48
Are trams that good (genuine question)?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
48 points (86.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
9591 readers
36 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Trams do not have to share the road with cars. They can have (and often do have) their own dedicated right of way.
In those situations the tram only really interacts with cars on intersections, similar to level crossings for rail.
I think it's more helpful to see a tram as an upgrade on a bus, rather than a downgrade on rail.
The main advantages of trams over busses are the increased capacity, and increased efficiency (less fuel, fewer drivers per passenger needed)
And even at intersections they usually are given priority over cars.
Yeah this makes sense. I come from a country that doesn't have many trams and when I do see them they tend to be interacting with the road which is probably where my perception comes from.
Definitions are loose but generally a tram is defined as sharing the road with cars, aka streetcar in North America. If it has its own dedicated right of way, then it's a light rail. Light rail can be separated all the way to a metro system if you want. (I think we shouldn't use the term tram at all, use streetcar which is self explanatory or light rail to mean dedicated right of way.)