s a worthwhile read BTW
I suspect these are too small to carry a significant number of passengers per hour
They’ll also probably never be autonomous as the challenge with autonomous is less the driving and more with passengers getting on and off, getting trapped etc
Trams are one example of Light Rail, but so is the Docklands Light Railway in London (an exception to "on sight" - it's automatic), as opposed the the Tube (underground) which is Heavy. But the Welsh "metro" project's "tram-trains" (Stadler Citylink) are also Light, even though their tracks into the valleys are very much not urban in the usual sense - the full valleys journeys are over one hour with the current trains and go through mostly rural areas with small towns.
I’ll give you an important one as an example: door to door journey times. I support RTO, which is the best way to improve that metric for the average person, which is to say, I was hoping this would be a discussion for out of the box thinking. Or really, what do you invest millions of infrastructure bucks into? All of Uber was only a little more expensive than a single high speed rail line. Why can’t cities run ride share? Why would they run ride share worse than a train service?
I haven’t found the projected figures for Coventry but it would be very, very awkward if they can’t beat the numbers above with a supposedly much cheaper track.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Besan%C3%A7on?wprov=s...
Still, there's no point comparing build costs between France and the UK as they're completely different cultures and jurisdictions. Instead, a more reasonable approach is to compare to recent similar project in the UK.
Edinburgh's tram covers 18.5 km and cost at least (they're still uncovering overruns years later) £1 BN. That's ~£50 MM or ~€60 MM per km. That's what CVLR should and will be benchmarked against.
VLRT seems gimmicky at first but the more I look at it the more sense it makes.
Separated by huge distance of 20 miles, both have thousands of same EU laws )still on the books, share thousands of years of history and at one point ruled by the same aristocracy.
They're using "Standard rail components, innovative construction" - standard gauge rail, but laid over a foundation of slab ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC), which allows for the shallower foundation / avoidance of utilities relocation.
Using UHPC to rethink infrastructure is the big story here, I think.
That's a _very_ small tram, smaller than most buses.
They make all kinds of claims that don't stand up to over 100 years of history running trains. The claim they are innovative, but there is nothing new here, and no evidence they have looked at the real problems of transit systems. Someone is going to make a lot of money on this at the expense of the community that loses.
Trains have been around for a long time. You can buy all the parts you need for a good system off the shelf. You won't be saving money by designing something new, you just waste money on engineers to design something and then lose the scale factors you could get from buying the same thing as everyone else. If you buy the same thing as everyone else that means there will be a market for spare parts and thus in 20 years when (not if!) something breaks you can keep the system running.
Yes overhead wires are expensive - but they are a rounding error compared to track. Batteries are expensive too, and you have to buy a lot of them. Batteries need to be recharged which means these trams will be out of service often so they have to buy a lot more so that when one is out of service for charging the others can work. (you still need a few extra for maintenance, but battery charging is more common so you need a lot more)
If you want to build a train the best way to save money is to build exactly the same as everyone else does: standard off the shelf trains, running on standard off the shelf rails, and standard off the shelf overhead rail. If you want to innovate make sure that everyone is fluent in Spanish, Turkish, Korean, or Italian - because places where those languages are spoke build and run trains much cheaper than other places you can think of so you want to learn from them. (note that French or Japanese are not on the above list - while those areas do cheaper than English speakers, they are still expensive)
I'm not sure about the UK, but in the US most of the cost blowout for trains seems to be in stations, so focus all your innovation there: don't make them monuments to how much money you can spend. (The UK has cost problems almost as bad as the US, but I'm not aware of any study on where the issues come from, while at least in the US there are studies).
Anyway everyone is pretty sure that that something is wrong with the standard train economics as you describe them, because if there wasn't something wrong with it there'd be a lot more trains. I can't tell from the site, or from your comment, if this is the solution, or even worth doing as an experiment... but "don't change anything ever" doesn't strike me as productive either.
Innovation should require some knowlegde of what is already done - otherwise you invent square wheels.
Given the rapid progress in battery and battery charging tech, I doubt that evidence still applies today.
Also, they may be cheaper in the long run but require more up-front investment. Depending on the interest rate, that can swing the answer to the ”what’s cheaper?” question
Adding a bus line isn't sexy, even bus rapid transit (BRT) sounds like a wet fart. They work, they can work extremely well, but nobody gets excited about it.
This thing is just like a monorail; something worse than a bus but that sounds sexier.
I agree with much of your sentiment, and hope that the Coventry council is being challenged in these sorts of ways, but at the same time I recognise that each city is going to have quite different requirements for trams driving down the roads in its centre.
Perhaps a better push back is: why isn’t this just a better bus network?
There are different modes of operation that differentiate them but fundamentaly they are all trains and face the same issues
Again I sorta see what you mean, but feel you’re massively over simplifying this.
Ceci n'est pas une tram: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kMUANU9H6aw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_bus also exist.
(For me, the big thing about trams and trains and subways, etc is that the track is a kind of social construct - the track tells me that eventually a vehicle will come for me - no need to really worry about timetables, etc. A bus, a bus may come, maybe it won't. It's all psychoillogical but it's there the same.)
A tram is a golf cart or ATV A train is a highway bus
They have different applications and contexts in which they operate, even if they have core similarities
The second sentence is partially true: they do have different modes of operation.
But no, they don’t face entirely the same issues. Trains should hopefully never routinely encounter cars sharing their track and they don’t have to make tight turns to follow existing roadways.
>something that claims to be innovative but in fact doesn't do anything not thought of before and doesn't solve any problems
The DLR was I think about the first decent scale autonomous rail system and provides a lot of transport.
I mean things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Tran... predated it by a decade but is dinky in comparison.
In Australia, highest cost is buying up required land and construction of buildings. We spent ~100mil USD on a single, open air platform for a line extension of exactly that one station. It was about 5 km of extra track. It is amazing we have any trains at all.
Eliminating overhead wires isn’t about cost. It’s about being able to build in existing urban areas that don’t want high voltage live wires everywhere, and likely already have above ground infrastructure they would interfere with.
You are speaking like a naive person that thinks that most the challenge is the physical world
But in UK most of the challenge is archaic and idiosyncratic laws, disproportionately powerful NIMBY’s and the treasury brain.
The treasury brain will approve a project with 1X capex and 10x opex instead of one that has 2X capex and 1X opex
The NYMBY is wild and unpredictable, they just killed project for a data centre placed on top of a literal dump because it would ruin the view of that dump from a motorway (nobody lives there)
A project to re-open 3 miles of railway that already exists took 5 years to approve and 80,000 pages of environmental accessment
But if it’s innovate and designed in UK it might just slip through
The answer is of course that rails provide major advantages on their own, primarily by allowing vehicles to travel much more efficiently thanks to the low friction of running steel wheels on steel tracks
“Thanks to the very low friction between the steel wheel and steel rail, railways can move a load using as little as 15% of the energy that road haulage needs.”
Gareth Dennis, How Railways will Fix the Future (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/761930/how-the-rail...)
There’s nothing stopping a road from being smooth but, logistically, there’s clearly no reason to rush to repair roads when they deteriorate. That means potholes get tolerated, potholes means suspension, and both of those mean bus-like rides instead of suburban light rail rides.
Railway track has to be flat. Anything less than perfect is intolerable so it tends to hold its maintainers to a higher bar.
I've found the new battery buses to be far more comfortable to ride in than older diesel buses since they remove the vibration when idling. The extra weight might mean more potholes to repair though.
And lastly badly maintained railway lines are just as prone to causing motion sickness as badly maintained roads.
You’re absolutely right about potholes, technically, but my point was more about how people work not the immediate technical difference between road and rail.
If you have a system that requires 100% upkeep in order to function at all — the rails of a tram system — then it receives nothing less than the complete maintenance it demands.
The social and technical economics of roads, on the other hand, practically ensures that they’re only ever barely maintained to the lowest possible standard people (and air suspension) will tolerate.
Trams, the divas that they are, will tolerate nothing less than perfection!
The fact that buses are so flexible and easily (and cheaply) rerouted makes developers less likely to build developments that rely on access to transit, but once a community spends a hundreds of millions of dollars on a light rail line, they know it's there for the long term.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/27/steetcar-...
Jarrett Walker has a good piece about it: https://humantransit.org/2025/05/what-was-wrong-with-the-was...
I agree with him that in order to endure and justify a permanent operating subsidy a transit service needs to be useful and used by many people. Most American light rail doesn't meet that bar.
I think there is another aspect that usually goes unstated, which is the vibes. If you're a mayor you want to build a tram. If you're a tourist you want to ride a tram. If you're a prospective resident you want to live near a tram. Yes, it's smoother and yadda yadda, but really it's because it has more sex appeal. A technically equivalent bus may well be _technically_ equivalent but could never be truly equivalent. Nobody would write a play entitled A Technically Equivalent Bus Named Desire. In a way, spending money on a tram is similar to spending money on parks or flowers or public art. And so we will spend the money; and we will build the streetcar; and damn the technical equivalence.
I wonder what the world would be like if we were honest with ourselves.
Wiki tells me:
> The DC Streetcar is a surface streetcar network in Washington, D.C. that consists of a single line running 2.2 miles (3.5 km) in mixed traffic along H Street and Benning Road in the city's Northeast quadrant.
a longtail ebike, a pushchair with/for 2 kids (horizontal arrangement), a dining table for 6 people and 30 kg of cement
I tried it, and with most of em they don’t let you on a bus or you can’t fit but tram is fine
Modern urban light rail is also typically electric, using overhead power. Although buses can also use this.
This is one of the main reasons the super dense Japanese cities aren't as air poluted as other urban centers.
Not really that efficient...
And, as has been rediscovered about 200 times in Southern California (by the drivers, not by the sstate government), you can add additional lanes almost indefinitely, and it doesn't really help congestion that much.
Busses aren't much more efficient when riding down a lane than lower occupancy vehicles, but streets aren't bottlenecked by their roads, they're bottlenecked by their intersections. The key advantage of a bus is at the intersection. A bus holds the intersection for far less time than the equivalent passenger capacity of cars.
The problem bus lanes try to solve is dominantly that without them the traffic advantage of people riding busses mostly goes to people not riding busses, and this makes for a pretty terrible incentive structure. Busses are intrinsically disadvantaged against cars (schedules, uncertainty, routes), so if you don't help them, then people will prefer to drive. Bus lanes internalize the externality.
And your bus only lane has a lot more options. If there is a major disaster you can divert other traffic (not necessarily all traffic though that is an option) into it which might be a useful compromise at time. If you need to repair your bus only lane you just divert the bus to regular traffic. For that matter most places there isn't any traffic and so a bus in mixed traffic has no downsides thus not costing you that whole lane (or track), just build the bus-only lane where it is needed.
Trains are a good thing when they do something a road cannot. However the common bus can be just as good for much less. If you have the money and want good service and ride quality the bus can do it too, and typically for much less cost than a train.
Trains are good where they don't mix with traffic (meaning elevated or underground) because they can then be automated (and also faster). Alternatively a train can hold more people, so if you are in the rare situation where a 100 passenger bus every 5 minutes can't handle the passengers a train is good. Most of the time though you are not in either situation and so a bus can do everything a train can.
Unless the track is just in a regular lane that can be full of cars/busses/trucks whenever there isn’t a light train. Like how trams work in most of the world
A rail track for the same route sits empty just as much.
> you can add additional lanes almost indefinitely, and it doesn't really help congestion that much.
I don't think adding bus-only lanes would have that effect. Adding lanes for private vehicles reduces congestion, which encourages people to move to places along the route until the congestion reaches the previous barely-tolerable level (as I understand it).
While that bus lane may look empty most of the time it likely carries far more people per hour than the congested car lane next to it.
> While the Lincoln Tunnel’s car lane can only move 3,000 people per hour in each car lane, its bus lane moves 30,000 people per hour.
https://transalt.org/blog/bus-commutes-are-significantly-lon...
> Now the XBL handles 1,850 buses that carry more than 70,000 passengers from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. each weekday, which comes to 600 buses an hour. The bus lane operates at its maximum capacity for 90 minutes of its four-hour operation.
https://www.govtech.com/transportation/fed-funds-study-of-ai...
Here in San Francisco along Mission St we have about 20 articulated buses an hour in each direction. These have a planning capacity of 94, 85% load standard 80, 125% crush capacity 119 according to https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSF/comments/445xdg/what_is_the_m....
While mostly a bus and taxi lane Mission St allows local traffic within each block so buses are still a minority of the vehicles in the lane.
Meanwhile the main 2 lanes in each direction street nearby has 1020 vehicles an hour in the peak direction. At 1.6 people per vehicle that's only about 830 people per lane at rush hour. So even at 'standard capacity' the buses in a regular city street not completely dedicated bus lane carry double the number of people. (From experience I suspect it is somewhat more than that.)
That's a bus every 5.1 seconds. In a single lane. (and at 30mph it'll take 1.5 of that 5 seconds just for the bus itself to pass. That's very marginal braking distance).
Also, 1850 / 4 is 453, not 600.
The article I quoted to which you are replying suggests 600 busses an hour. I don't think that is unreasonable for a dedicated highway lane into a bus terminal. There's a nice picture of it here: https://abc7ny.com/port-authority-lincoln-tunnel-technology-...
> Also, 1850 / 4 is 453, not 600.
Quoted in the post you are replying to:
> Now the XBL handles 1,850 buses that carry more than 70,000 passengers from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. each weekday, which comes to 600 buses an hour. The bus lane operates at its maximum capacity for 90 minutes of its four-hour operation.
I read that as they reach the maximum capacity of 600 buses an hour only for the 90 minutes of rush hour. Across the 4 hours it operates each bus averages 38 passengers (70000/1850). It seems reasonable to assume that the rush hour buses are more packed given they are looking at ways to increase capacity and have you ever taken a rush hour bus in a big city?!
From the picture linked above these seem to be 53 seat coaches for longer distance routes rather than city buses which would carry more passengers with some standing. 50 * 600 = 30,000. It's in the ballpark!
Other advantages: people who don't drive, which includes children can get about. Lots of public transport can compensate alot for un walkability of suburbia.
You can make the same argument (in terms of space) about a train track. The real advantage of trains (light or heavy) is permanence. It's easy for the next government to remove the bus lanes because "OMG too much traffic, one more lane will fix it." It's much more difficult to rip out a rail line and convert it to a road.
Bus rapid transit, when done right (basically, almost like a tram) can be quite successful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh1IaVmu3Y8
Since it's harder to make that choice when you're building rail, it's more likely to be done right.
UK tram track construction typically involves deeper track beds compared to France/EU, using concrete slabs of 500-1000mm deep, is intended to protect utilities. In contrast, many European projects utilize shallower trackbeds, even with grassed areas, which are 300-400mm deep
Coventry is, like many cities in the U.K., burdened with road systems that in some places go back to mediæval times. Yes, the Nazis did famously bomb the city centre, but there are some parts of the mediæval city remaining, and much of the outskirts of the city is where it has expanded since World War 1 to swallow what once were standalone villages like Walsgrave and Stoke that dated back to the times of the Domesday Book. Much of the street systems are the old country roads through those villages, augmented by housing estates built around them. So Coventry does not have a wide and regular street system. There is no grid, Norteamericanos!
There are only a handful of dual carriageways for major arterials. Some of the rest is quite cramped, and the ring-road, an early experiment in U.K. post-WW2 reconstruction that basically taught the U.K. how not to build inner city ring-roads, is a massive barrier to any public transport system. The ring-road was some years back significantly re-built just to make the railway station better accessible, whose entrance is on the ring road.
Coventry is actually fairly well served with bus services, to and from nearby Warwickshire and Solihull, and within Coventry itself. There is a significant electric bus network already in place for some years, and Coventry has been more proactive in moving buses from diesel to electric than those other two have, although they too are gradually replacing the old diesels. Stand at the bus stands on Trinity Street in the city centre, and you'll see mostly electric buses go by.
The ironic thing of this project being placed where it is (aside from the amusing fact that the tram route is literally a route to nowhere, as Queen Victoria Road was blocked off in the mid-20th century when the ring road was constructed and is now a dead-end) is that to construct it they had to divert many of the bus services, since Greyfriars Road is one of the routes to and from the main city centre bus terminus.
Coventry has been quite experimental in recent years when it comes to transport design. Aside from hacking the ring road about, it has experimented with things like converting many of the street intersections around Coventry University (not to be confused with Warwick University, a partner in the headlined project) into shared space intersections.
Would this actually work as a general transport system in Coventry as whole? Almost certainly not. A light rail system from, say, the Coventry Arena to anywhere useful elsewhere in the city would bedevil Jimmy Hill Way. That's why there's a commercial centre right next to the Arena in the first place. In the outskirts of the city the Hipswell Highway and routes like St James Lane/Willenhall Lane and the Holyhead Road are major thoroughfares but some are already down to 1 lane wide in places. And the idea of running a tramway along Radford Road or the Foleshill Road is sheer lunacy to anyone who has seen those roads.
The scope of any tram system is almost certainly physically confined to the old city, and maybe the A4600 and A428. But the old city is actually walkable. The places where public transport is needed is the arterials like the Holyhead Road, already well served by buses. Cynically I expect that much of this is about selling this system to other cities.
And indeed, the partnership with Dudley Council is strongly indicative that this is mainly using Coventry as a staging area for development that will be, if it takes off, more in the rest of the West Midlands than in Coventry itself. There is, physically, more scope for this sort of thing in the road systems of Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley, West Bromwich, Wednesbury, Great Barr, et al. than there is in Coventry. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one councillor is being sold the line that this is really to sell it to other cities around the world.
* https://coventry.gov.uk/news/article/5276/first-ride-on-vlr-...
Getting 1000 people downtown could be up to 2,000 Waymo trips (one trip to drop off the worker, another trip for the car to go back out to pick up another passenger). While one of these 56 passenger very light rail cars can do it in 18 trips. A light rail vehicle like the Siemens trains used in San Francisco can carry up to 200 people at crush loads, so that's 5 trips.
* Think having much higher speed limits (as far as humans are concerned, nonexistent), or mass coordinating movement over the entire traffic.
** We can reasonably estimate the minimum without bothering to ask how fast the tech will improve: Even if the tech were available now, think about fleet replacement costs which no one group would be too eager to pay. Best case, it's the typical 'make a concentrated pressure group lose for societal benefit' and we know how that politics goes. It will happen, but slowly.
*** Another thing to account for is that there's no good reason to design an AV car like a normal car, and there'll be some iteration time over that too.
Or you can have a different wheel count and arrangement normally, as the AI can be trained for this. We don't have to standardize AV cars as much as we have to standardize cars for humans.
I don’t think fixed route transport infrastructure is going to have trouble competing on efficiency.
They were targeting $7.5k for their in house honeycomb lidars and they have 12 of them - that’s 90k already.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/27/22644370/waymo-lidar-stop...
They also aren’t close to the $7.5k target (there isn’t any public source for that so you’ll have to take my word for it).
Also $30k wouldn’t even cover the base vehicle.
The price is somewhat of a guess, several years ago, the hardware in Waymo was priced at $130k by Munro&Associates. But since then the cost of the LIDAR sensors fell by 90% or so, reducing the main expense.
And Baidu has cars on the road that cost $30k for the _entire_ car. So presumably, so even a couple of pricier sensors won't affect the estimate too much.
> The price is somewhat of a guess, several years ago, the hardware in Waymo was priced at $130k by Munro&Associates
10 years ago they had even more sensors dotting the car, instead of one honeycomb on each corner they had 2, so I find $130k hard to believe given what we know about the sensor kit today.
> But since then the cost of the LIDAR sensors fell by 90% or so, reducing the main expense.
I do not know of any lidar that has done that, and Waymo makes their own and we know their price(-ish) (and quantity). I think they’ve actually gone up in price (but also capability - honeycomb 1 vs gen 2).
Waymo uses brand-new electric Jaguars.
But there is no _reason_ to use Jaguars and not specially-built smaller and less powerful cars, when Waymo finally starts a real rollout.
I'm not including the base vehicle in the cost. It's highly variable, and can be as low as $10k for small personal intra-city taxis.
China has already launched a $30k taxi: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/05/14/baidu-...
This _completely_ blows any transit out of the competition. Literally nothing can come even close in the end-to-end efficiency.
Buses are _barely_ more effective than cars. A regular passenger car with 4 people is more efficient than a city bus. An EV needs 2.5 people (these numbers are for the US).
The explanation is simple:
1. Buses have to drive _all_ _the_ _time_, even when there are few passengers. As a result, the average bus load tends to be around 10-20 people. And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical.
2. Buses have INCREDIBLY polluting components: 2-3 drivers for each bus needed to provide the service. They are by far the dirtiest part of the bus. This part can be removed with the self-driving hardware, but...
A full self-driving bus also makes no sense. It defeats the main advantage of self-driving: door-to-door transportation.
That being said, self-driving mini-buses seating 6-10 people are a good idea for rush hour transit.
Even if you focus only on emissions this completely ignores the cost of congestion, which is huge.
Your complaint about self driving buses makes no sense either. If the most polluting part of the bus is the driver then removing the driver makes the bus far, far less polluting.
When your arguments don't even make sense on their own terms it suggests that you're making them from an emotional position instead of a rational one. That's ok: if you don't like buses just say so, but be honest about it instead of making spurious arguments.
Congestion should be fixed by removing buses, de-densifying city cores, and forcing companies to build offices in a distributed fashion.
Meanwhile, replacing buses with shared taxi-style vehicles will do most of the job, while _reducing_ congestion. It's a bit complicated, but it's entirely possible.
The reason is simple, there is an unavoidable tension between the density of bus stops and the average speed. As a result of frequent stops, in most cities buses move at an average speed of less than 20 km/h.
For example, in Seattle it's 15 km/h. This is just 3 times faster than a rapid walk!
If we reduce the number of cars by 2x by adding mild car-pooling during the rush hour, then we'll have more than enough throughput to eliminate congestion _and_ buses in Seattle. This does not generalize to all cities in the US (e.g. Manhattan needs a serious demolishing to become sane) but usually, it's in the same ballpark.
> Your complaint about self driving buses makes no sense either. If the most polluting part of the bus is the driver then removing the driver makes the bus far, far less polluting.
Sure. But why stop there? Buses have an INCREDIBLE impact in the number of lifetimes wasted during commutes.
> When your arguments don't even make sense on their own terms it suggests that you're making them from an emotional position instead of a rational one. That's ok: if you don't like buses just say so, but be honest about it instead of making spurious arguments.
Nope. There are no rational arguments _for_ urbanism. It's a failed obsolete ideology, and it's leading to the downfall of democracty and the rise of populism.
> Manhattan needs a serious demolishing to become sane
Ah yes, lets demolish one of the most economically productive regions of the USA, both in GDP / capita and GDP / km^2 in order to make it easier for people to drive through it.
Listen to yourself, this is deranged.
Doesn't matter, dense cities start having their own issues. Instead of taking "the bus", you'll need to wait for the correct bus to arrive. Also, density drives up misery and nothing else. Proven by the birth rate.
> Ah yes, lets demolish one of the most economically productive regions of the USA, both in GDP / capita and GDP / km^2 in order to make it easier for people to drive through it.
Yup, exactly. There's no freaking reason so much GDP has to be crammed into several square miles of space, sucking the life from everywhere else.
> > And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical.
Most transit systems DO operate different intervals during rush hour. Most places I've lived there's been anywhere from 3-5 different intervals at different times of day: At a minimum a night schedule which might be once an hour or not at all, a rush hour schedule, and 1+ day-time non rush-hour schedule.
I do agree that mini-buses would be an advantage though, once you don't need drivers, and that'd further reduce the advantage of small self-driving cars by allowing for far more routes.
Sigh people just like to make statements without evidence to back them up.
> Buses are _barely_ more effective than cars. A regular passenger car with 4 people is more efficient than a city bus. An EV needs 2.5 people (these numbers are for the US). >
Evidence? Moreover you know that average occupancy rates of cars are around 1.5 [1], for short trips like commuting it's more like 1.1 [1] so that's a factor 2 off from your 2.5. So even if we believe your numbers you have to explain how you're going to increase occupancy rate by a factor of 1.5 to 2 before they become just better (not even blowing out of the water). [1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/ENVISSUENo12/page029....
Note I could not find numbers on buses, but trains in the above source have occupancy rates of 50%.
> The explanation is simple: > > 1. Buses have to drive _all_ _the_ _time_, even when there are few passengers. As a result, the average bus load tends to be around 10-20 people. And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical. >
And robotaxis have to drive empty to and from the person they are picking up.
> 2. Buses have INCREDIBLY polluting components: 2-3 drivers for each bus needed to provide the service. They are by far the dirtiest part of the bus. This part can be removed with the self-driving hardware, but... >
Not sure how we should account for bus drivers, considering that even if they are not working as bus driver the person is still around (also should we include the emissions from all the engineers working on self driving tech at the moment then) . However your statement is also false in most western countries, at least green house gas emissions of private households are dominated by transport (i.e. Cars).
> A full self-driving bus also makes no sense. It defeats the main advantage of self-driving: door-to-door transportation. >
You're contradicting yourself. If the bus driver is the most polluting part of the bus (according to your statement above), then it would definitely make sense to get rid of them.
It would be great if your statement was true and robotaxis are the most efficient thing ever. I'd love to see well laid out evidence for this, but from what I just found your statement is not supported by reality.
How common are those? I always see them with just one person on board.
[1]: https://data.transportation.gov/Public-Transit/2022-2023-NTD...
NYC is special in that it's one of the few places that subways make sense in America. That said, operating costs are common but extremely misleading way to measure transit costs when new tunnel costs $2.2B/mile.
The built environment is not fixed or exogenous. NYC is great for the subway because it was built around the Subway. If America followed international best practices, it could go a long ways towards steering other places' built environments too.
For most cities, cars will be about 2-3x faster. For three simple reasons: no walking, no waiting, no stopping.
And that's the paradox. Cars are better than transit, yet modern cities are hell-bent on destroying the car infrastructure.
You can also check this site with isochrones for different transport modes: https://www.geoapify.com/isoline-api/