lexande

So have Chicago and Boston, and yet

Realistically everybody who had any chance of paying has a means of instant payment (card or phone) on them, so the issues are
1) people who falsely deny having means of payment
2) ensuring the system doesn't become a moving shelter for totally indigent people

Why not? The ticket machines take foreign cards obviously.

If you'll admit to having a card on you at all can't they just have a machine to tap it and charge it on the spot?

77) (actually pursue) Electrify Ottawa lines 2 and 4

Unfortunately that's not enough to stop other people's kids from voting to wreck your country.

Schools can be influenced by policy, whereas there is not much any of us can do about how other people (fail to) parent their kids.

I thought EMU overhaul schedules and maintenance contracts were generally measured in years and not km?

But I'm not convinced this makes sense in any developed country, the labor and operational complexity involved in coupling/uncoupling is expensive and the electricity to keep an extra EMU running is cheap.

The Helsinki lines are all pretty frequent I thought?

Do they do that in Helsinki? I think the answer on busy systems is to not fuck around with detaching EMUs. Elsewhere in the thread Alon advocated permanently coupled trainsets.

Schedule recovery time at the airport station, take trains in and out of service at Pasila probably.

Your depot probably isn't right in the urban core either. And there will often be at least some facilities to park trains near the outer ends of the line since traffic tends to flow into the city in the morning and out in the evening.

The loop doesn't actually help you if you are trying to close cars, for this or any other reason.

I've never actually encountered a closed car on LIRR or Metro North. Why do they do it? Fare enforcement reasons?

76) (actually pursue) As shown above, DC Yellow Line to Bailey's Crossroads via Columbia Pike

Ah okay so you'd keep Tobu Asakusa. That always seems like a tempting stub terminal to get rid of but unlike the others it's not purely metropolitan service.

Okay but like, where do the trains coming in from Kinugawaonsen or whatever go? That's significantly further out than any existing Tokyo subway thru running.

I like this but is the idea that everybody transfers to the Blue Line at Rosa Parks?

Does Stuttgart 21 (with tunnels permitting trains from Esslingen to enter Stuttgart Hbf from either end) count?

Tangentially I'm curious what you'd suggest doing with the long-distance Tobu Skytree services. bsky.app/profile/lexa...

The 200k+ per day of course get priority when that's the tradeoff, but your conversion of Keisei-Ueno to a Ginza branch isn't going to attract 200k+ per day that aren't already riding.

Romancecar on off-peak Chiyoda also seems like a poor use of capacity, but it's just 6 outbound & 3 inbound trains per weekday, while Skyliner is every 20 minutes (41 outbound & 43 inbound trains per weekday total).

Isn't the relevant thing in this context revenue and not ridership? (And in contexts where airport trains don't have higher fares, they tend to have higher consumer surplus per ride, so while often overrated it makes sense to prioritize them somewhat more than other lines of equal ridership.)

It's tempting to think about trying to route the Skyliner into the Shinkansen but I guess the loading gauge is wrong.

We're talking about thru running so surely there is no "reverse peak"? And long dwells even in only the reverse peak direction still hurt peak direction capacity since the trains that will turn & become peak trains get stuck behind them.

The non-stop airport express trains still seem like a poor fit for subway thru running, lots of passengers with luggage and who aren't familiar with the line mean long dwells.

Does this mean regauging all of Keio?

Planning is pretty advanced (hence the above map) but I don't think any actual construction has started.

That looks pretty goofy but I guess maybe it's not that bad.