this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Fuck Cars

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Are trams that good (genuine question)? (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by t_jpeg@lemmy.world to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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Sometimes when watching videos on effective ways of public transport and trams come up, I get a bit annoyed at people not addressing the fact that they seem to share the road with cars. Why do people twerk for trams so much as a form of light rail if they share the road with cars and are subject to being affected by traffic? Doesn't that just make them rail buses without their own bus lane? Doesn't that make them more obsolete? Why do people like them so much?

Edit: Also, does anyone have any resources about the cost to benefit ratio of different intratown/city forms of transport (bike lanes, BRT, trams and other forms of light rail, subways etc)? Would be much appreciated.

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[–] Pipoca@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There's two links there. One is to those graphs, the other is to the article.

Basically, they're measuring the population that's within a 30 minute public transit trip of the center of the city. Because the city relies mostly on slow busses that get stuck in traffic, the number of people who can reasonably commute to jobs in the center of the city is about half of the nominal population of the city.

Larger cities are more productive per capita than small cities due to economies of agglomeration. Birmingham's productivity is well below what it should be given its nominal population numbers, but if you use the number of people within a 30 min bus ride of downtown at peak commute times then it's on the lower end of normal.

Our hypothesis is that by relying on buses that get caught in congestion at peak times for public transport, Birmingham sacrifices significant size and thus agglomeration benefits to cities like Lyon, which rely on trams and metros. This is based on our calculations that a whole-city tramway system for Birmingham would deliver an effective size roughly equal to the OECD-defined population.

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

I didn't see the first link, they were lined up under each other on my phone so I saw them as a single link, my bad. It is an interesting article, though I'd prefer to see the analysis done or more than one city before taking it as more than a curiosity. That title is atrocious though, it gives away nothing about the content of the article and makes a seeming factually incorrect statement.