Few days
ago I went back to the Gold Coast for a technical seminar on the new Light Rail Project that is now under construction there. The stage one of the project will
cost $ 1 billion to deliver a 13 km route between the Gold Coast University Hospital and Broadbeach. This new public transportation system will commence operations
in 2014 well ahead of the Commonwealth Games that Gold Coast will host in 2018.
The system in this first stage will consist of 14 trams and 16 stations and it
is expected to move 50,000 passengers a day with a capacity to cater for up to
75,000 passengers a day.
The trams
are constructed by Bombardier and are 43.5 metres long, 2.65 metres wide and
can travel at speeds up to 70 km/h. The trams are the latest generation of
FLEXITY 2 Light Rail Vehicles that are used in Croydon and Docklands in London, Nottingham and Manchester, Blackpool and Lancashire. The unique feature for the Gold
Coast trams will be of course the Surfboard racks.
This new system
will be the first light rail system in Queensland. Previous attempts to propose
planning and construction of such a system in Queensland’s capital city Brisbane were unsuccessful. Public spending
in transportation is directed to the bus system like the CityGlider and CityCats.
In the traffic engineering – transportation planning community there is a big and long standing debate on the benefits of light rail systems against bus rapid transit systems. The BRT or busway as they are called in Australia is at the moment the preferred choice in Brisbane. Personally I am not sure that there is a clearly superior system between the two. Probably it depends on the urban environment and the characteristics that those systems are to be designed and operate. And while busways are usually less expensive to implement and more flexible and adaptive to changes, the light rail systems give the city a world class image lift and support residential and commercial development along its stations.
In the traffic engineering – transportation planning community there is a big and long standing debate on the benefits of light rail systems against bus rapid transit systems. The BRT or busway as they are called in Australia is at the moment the preferred choice in Brisbane. Personally I am not sure that there is a clearly superior system between the two. Probably it depends on the urban environment and the characteristics that those systems are to be designed and operate. And while busways are usually less expensive to implement and more flexible and adaptive to changes, the light rail systems give the city a world class image lift and support residential and commercial development along its stations.
After all, the way busways work in Brisbane, some times they give the impression that we do have a light rail.
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