Top Ten. Transport and Traffic Best photographs of 2012.

It's the time of the year that different top ten lists are published in an attempt to review this year that soon is coming to an end. Best songs, best movies, best shows and the lists go on. My favourite is lists of best photographs because as the Chinese proverb, quoted later (1911) by newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane say: "Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words." The web is filled with amazing photographs but I always give greater attention to the ones that involve transport and traffic. Browsing through such sites I realised that a significant percentage of these pictures involve transport and traffic on one way or another.

So here is my top ten list of the most spectacular transport and traffic photographs of 2012. I took the liberty to put my own titles on them as most of them were not published under the photographers original title. Apart from the title,  I list the country that the picture was taken, the photographers name and the news agency that published it. I kept the last spot in the list for one of my own photographs, because of it's special meaning. Is the photograph from the most popular blog post for 2012 and also is the photograph that reflects my pleasure for living and working in such a great city.

10. Bus rapid transit. Australia. KYRIAKOS TYROLOGOS.

9. Space Travel. USA, AFP

 8. Cruise Safety. Italy. PAUL HANNA. Reuters 

7. Highway Land Resume. China. CHINA DAILY. Reuters

 6. Alternative mobility. Colombia. FREDY BUILES. Reuters

5. Public Transport Overcrowd. Bangladesh.  ANDREW BIRAJ, Reuters 

thanks to fellow blogger Prafull for correcting me

4.Cost of fuel. Italy. ALESSANDRO BIANCHI. Reuters

 3. Freight Overload.Pakistan. MIAN KHURSHEED. Reuters

   2. School Active Travel.Indonesia. BEAWIHARTA. Reuters

  1. Storm Traffic Halt. United States. LUCAS JACKSON. Reuters

BRT or LRT? Busway or Light Rail?

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.  

After all, the way busways work in Brisbane, some times they give the impression that we do have a light rail.