Have you actually looked at a map of Cardiff?
Where on earth are you going to put trams in Cardiff City Centre?
And again, what has another city got to do with Cardiff? Why are you comparing chalk with cheese?
I see you missed the point again. There was a point made about new western suburb developments, and it was said that LR would be useless because it would be stuck in traffic. My point is that modern tram systems tend to be mostly segregated from traffic out in suburbs. Especially in new developments it's easy to provide a twin track route either on the verge, central reservation or totally separated from the road. Shared running is used only where there's more value from serving streets directly rather than running faster. Oldham saw the separated tracks through Mumps redirected onto the street through the town centre, because the advantage of serving more people massively outweighed the journey time increase for cross-Oldham travel.
You could quite easily have LR trains run on the existing segregated HR alignment through Cardiff city centre and then turn off onto the streets to serve suburbs. That's the sort of flexibility that LR is absolutely great at. The same system can do everything from full street running to fully segregated lines and any combination of the two. That's simply not possible with HR. If you had both a pure tram and a heavy rail network, you wouldn't be able to join the two together with through running.
Here are photos of Cardiff city centre:> 1 = St.Mary Street with normal pedestrian volume. 2 = Westgate Street & 3 St.Mary Street - on match days.
Yes, a busy urban core. If street running happens in the centre of Cardiff, it will be designed to handle match days. Would the whole edifice come crashing down if trams were given a few metres' width of one street? It's far easier to handle predictable tram traffic than it is to handle bus, let alone taxi and car, traffic.
However in Cardiff the HR frequency is already 4 tph from Penarth, 4 tph from Barry(CASR has signaled this for 6 tph), 4 tph from Caerphilly (CASR has signaled this for 6 tph), 6 tph from Pontypridd (CASR has signaled this for 8 tph). So Light Rail wont solve the problem of low frequency as it doesn't really exist..
Quite. This morning at 8.30, I boarded a 6 car Merseyrail EMU at a Northern Line station on the fringes of Liverpool's contiguous built-up area. This was roughly 3/4 full. Trains now run 6 per hour at that time of day.
There's no magic to running an efficient and popular HR suburban service - it's just a question of putting on enough trains, with enough capacity.
Infrastructure capability is only one factor. Extra HR capacity will cost more money than it brings in ticket revenue. If there are more beneficial ways for the government to spend the necessary subsidy money, then HR enhancements won't happen. We all know there are many, many infrastructure schemes which have enabled extra capacity or new services without those services actually happening.
Few of the disadvantages you cite are inherent to HR. Merseyrail could be run a lot more cheaply if staff numbers were cut with DOO, and by reducing the number of staff doing nothing most of the time at central stations (they could be replaced by re-assigning admin staff to stations and giving them evacuation training). It doesn't take long to get underground, and any time taken in doing so is set off against the reduction in time getting across the city centre several times more quickly than an on-street option would require.
Yes, Merseyrail would be cheaper to run if DOO. However, the minimum cost will always be higher than an LR system.
How much does it cost to maintain a single Metrolink stop? It's open the elements and uses pretty much standard street furniture sitting on a pre-fab concrete box. Access for all is provided by simple little concrete ramps. What about an underground station? You have the costs of maintaining a tunnel, with the fire safety regulations (which make it mandatory to have staff on site at all time, even if passenger numbers aren't enough to justify it), the need to have lifts, the need for security and so on. To serve a city centre well, you need to have multiple stations, but for every station you add more cost.
The advantages of LR which you describe are somewhat offset by putting it into a tunnel, quite apart from the cost of construction. And that doesn't get around the almost unavoidable reduction in capacity, unless you string so many trams together that they're incapable of running on oh-so-flexible LR lines.
Once again, all this really boils down to is 'let's turn everything into light rail coz it's cheap', even though it is possible to reduce the cost differential substantially with heavy rail. There is a danger here of knowing the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
I discussed the variety of pre-metro systems built on the continent and how they've essentially failed. A tunnel is only required as a measure of last resort if there is no practical way to run enough trams along the street. Manchester may require that in future.
LR isn't
better than other transport modes. All modes exist on a spectrum of capacity and demand. You have buses, then trolleybuses/BRT, then trams, then light metro, then heavy metro, then heavy rail. You pick the appropriate mode for the requirements of the city at that point in time. If passenger demand grows too much for a mode, that's when you look at building the next step up. Edinburgh is justifying building the tram down to Leith because the projections say there will be too many passengers for buses alone to cope. It is entirely possible that passenger demand can drop too, making it useful to drop down to the lower level. Plenty of cities in the UK used to have trams when urban density was at its peak, but de-urbanisation made buses a better choice.
So if it really is such a simples numbers game of the nirvana of saved costs why have the city fathers stuck with Heavy Rail in Liverpool and the West Midlands and ordered significant numbers of new HR rollling stock?if your right they would have been beating the door of DFT or financing themselves?
Now that Merseyrail has tunnels, there's not a lot of point in changing it all again. Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester all had their metro-ification years ago, using different technology in each case. Cardiff is on the cusp of having its own, and down in the Bay they're looking at using the most up-to-date knowledge and experience when doing it.
LR is only suitable for a properly bounded network. The local services around Cardiff are separated from other rail services enough that it makes sense to do some sort of different system. In Birmingham, the WM trains have to share the same tracks as trains which run all the way from Aberdeen to Penzance. LR can't really increase frequency or reduce the costs of stations out in the suburbs because of that. Without frequency enhancements the only way to retain capacity is to keep trains long, and needing long trains puts LR well out of its comfort zone. If you have no choice but to run relatively low frequency 6 car EMUs, staffing costs become proportionately less.
) would probably to me be just as acceptable as the present Northern Line, and would have a certain set of advantages too. But back then the mentality was very much "roads are for cars", even to the point that the reason for the elevated Moorfields entrance was that there was a plan to build a network of elevated walkways rather like those in some older New Towns, or like the partial project around Manchester University, all of which has now been removed.