Trackless Trams May Be The Best Alternative To Light Rail

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Trackless Trams May Be The Best Alternative To Light Rail


23 Dec 2020

By Lisa Chamberlain

Read More: https://citymonitor.ai/transport/rai...-to-light-rail

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The trackless tram, or autonomous rail transit (ART) as it is known in China, combines the best of high-speed rail and autonomous-vehicle (AV) technology with on-street mass transit to achieve a flexible, carbon-neutral and cost-effective urban connector. It is sold as a kit of parts – three cars plus a station – that can be installed about as fast as a city’s permitting process would allow, according to its proponents.

- Planners from Perth to New York City say it is the best possible use of AV tech in the urban context and a critical advancement in the era of climate change and our increasingly crisis-prone world. Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. But as with all innovations, whether trackless trams succeed on a mass scale depends as much on political and business interests as technology and design. “When it’s up and running in Perth, we’ll see,” says Sam Schwartz, a former traffic commissioner in New York City and the founder of an eponymous engineering company. “If it’s successful there, there will be slow exponential growth and then faster as it becomes more widespread. There’s a whole revolution of information technology that the transit industry has been incredibly slow to embrace.”

- Peter Newman, a professor of sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, is a staunch advocate for trackless trams. He was one of the first non-Chinese transit experts to visit the factory in Zhuzhou, China, where such streetcars continue to be developed. After 40 years of rail advocacy, Newman had to acknowledge that light rail is not always the best answer to urban transportation. This became clear to him when Sydney went way over budget installing light rail in its downtown core, disrupting the business district for years. But he doesn’t believe buses are the answer, either. “Buses can’t compete with rail,” Newman says. “They don’t get people out of cars. So I started looking around for alternatives to light rail and came upon an article about this new streetcar being developed in China.”

- He went to Zhuzhou in August of 2018 when the tram was still being tested. “I was convinced with one ride,” he says. “Doing 70km an hour, it rode like a train. The ride quality convinced me this is the future of transit. All of the problems with buses are gone: the jerkiness, the slowness, the vibration.” Upon his return from China, Newman co-authored a study and wrote a series of articles and papers. One paper he co-wrote, published in the Journal of Transportation Technologies in 2019, quantified the significant cost savings of trackless trams compared with light rail. In Sydney, for example, laying 20km of track through the oldest part of the city took five years and cost about $130m per kilometre. By contrast, trackless streetcars can be installed for as little as $10m per kilometre.

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An autonomous rail transit system launched in 2018 in Zhuzhou, China. (Photo courtesy of CRRC)