NotATrainspott,
The more you answer the more it confirms that you have not looked at a map of Cardiff, or read the comments of many people on here about it's physical and raliway geography and the problems that brings with any light rail proposal.
And you certainly have no idea about the crowd problems and the number of days that affects the City Centre.
Street running is rarely just added on top of the city centre as-is. Normally it is introduced as part of a wider set of traffic alterations - making some streets one-way, closing off others to private road users, etc. If street running happens in Cardiff city centre, it'll happen there too.
There's a point where frugality tips over into austerity fetishism, if not downright masochism.
No.
Transport systems are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. I know that's a shocking concept to raise on a site dedicated to obsessive interest in rail-based transportation as an end in itself. When politicians and taxpayers decide to fund a system, they're looking for what it can do, not just what it is. People don't want to linger about and admire urban transportation systems. They want to use them to get about the city region for their everyday lives.
Metrolink stations being simple means that there's as little as possible in the way of people as they go about their business. Every extra 'feature' of a heavier metro system involves extra physical or mental barriers which make it harder to access and use the transport system. Having platforms mere metres away from the shops, homes and facilities which people need transportation to and from is far, far easier for people than having them some distance away and underground, via busy ticket halls and flights of stairs or escalators.
Saving money on the stations makes it more financially viable to improve service frequency. Improving service frequency means you don't need to worry so much about the facilities at the station. On a Metrolink line with a 10tph service you're only going to be waiting three minutes on average to catch a tram. With timings like that there's simply no need for waiting rooms or essentially anything more than a bus stop.
You know what else comes with simplicity? Fewer things going wrong. The more stuff you need to encounter to use a transportation system, the higher the chance that something will go wrong. Metro systems depend on lifts and escalators to get people between the streets and platforms. When they inevitably require maintenance or break down, it creates great inconvenience for people. Those enclosed waiting rooms are only pleasant as long as they're kept lit, dry and warm - the very features which attract vagrancy and vermin. If you rely on features like these, then them going wrong creates a serious problem. Meanwhile, the existence of these things results in higher ongoing costs that aren't directly necessary for people to get moved around a city.
Just as an example, think about someone in a wheelchair. On HR, being in a wheelchair means relying on lifts in many places, either to leave an underground or overground station or to cross between platforms. Almost certainly at some point lifts are going to fail, leaving the wheelchair-bound passenger stranded or inconvenienced. When a wheelchair-bound person is making decisions about where to live, they'll have to consider the reliability of the transport system. On an 'austere' LR system, wheelchair accessibility is provided by default by things which are essentially unable to break down. There are only three stations on the entire Metrolink network which depend on lifts (Pomona, Cornbrook and Besses o' th' Barn). As a wheelchair user you have essentially nothing to fear about using the network, no matter what happens.
You do realise that it is possible to have the concrete bunkers of which you sound so fond on an HR system? Perhaps the waiting facilities at Mersyeside stations - which I'd suggest are the least railway users in a civilised country should be entitled to expect - might be one of the reasons why so many more travel by heavy rail, compared to in TfGMland.
More people will use HR in Merseyside because the metro network is on HR. The remaining HR lines in TfGMland are less metro-like and less popular than in Liverpool. Weirdly enough, one of the ways this could most easily be improved is with further LR conversion.
Why do you keep raising pre-metro systems? As they're light rail based, they should be right up your low cost thoroughfare. Britain doesn't have any pre-metro systems, but then few countries that I am aware of outside Britain have replaced heavy rail lines with LR only routes.
A pre-metro is a system using LR technology built with the explicit intention that it would later be converted to a fully segregated metro line. They were built by cities which believed their street-running tram networks would not work with car traffic in the city centre. Huge amounts of money was spent on moving city centre street running sections into tunnels. What makes it a pre-metro is that the funding wasn't available or the passenger numbers didn't yet necessitate full segregation all the way along the lines. The tunnels in the centre were done but the lines out into the suburbs still required street running. What we have found with time is that the premise of these systems - that street running in city centres is antiquated - is false. People don't like sharing city centres with cars, but they don't mind sharing them with electric trams. City centres should belong to pedestrians and public transport, with cars kept hidden away, not the other way around.
[/QUOTE]I am deeply sceptical of anyone who suggests that buses are a better mode of transport than any other, rather than just a cheaper one. Are you now arguing that it was a good thing that almost every British town and city dismantled their street tramways networks? Seems like the main basis for every one of your arguments is cheapness, although I am perhaps being a bit unfair when we consider how much the Rotherham tram-trains fiasco is costing.[/QUOTE]
Also, isn't it a teensy bit inconsistent to be arguing that the cost of maintaining underground stations is a disadvantage of HR, before admitting down the page that Manchester will need a cross-city tunnel soon? How do you expect passengers to get to and from that? Via the sewers, which by the sounds of things is the sort of miserable, but cheap, solution you'd enjoy?
Manchester would need a new tunnel only when passenger numbers are high enough that the costs of such a system are truly warranted. Each transport mode has an optimum point along that demand/capacity spectrum. Street running light rail is very good at a certain band, but at the upper reaches the advantages of a heavier and more expensive system outweigh the disadvantages. Street running in London Zone 1 hasn't made sense for a very long time. Looking ahead, the multi-billion pound expense of extending the Bakerloo line down Old Kent Road is justified because there are so many people travelling along that road on buses, and so much future development potential still to come, that nothing less than a proper heavy metro will handle demand. It's simply impossible to run 120m long trains at 30tph using street running on a busy urban thoroughfare. LR isn't suitable there, but that doesn't mean it's not suitable in places with lower demand which are still too busy for buses to handle.
Look at transport systems around the world. Every city depends on its bus services more than anything else. Trams and metros and heavy rail have to build on top of buses. The countries and cities with the most public-transport friendly governments (e.g. in Switzerland) don't stop running buses just because there are more intensive ways of providing transport instead. Buses suit rural and low-density suburbs. Trolleybuses then carry the mantle for low-medium density suburbs, followed closely after by trams, light metros and then heavy metros. Each technology is complementary, not in competition with one another.
You certainly are struggling with the rail geography of Birmingham. The electrified cross city line uses New St and shares its tracks south of New St with Long Distance Cross Country services however north of it to Lichfield and Walsall/Rugely they don't share with anything else.
The Snow Hill lines refer to the ex Great Western lines from Kidderminster /Stourbridge Junction to Leamington Spa/Stratford Upon Avon. Chiltern Railways run to Birmingham from Marylebone via Leamington Spa and Solihull. You could segregate those services from Leamington Spa into central Birmingham quite well as they run in on a ex 4 track formation and tie the converted local HR lines with the current Midland Metro.
If converting to Light Rail was such a wonderful idea with proven benefits then why did they not do it? Why have the stuck with new Heavy Rail rolling stock? Clearly the gospel of Notatrainspott has yet to penetrate the West Midlands. The "surplus to requirement trackbed" the Midland Metro is on is now needed as the Heavy rail corridor from Wolverhampton to Birmingham has reached saturation point and part of the reason were now building HS2. Light Rail got chosen to reopen the local service to Wolverhampton from Snow Hill because at the time in the mid 80's the Ministry of Roads was still hectoring BR to put forward lines for closure and bustitution so a Light Rail system not involving BR was seen as way of side stepping central Government hostility.
Again, you ignore what I write. If you're not able to essentially take over a line in its entirety, LR technology simply can't deliver as many benefits as it can on more dedicated lines.
If you used the West Midlands Metro trackbed to serve further-out areas of the West Midlands, it would come at the cost of serving the inner areas worse. Clearly there was enough value in serving the inner areas that they built the system in the first place. These tracks are used to serve a different point along my demand/capacity spectrum than the HR services heading out to Leamington Spa. The only way to serve both is to have two independent systems, which is essentially what we've got today. What HS2 is doing is shifting some of the longer-distance passengers onto new tracks, allowing the existing HR infrastructure to become more dedicated to urban and regional transportation.
Likewise on Merseyside theirs loads of Light Rail systems with underground sections across the world. Rip up that pesky non standard 3rd rail and put the "cheap" wires up and run cheap Light Rail vehicles instead of 3rd rail vehicles is surely a better solution? Why did the city fathers on Merseyside not lap this up?
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