12 ms·

Coventry Very Light Rail

209 points by Kaibeezy 1y ago

xnx 1y ago
I wouldn't be planning any fixes infrastructure transit programs that didn't have an ROI in the next 7 years. It will be hard for anything to compete with the efficiency of Waymo.
- digitalPhonix 1y ago
  Each Waymo vehicle is probably close to half a million USD in just hardware cost. I don’t think fixed route transport infrastructure is going to have trouble competing on efficiency.
  - cyberax 1y ago
    The hardware costs for Waymo are estimated at $30k.
    - digitalPhonix 1y ago
      Source? 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-selling-autonomous-cars-laser-bear 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.
      - cyberax 1y ago
        This is an estimation for the self-driving hardware cost (computers, LIDAR, sensors). It does not include the base car price, as it can be easily optimized down to almost nothing (sub $10k). 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.
        rafram 1y ago
        > include the base car price, as it can be easily optimized down to almost nothing (sub $10k). Waymo uses brand-new electric Jaguars.
        cyberax 1y ago
        Sure. Because why not? The cars are in the experimental stage, so they might as well use nice ones. But there is no _reason_ to use Jaguars and not specially-built smaller and less powerful cars, when Waymo finally starts a real rollout.
        digitalPhonix 1y ago
        Source? None of those numbers make sense. > 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).
    - cycomanic 1y ago
      Are you talking about raw material costs? Or is that one of these extrapolations of if we scale everything to millions of cars and realise no inefficiencies and nobody making any money in the supply chain?
      - cyberax 1y ago
        I'm talking about the current cost of the self-driving system, that is already produced by companies that charge a significant markup. With volume, it will go down more. 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-launches-new-28000-robotaxi-in-wuhan/ 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.
        cycomanic 1y ago
        Why does it blow away any other public transit? That can't be true because if you put the same self driving tech into a bus, you already am an order of magnitude cheaper per passenger (likely more). Moreover let's assume robotaxis are cornering the market and make all other forms of transport non viable. Why would the public then maintain the roads? So at that point at least costs are suddenly going to explode.
        cyberax 1y ago
        Sigh. People are WAAAY too accepting of urbanist propaganda. 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.
- johnea 1y ago
  It is really efficient, at sitting in traffic with all the other cars 8-/
  - cyberax 1y ago
    And yet, still faster. That's the paradox of cars.
    - rsynnott 1y ago
      Cars are very much not faster than trams in high traffic conditions. Nevermind heavy rail.
      - cyberax 1y ago
        Yes, they are. Do an experiment, drop ten points randomly on a city map. Then plot routes between them, using Google for transit and cars. 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/ https://www.geoapify.com/isoline-api/
        xnx 1y ago
        > Cars are better than transit And are even better when parking isn't a concern (e.g. taxi service)
- rafram 1y ago
  Public transit isn’t supposed to have a financial “ROI.” Are highways expected to turn a profit from tolls?
  - bluGill 1y ago
    The libertarian answer is yes highways should. Most self proclaimed libertarians refuse to go that far - if you allow for highways to not make money then transit shouldn't be held to the higher bar.
    - charlieyu1 1y ago
      I always find this a dumb idea. Transportation networks enable things to happen that comes back as taxes, that is. Same for education, or other public services.
  - xnx 1y ago
    Fair, but how unprofitable should they be? -$5/passenger-mike? -$12/passenger-mile? I think we can do a lot better than the current US mass transit status quo.
    - rafram 1y ago
      In 2022, the NYC Subway budgeted about $0.75 per passenger-mile (and that was during Covid, when ridership was very low) [1]. You’re really overestimating how much public transit costs to run. Private vehicles are an extremely inefficient way to move people around, hence the cost of Uber/Lyft/taxis. [1]: https://data.transportation.gov/Public-Transit/2022-2023-NTD-Annual-Data-Metrics/ekg5-frzt/explore/query/SELECT%0A%20%20%60agency%60%2C%0A%20%20%60mode%60%2C%0A%20%20sum%28%60total_operating_expenses%60%29%20AS%20%60sum_total_operating_expenses%60%2C%0A%20%20sum%28%60vehicle_revenue_miles%60%29%20AS%20%60sum_vehicle_revenue_miles%60%0AGROUP%20BY%20%60agency%60%2C%20%60mode%60/page/aggregate https://data.transportation.gov/Public-Transit/2022-2023-NTD...
      - xnx 1y ago
        NYC is special in that it's on 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.
- Johnny555 1y ago
  Single passenger cars still have a problem with density even if there's no need for a driver. Combining multiple people into one trip can help, but also lessons the utility of Waymo if riders have to go out of their way to pick up additional passengers. 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.
  - mmooss 1y ago
    Yes, I always say: Next time you see mass transit pass, imagine all those people in their own private cars on the road.
- cycomanic 1y ago
  You mean it's very difficult to compete with a company that is massively subsidised by public infrastructure? That's what really killed freight rail in most of Europe, make the train companies pay for track maintance (often the rail companies even want this because it keeps competition out as well), while trucks atpapy very little of the cost they impose on the public (i.e. much higher road usage, causing most of the traffic issues).
- jcranmer 1y ago
  If this were true, cities would have abandoned mass transit for taxi system decades ago. The requirement for there to be a warm body driving a taxi isn't among the prime causes of its inefficiency.
- yyyk 1y ago
  The big AV transit efficiency gains* can only happen when nearly all human drivers are removed from the road. Alas, that's at least 20 years ahead of now**, or more (e.g. if tech stalls for some reason, though I consider it unlikely). Otherwise they'd be limited by having to account for human drivers and that limits speed and throughput enough so other solutions are a must. * 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.
  - mitthrowaway2 1y ago
    Higher speeds increases noise and stopping distance, even for autonomous vehicles.
    - yyyk 1y ago
      True, but this can be compensated for. Current vehicle design is based on human-operated gas vehicles - so it better be aerodynamic (to save gas), and a human needs to be in the front (to see) with only a glass to separate, and it needs a particular stopping action (again a consequence of carrying humans without enough separation). This has unfortunate implications for noise and stopping distance. Electric-powered AV can have creative designs to enable much quicker (yet safe) stopping action, an action which AV would also make rarer.
      - mitthrowaway2 1y ago
        Autonomous vehicles can have faster reaction time, but once they hit the brakes, stopping distance will still increase with speed because it's limited by the friction between tires and pavement. Unless you put parachutes or rockets on these vehicles, or thrust spikes into the pavement...
skybrian 1y ago
What advantages are there over bus service?
- johnea 1y ago
  Trains have their own right of way, buses sit in traffic. 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.
  - qgin 1y ago
    You can have a bus-only lane easier than a tram-only track.
    - johnea 1y ago
      A bus only lane is also a vehicle lane that is sitting empty a good part of the time. 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.
      - askvictor 1y ago
        > A bus only lane is also a vehicle lane that is sitting empty a good part of the time. 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.
      - mmooss 1y ago
        > A bus only lane is also a vehicle lane that is sitting empty a good part of the time. 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).
habosa 1y ago
Comments so far are not discussing what makes this light rail “very” light, so here’s an excerpt. The project claims to cost half of “normal” light rail. > 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.
- jsnell 1y ago
  These things are tiny! I've traveled in larger airport shuttles. 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?
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Tiny might make sense if they are running every 2 minutes and thus getting their capacity via frequency. However there is no reason to think they will do that. (if they were running anywhere near that frequent overhead wire would be a lot cheaper than a battery on every tram)
    - bardak 1y ago
      Yeah but you could do that with a bus today without miltiions in infrastructure spending
bluGill 1y ago
Gadgetbahn - a derisive term transit advocates use for something that claims to be innovative but in fact doesn't do anything not thought of before and doesn't solve any problems. 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).
- TylerE 1y ago
  You’re grossly oversimplifying and ignoring knock on effects. 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.
PLenz 1y ago
Everything old is new again: The Light Railways Act of 1896 also propsed rail lines built to less then mainline standards (often narrow gauge) to get transport links to otherwise unconnected locations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Railways_Act_1896 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Railways_Act_1896 comment edited because I fat finger editing the submit button
- Empact 1y ago
  As this page notes: https://www.coventry.gov.uk/coventry-light-rail/coventry-light-rail-track https://www.coventry.gov.uk/coventry-light-rail/coventry-lig... 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.
andrewl-hn 1y ago
Besançon in France is one of the cheapest conventional tram schemes in Europe at €17.5m per km and €1.81 per tram (132 passengers). It’s a conventional tram track with overhead catenary wires: as standard as one can get with those things. Presumably in the UK the costs would be somewhat higher: France is a modern tram capital, with a lot of relevant talent and expertise available locally. 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=sfti1#Finance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Besan%C3%A7on?wprov=s...
- closewith 1y ago
  CVLR is projected to cost £10 MM per km, but we all know what projections are worth. 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.
  - andrewl-hn 1y ago
    Very good point. There’s also a potential for future upgrades. They may invest into catenary lines at some point, get rid of batteries and increase capacity inside vehicles. Or, switch to hot-swap batteries and increase vehicle turnaround and frequency. Or, they can switch to traditional concrete reinforcement for rails for future lines if they decide that the rails-on-slabs approach doesn’t work out as well as they hoped for. Their vehicles while custom-built are running on top of standard tram lanes, so they will be able to use traditional tram tracks, too. VLRT seems gimmicky at first but the more I look at it the more sense it makes.
  - ClumsyPilot 1y ago
    > they're completely different cultures and jurisdictions 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.
tempodox 1y ago
The text display in front seems to be easily overpowered by sunlight. They could use a display that's also readable by daylight.
- n4r9 1y ago
  I guess they're aiming to handle narrow edge cases in later iterations.
- maratc 1y ago
  They are designing for Coventry, UK so "sunlight" is an edge case.
ninalanyon 1y ago
If it is battery powered why does it need rails? Why not just use an electric bus?
- tmtvl 1y ago
  There's various possible reasons. Less pollution from tire wear and the possibility to lay tracks across grass to create relatively ecological dedicated lines so the carriages don't get stuck in traffic are two options that spring to mind immediately.
- youngtaff 1y ago
  Efficiency — mainly through lower friction “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-railways-will-fix-the-future-by-gareth-dennis/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/761930/how-the-rail...)
  - ninalanyon 1y ago
    Everyone proposing trams says this. None of them provide any numbers. How much more efficient does it have to be to offset the much greater cost of the roadway?
- wongarsu 1y ago
  If overhead wires were the only advantage of light rail, why is anyone using light rail instead of trolleybuses? 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
  - chgs 1y ago
    They also provide major disadvantages, like a single obstacle or broken down vehicle blocking the entire route.
rsynnott 1y ago
> The vehicle has a capacity of 56, is comfortable and has low floors to enable passengers to embark and disembark easily That's a _very_ small tram, smaller than most buses.
- thehappypm 1y ago
  I assume 56 is the capacity that they advertise but people will cram in like sardines when it’s rush hour
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    The buses around here advertise a capacity of 90, and the trams a capacity of 400.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  It's not smaller than most of the buses that run in the existing Stagecoach and National Express fleets that go around and to and from Coventry, which seat approximately 30 people on a single-decker with standing room for about 10 more (in the best case, with no push-chairs, trolleys, or wheelchairs).
JdeBP 1y ago
Since there are going to be a lot of people who don't even know England, let alone Coventry: 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.
ClumsyPilot 1y ago
Important background: Building the same tram in Britain costs at least 2X more than in France, often 3x more. 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
- tmtvl 1y ago
  Does the UK have a loose, silty soil which requires the deeper track beds or more stringent safety regulations or something?
deleted 1y ago
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curtisszmania 1y ago
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pkaodev 1y ago
Not really related, but leaving Coventry has probably been one of the best decisions I've made in my life. This makes sense though, one of the best things about the city is the good transport links for getting out of it.
golemiprague 1y ago
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209 points by Kaibeezy 1y ago

xnx 1y ago

I wouldn't be planning any fixes infrastructure transit programs that didn't have an ROI in the next 7 years. It will be hard for anything to compete with the efficiency of Waymo.

digitalPhonix 1y ago
Each Waymo vehicle is probably close to half a million USD in just hardware cost. I don’t think fixed route transport infrastructure is going to have trouble competing on efficiency.
- cyberax 1y ago
  The hardware costs for Waymo are estimated at $30k.
  - digitalPhonix 1y ago
    Source? 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-selling-autonomous-cars-laser-bear 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.
    - cyberax 1y ago
      This is an estimation for the self-driving hardware cost (computers, LIDAR, sensors). It does not include the base car price, as it can be easily optimized down to almost nothing (sub $10k). 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.
      - rafram 1y ago
        > include the base car price, as it can be easily optimized down to almost nothing (sub $10k). Waymo uses brand-new electric Jaguars.
        cyberax 1y ago
        Sure. Because why not? The cars are in the experimental stage, so they might as well use nice ones. But there is no _reason_ to use Jaguars and not specially-built smaller and less powerful cars, when Waymo finally starts a real rollout.
      - digitalPhonix 1y ago
        Source? None of those numbers make sense. > 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).
  - cycomanic 1y ago
    Are you talking about raw material costs? Or is that one of these extrapolations of if we scale everything to millions of cars and realise no inefficiencies and nobody making any money in the supply chain?
    - cyberax 1y ago
      I'm talking about the current cost of the self-driving system, that is already produced by companies that charge a significant markup. With volume, it will go down more. 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-launches-new-28000-robotaxi-in-wuhan/ 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.
      - cycomanic 1y ago
        Why does it blow away any other public transit? That can't be true because if you put the same self driving tech into a bus, you already am an order of magnitude cheaper per passenger (likely more). Moreover let's assume robotaxis are cornering the market and make all other forms of transport non viable. Why would the public then maintain the roads? So at that point at least costs are suddenly going to explode.
        cyberax 1y ago
        Sigh. People are WAAAY too accepting of urbanist propaganda. 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.
johnea 1y ago
It is really efficient, at sitting in traffic with all the other cars 8-/
- cyberax 1y ago
  And yet, still faster. That's the paradox of cars.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Cars are very much not faster than trams in high traffic conditions. Nevermind heavy rail.
    - cyberax 1y ago
      Yes, they are. Do an experiment, drop ten points randomly on a city map. Then plot routes between them, using Google for transit and cars. 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/ https://www.geoapify.com/isoline-api/
      - xnx 1y ago
        > Cars are better than transit And are even better when parking isn't a concern (e.g. taxi service)
rafram 1y ago
Public transit isn’t supposed to have a financial “ROI.” Are highways expected to turn a profit from tolls?
- bluGill 1y ago
  The libertarian answer is yes highways should. Most self proclaimed libertarians refuse to go that far - if you allow for highways to not make money then transit shouldn't be held to the higher bar.
  - charlieyu1 1y ago
    I always find this a dumb idea. Transportation networks enable things to happen that comes back as taxes, that is. Same for education, or other public services.
- xnx 1y ago
  Fair, but how unprofitable should they be? -$5/passenger-mike? -$12/passenger-mile? I think we can do a lot better than the current US mass transit status quo.
  - rafram 1y ago
    In 2022, the NYC Subway budgeted about $0.75 per passenger-mile (and that was during Covid, when ridership was very low) [1]. You’re really overestimating how much public transit costs to run. Private vehicles are an extremely inefficient way to move people around, hence the cost of Uber/Lyft/taxis. [1]: https://data.transportation.gov/Public-Transit/2022-2023-NTD-Annual-Data-Metrics/ekg5-frzt/explore/query/SELECT%0A%20%20%60agency%60%2C%0A%20%20%60mode%60%2C%0A%20%20sum%28%60total_operating_expenses%60%29%20AS%20%60sum_total_operating_expenses%60%2C%0A%20%20sum%28%60vehicle_revenue_miles%60%29%20AS%20%60sum_vehicle_revenue_miles%60%0AGROUP%20BY%20%60agency%60%2C%20%60mode%60/page/aggregate https://data.transportation.gov/Public-Transit/2022-2023-NTD...
    - xnx 1y ago
      NYC is special in that it's on 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.
Johnny555 1y ago
Single passenger cars still have a problem with density even if there's no need for a driver. Combining multiple people into one trip can help, but also lessons the utility of Waymo if riders have to go out of their way to pick up additional passengers. 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.
- mmooss 1y ago
  Yes, I always say: Next time you see mass transit pass, imagine all those people in their own private cars on the road.
cycomanic 1y ago
You mean it's very difficult to compete with a company that is massively subsidised by public infrastructure? That's what really killed freight rail in most of Europe, make the train companies pay for track maintance (often the rail companies even want this because it keeps competition out as well), while trucks atpapy very little of the cost they impose on the public (i.e. much higher road usage, causing most of the traffic issues).
jcranmer 1y ago
If this were true, cities would have abandoned mass transit for taxi system decades ago. The requirement for there to be a warm body driving a taxi isn't among the prime causes of its inefficiency.
yyyk 1y ago
The big AV transit efficiency gains* can only happen when nearly all human drivers are removed from the road. Alas, that's at least 20 years ahead of now**, or more (e.g. if tech stalls for some reason, though I consider it unlikely). Otherwise they'd be limited by having to account for human drivers and that limits speed and throughput enough so other solutions are a must. * 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.
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  Higher speeds increases noise and stopping distance, even for autonomous vehicles.
  - yyyk 1y ago
    True, but this can be compensated for. Current vehicle design is based on human-operated gas vehicles - so it better be aerodynamic (to save gas), and a human needs to be in the front (to see) with only a glass to separate, and it needs a particular stopping action (again a consequence of carrying humans without enough separation). This has unfortunate implications for noise and stopping distance. Electric-powered AV can have creative designs to enable much quicker (yet safe) stopping action, an action which AV would also make rarer.
    - mitthrowaway2 1y ago
      Autonomous vehicles can have faster reaction time, but once they hit the brakes, stopping distance will still increase with speed because it's limited by the friction between tires and pavement. Unless you put parachutes or rockets on these vehicles, or thrust spikes into the pavement...

skybrian 1y ago

What advantages are there over bus service?

johnea 1y ago
Trains have their own right of way, buses sit in traffic. 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.
- qgin 1y ago
  You can have a bus-only lane easier than a tram-only track.
  - johnea 1y ago
    A bus only lane is also a vehicle lane that is sitting empty a good part of the time. 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.
    - askvictor 1y ago
      > A bus only lane is also a vehicle lane that is sitting empty a good part of the time. 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.
    - mmooss 1y ago
      > A bus only lane is also a vehicle lane that is sitting empty a good part of the time. 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).

habosa 1y ago

Comments so far are not discussing what makes this light rail “very” light, so here’s an excerpt. The project claims to cost half of “normal” light rail. > 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.

jsnell 1y ago
These things are tiny! I've traveled in larger airport shuttles. 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?
- bluGill 1y ago
  Tiny might make sense if they are running every 2 minutes and thus getting their capacity via frequency. However there is no reason to think they will do that. (if they were running anywhere near that frequent overhead wire would be a lot cheaper than a battery on every tram)
  - bardak 1y ago
    Yeah but you could do that with a bus today without miltiions in infrastructure spending

bluGill 1y ago

Gadgetbahn - a derisive term transit advocates use for something that claims to be innovative but in fact doesn't do anything not thought of before and doesn't solve any problems. 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).

TylerE 1y ago
You’re grossly oversimplifying and ignoring knock on effects. 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.

PLenz 1y ago

Everything old is new again: The Light Railways Act of 1896 also propsed rail lines built to less then mainline standards (often narrow gauge) to get transport links to otherwise unconnected locations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Railways_Act_1896 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Railways_Act_1896 comment edited because I fat finger editing the submit button

Empact 1y ago
As this page notes: https://www.coventry.gov.uk/coventry-light-rail/coventry-light-rail-track https://www.coventry.gov.uk/coventry-light-rail/coventry-lig... 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.

andrewl-hn 1y ago

Besançon in France is one of the cheapest conventional tram schemes in Europe at €17.5m per km and €1.81 per tram (132 passengers). It’s a conventional tram track with overhead catenary wires: as standard as one can get with those things. Presumably in the UK the costs would be somewhat higher: France is a modern tram capital, with a lot of relevant talent and expertise available locally. 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=sfti1#Finance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Besan%C3%A7on?wprov=s...

closewith 1y ago
CVLR is projected to cost £10 MM per km, but we all know what projections are worth. 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.
- andrewl-hn 1y ago
  Very good point. There’s also a potential for future upgrades. They may invest into catenary lines at some point, get rid of batteries and increase capacity inside vehicles. Or, switch to hot-swap batteries and increase vehicle turnaround and frequency. Or, they can switch to traditional concrete reinforcement for rails for future lines if they decide that the rails-on-slabs approach doesn’t work out as well as they hoped for. Their vehicles while custom-built are running on top of standard tram lanes, so they will be able to use traditional tram tracks, too. VLRT seems gimmicky at first but the more I look at it the more sense it makes.
- ClumsyPilot 1y ago
  > they're completely different cultures and jurisdictions 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.

tempodox 1y ago

The text display in front seems to be easily overpowered by sunlight. They could use a display that's also readable by daylight.

n4r9 1y ago
I guess they're aiming to handle narrow edge cases in later iterations.
maratc 1y ago
They are designing for Coventry, UK so "sunlight" is an edge case.

ninalanyon 1y ago

If it is battery powered why does it need rails? Why not just use an electric bus?

tmtvl 1y ago
There's various possible reasons. Less pollution from tire wear and the possibility to lay tracks across grass to create relatively ecological dedicated lines so the carriages don't get stuck in traffic are two options that spring to mind immediately.
youngtaff 1y ago
Efficiency — mainly through lower friction “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-railways-will-fix-the-future-by-gareth-dennis/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/761930/how-the-rail...)
- ninalanyon 1y ago
  Everyone proposing trams says this. None of them provide any numbers. How much more efficient does it have to be to offset the much greater cost of the roadway?
wongarsu 1y ago
If overhead wires were the only advantage of light rail, why is anyone using light rail instead of trolleybuses? 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
- chgs 1y ago
  They also provide major disadvantages, like a single obstacle or broken down vehicle blocking the entire route.

rsynnott 1y ago

> The vehicle has a capacity of 56, is comfortable and has low floors to enable passengers to embark and disembark easily That's a _very_ small tram, smaller than most buses.

thehappypm 1y ago
I assume 56 is the capacity that they advertise but people will cram in like sardines when it’s rush hour
- rsynnott 1y ago
  The buses around here advertise a capacity of 90, and the trams a capacity of 400.
JdeBP 1y ago
It's not smaller than most of the buses that run in the existing Stagecoach and National Express fleets that go around and to and from Coventry, which seat approximately 30 people on a single-decker with standing room for about 10 more (in the best case, with no push-chairs, trolleys, or wheelchairs).

JdeBP 1y ago

Since there are going to be a lot of people who don't even know England, let alone Coventry: 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.

ClumsyPilot 1y ago

Important background: Building the same tram in Britain costs at least 2X more than in France, often 3x more. 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

tmtvl 1y ago
Does the UK have a loose, silty soil which requires the deeper track beds or more stringent safety regulations or something?

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curtisszmania 1y ago

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pkaodev 1y ago

Not really related, but leaving Coventry has probably been one of the best decisions I've made in my life. This makes sense though, one of the best things about the city is the good transport links for getting out of it.

golemiprague 1y ago

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