How the World’s Best Transit Systems Achieve Amazing Frequency 

The Victoria line in London has terminals with just a single island platform. The train arrives and the driver gets off, and at the other end another driver is waiting, and gets on to drive the train back the other way. As the train leaves the first driver walks down the platform to the other end, and while he walks, a train arrives and does the same on the other platform. Shortly after he reaches the other end, the next train arrives, its driver gets off, and this driver gets on to drive it back. The Victoria line runs every 90 seconds at peak times, so it's a pretty efficient system and works well, and no need for reversing sidings.

I've seen it multiple times now: WHY on earth are trams in the US/Canada driving in that slow manner? How are they supposed to compete with cars if you have to be slower than them on the SAME street, even with their own lanes?

Don't forget station placements and layouts. The best type of line stop placement would be one where every station switches sides of the train. this creates good passenger flow onboard during crowded times. And yes platforms on both sides of the tracks along with double platform boarding is a great thing -- especially when you have one track serving multiple routes to keep people waiting for certain segments on different sides and keep confusion to a minimum

3:48 You are showing subway line U5 in Berlin here, and it’s a bit ironic, because this is the “wrong” train, which has caused much consternation on the line. These trains are much too narrow for U5 (2.40 m vs 2.65 m; you can see the extension boards near the exits). Reason being: A local manufacturer had issues supplying new trains, so the public transport company had to borrow trains from the narrow line U2. Luckily, this won’t be forever, otherwise it would indeed make that line less attractive.

You must come to know São Paulo metro system. Lines 3 is a non-stop carrousel.

How can I use Opentrack as a regular guy?

Once again, a great presentation - and I strongly agree with all of the points you make. Re London (UK), the buses need most to improve frequencies. In the current (politically derived) cost-cutting frenzy, a lot of routes have reduced to 'every 12 minutes', which is a crazy decision: for me, every seven and a half minutes (8 per hour) is the level at which you get the most gain in passenger numbers, as it's the level at which most people don't mind waiting for the next bus, and so will turn up without checking the schedule. 'Every 12 minutes' gives times which are completely unmemorable; at least 'every 15 minutes' gives you that comfort! But London buses fall into the typical bus-man's pitfall trap of every route having its own frequency - which is always justified by how many and what sort of people live along the route, and what current ticket sales are, but completely ignores the fact (well established by over a century of experience on the tube lines) that, to function at its best, a network needs to give comfortable connection times at transfer points. For example, the new outer-London express network 'SuperLoop' has different routes at 10, 12 and 15 minute frequencies, which will lead to people having discouraging experiences when they try journeys involving transfers. The SuperLoop does have some great features, such as interchanges with all the radial routes it crosses, but I'm disappointed that a standard frequency has not been specified.

What you mention at 9:00 is interesting (the widening of an approach track to 2 with an island platform at a through running mainline railway station) because Brussels never implemented this at its Central station, which has now become a notorious bottleneck on the Belgian railway network. That said, the issue hasn't been replicated everywhere as Brussels-Luxembourg station has 6 tracks (with 2 island platforms and 2 side platforms) even though there are only 4 approach tracks.

5:10 *cough cough* MTR Airport Lines (Tung Chung Line and Airport Express)

Hey, could you maybe make a video about the Transportsystem Bögl maglev? It's developed in Germany and the company uses prefab and standardized components and promises a system with the capacity for a (light) metro with the construction costs of a tram system Edit: it is also supposed to be automated and entirely grade separated. And maintenance is supposed to be less due to less moving objects. Also noise is significantly lower and the train is able to do steeper inclines

one thing that wasnt mentioned in the dwell time section is level boarding. its not just important to people like me who use wheelchairs, but also speeds up boarding emensly with busses and trains. especialy if you look at trains like go trains or old trams with 3 stairs

“Transit should be frequent” My local route: 2 buses per hour during weekdays, take it or leave it

Infrequency of a transit system leads to sort of chicken or egg problem. Is there low ridership due to low frequency? Or do transit systems have low frequency in response to low ridership?

Excellent! Might be worth looking at Moscow. Its Metro has by far the greatest frequency on the planet, 75 to 90 second headways! It is more a human conveyor belt than a transit system.

In the UK, most buses sadly only have 1 door all the way at the front so at the busier stops, you often have to join a queue to get off if you're sitting at the back. In the rest of Europe, buses often have 3, 4 or even 5 doors.

Spanish solution is an amazingly practical layout if there's enough traffic to warrant it. Can't widen the existing island platform because there are tracks in the way? No problem, just put additional platforms on the side. In the case of two perpendicular lines, you are a single escalator ride from one line's exit platform to either of the other line's boarding platforms. You still get the benefit of being able to transfer cross platform between tracks on the same line. Tracks 2 and 7 at Jamaica station on the LIRR utilize Spanish solution and it makes being able to cross to another platform without needing the stairs much easier by allowing one to cut through the train. It is not idiot-proof, but there are things you can do to coax people to use it correctly. Properly design and sign stations and passages so that people naturally go to the correct platform to board. There are several examples in the US where Spanish solution-style platforms are in place, but station design and access constraints make it unworkable. Park Street station on the Red Line of the MBTA is one such example. Open the car doors on the alighting side before those on the boarding side, with a delay of several seconds. You want enough time for a clear pulse and flow of all passengers towards the correct doors to start before you open the doors for passengers to start boarding. That way, passengers don't even need to think about it, they just go with the flow.

I'm on an overseas holiday in Beijing at the moment. I've been using the subway a lot, over a dozen trips so far, some of those with multiple interchanges, so something like 20 trains. My longest wait has been three minutes. Sometimes you're at the top of the stairs going down to the platform and you can hear the train you've just missed as it's leaving the station. If you walk at a normal pace, by the time you walk down the stairs and to the middle of the platform, you can hear the next train coming.

2:36 Munich S-Bahn commuter rail trunk line in downtown Munich runs at a potential capacity of close to 50k passengers per hour per direction during rush hour, as the commuter trains of the different lines come together on a 2 minute schedule / adding up to 30 trains per hour per direction

GOA-4 operation also massively improves frequency, allowing trains to instantly reverse without waiting for the driver to walk to the other cab. Lyon line B (which was automated last year) has 2 minutes headways despite its northern terminal being single tracked for historical reasons.

Well said about the doors! Whether it's the NYC Subway, SEPTA's Market-Frankford Line, or the PATH, the trains have three or four doors on each side! They notice how effective having three doors is on a rapid transit train, and yet they don't think "Let's do that with suburban rail so the operations are just as effective". Like the LIRR got fancy M9s back in 2019 and yet they fall into the same problem as the M7s and M1/3s, it's just two doors. The LIRR C3 bilevels having small steps to get to the seats is even worse for crowd flow! Having a third or fourth door is great for avoiding congestion at the doors and maintaining good crowd flow, or having two much bigger doors like on the Macau LRT as you pointed out can do the trick too! And of course, Spanish solution works like a charm as well! Besides European examples, a North American example of Spanish solution is at the 33rd Street PATH station, opening the doors on one side to let all the 33rd Street passengers off and then opening the other side for those getting on the Journal Square-bound train (or Hoboken-bound when Hoboken has its own Hoboken-33rd Street trains on weekdays). Epcot, TTC, and Magic Kingdom stations on the WDW monorail uses Spanish solution too! Driverless metros also allow to run higher frequencies without a huge operational cost, then they don't need to use more people to operate more trains, and platform screen doors simplify station layout, thus increasing safety.

Frequency makes transit so much better! I wish Seattle would increase the frequency in its existing downtown tunnel rather than building a second tunnel a block away and forcing people to walk between two tunnels for transfers between lines. I still like 8sec headways a gondola can provide - no train will ever reach such - makes transfers so much more pleasant!

On some lines in London, they improve turnaround time by having another driver waiting at the other end of the platform to get in at the other end to drive the train out. The driver who took the train into the platform leaves the train, then walks to the other end of the platform to drive out the next train. It requires an extra driver per shift to do that because at any given time, one driver will be walking to the other end of the platform while the others are driving trains. But you do get more journeys for the same number of trains.

The problem you mentioned at 5:01 is the problem the Tung Chung Line and Airport Express on the MTR faces! When British Hong Kong was planning to build it, the Chinese government raised concerns about the effect of the project on the territory's fiscal reserves, which eventually forced the Hong Kong government to reduce the cost, and this led to many limitations. The power supply system restricts the number of trains running between Kowloon and Lai King stations. The system can accommodate a maximum of one Airport Express train and two Tung Chung trains travelling in both directions at one time. The minimum headway on this section of the line is 3 minutes 30 seconds. The airport rail link was originally designed to accommodate four tracks, two each for the Airport Express and Tung Chung line. It was later reduced to two tracks where both services share the same trackage. As a result, signal failures can affect both services. The Lantau Link section of the line only allows one train to pass through each direction at the same time, raising the minimum headway between trains to 2 minutes 15 seconds. As a result, some Tung Chung line trains terminate at Tsing Yi during peak hours, instead of travelling the entire line. The signaling system doesn't give priority to Airport Express trains, thus Tung Chung Line trains at Sunny Bay frequently impede them.

I'm wondering why tail tracks beyond the terminal allow higher frequency of the train? Doesnt it require the train to stop twice and require drivers to walk from one end to another while the train is stopped at the tail tracks, not picking up passengers?

What is OpenTrack?

Can You please make a video on poor condition of bus services in Indian cities other than Delhi (like Kolkata) a constant reduction of buses in suburbs.... Govt is investing less and less. Also, love your videos, from from the city hosting India's first metro system ❤️🇮🇳

Day 13 of asking Reece to cover the South Wales Metro

Many UK train companies need to hear this. Nice video 👍

The Spanish solution sounds fascinating.

Makes me always proud seeing a train from my hometown Berlin. A bit silly I know but…

6:47 how do I open up Open track?

I’m fixated on the door issue and dwell time, and can’t help but see the complete inefficiency of airplanes in this regard. Airplanes are great for long haul, but for regional trips, boarding and unboarding can take as long as the flight itself, with modern rail being an obvious alternative.

My biggest problem with getting in and out of a train are those idiots with the bicycles. Especially when there is no space for those bicycles and they are blocking the doors.

Sydney Trains has something called a "City Circle" where three suburban lines running at suburban frequencies converge onto a single pair of tracks to run through the busy CBD. It's pretty neat on paper, as it operates with metro-like frequencies within the City Circle, but if one of those lines gets delayed due to some emergency the knock-on delays would affect THREE lines instead of one. It's a pretty amusing achilles heel until it makes it onto the news with yet another "train delay paralyses entire network angering commuters" headline.

When buses run every fifteen minutes, we call it off-peak.

Please make a video about INDIAN BULLET TRAIN PROJECT 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳🥺🥺🥺

6:42 it's NOT true that side platforms are more efficient for a terminal! There are tons of high frequency metro systems around the world with Island platforms at the terminus. The track layout can be exactly the same, just with more space between tracks to fit the platform between them. Actually it's better to have island platforms in many cases: you can have an additional crossover before the station that gives you the option of turning the trains around at the platform. this is very common on the Vienna U-Bahn

Interesting, but I think you overlooked one aspect: passengers and passenger discipline. I commute daily in Berlin, and people are just too stupid? Lazy? Obnoxious? For frequent service. Doors are being held; stepping into the middle of a car is rare; doors are blocked. And everybody grumbles about train service, of course 🙄. Anything that could be done for this problem?

I remember the Boston Red line terminal station (Alewife) ... the train would deboard, the driver would walk to the other end of the train, then boarding would happen for the inbound trip. Slow, but there were two platforms doing the same, and if all went well, the process could handle all us rush hour passengers. In Minneapolis, we have a different frequency problem - a shortage of drivers. If your rolling stock needs drivers, and you don't have the people-power, frequency will suffer, no matter how good everything else is. Fortunately, ridership is up this fall, above 2019 levels. I'm seeing it on my bus commute ... maybe they'll find enough drivers to bring the route frequency from every 15 minutes to every 10. [For commenters who think 15 is good enough ... this is a major route, along a heavily populated urban corridor through downtown and on to the university. It could probably justify every 5 minute service - if there were enough drivers. There's a plan to turn the ordinary route into an express busway in a few years.]

Any time a driver is involved in the frequency equation, there will be delays due to said driver. For best frequency, Driverless (GOA3) or Unattended (GOA4) operation is of benefit. Humans get tired, computers do not. ;) As for the criticality of turnbacks , many systems used a "degraded" form of driverless by automating just the turnback operation. This allows the driver to walk from one end of the train to other while the turnback is in progress.

I know it's the grammar N*z! in me, but can you please, PLEASE, learn the proper usage for less and fewer. It's less dwell time but fewer doors, less frequency but fewer trains. One does not use less with something one can count. Less is for time or volume. Sorry but I just cringed so much watching this video that I had to get it off my chest. Carry on.

Berlin S-Bahn acceleration always gets me. Especialy compared to trains on neighbouring tracks that ultimately reach higher speeds but those S-Bahns just speed up so fast its crazy. Outruns trains departure the same moment every time. Not even close.

For buses there are classic doubledecker buses, eg in London and in Berlin. many decades ago, they had a single stairs to the upper deck at one end. then they added second set of stairs to allow for entering on one end and leaving on the other, and used a central walkway with 2seater benches instead of having the same single walkway for entering and leaving at one side with 4seater benches. more recently they started replacing old doubledecker buses with articulated buses which are twice as long, have more and wider doors, and have the same capacity (around 100 people) but no longer need stairs. I still love the tradition and hate when they get rid of most doubledeckers, but i completely forget about this when i can very quickly enter and leave on short stops. and on most innercity routes, i have to wait no longer than 5 minutes for the next bus on the same line, or even much less if (for short travel distances) there are 2 or 3 lines which partially overlap. (similar frequencies on multiple lines apply to trams) similar applies to U- and S-Bahn (capacity up to 1000 on long trains) which (for me, in the center of the city) come every 2-3 minutes during rush hour, 5 minutes normal, and even 10 or less at other times. who needs to look at and learn timetables with good frequencies ? the S-Bahn on lines to and beyond city limits often only has a "low" frequency of 20 minutes (still not bad when you then sit in the train for 30+ minutes for those distances), but through a big part of the town seven lines share the tracks and thus people mostly can use any train every 2-3 minutes. the next problem are probably some old stations (built 100+ years ago, right in the center of the city) that almost can't be rebuilt easily or at all (at least not while continueing normal operations, and not when some base are protected historical buildings), creating bottlenecks on stairs and elevators instead of on the train doors.

So you make yet another video without mentioning Moscow metro system, which has one of the most frequent trains in the world (80 sec intervals). I wonder what it takes for you to discredit yourself even further... And so, this essay of yours is just not substantial then without one really proper example of metro systems. It just seems unreasonable even if the reason for ignoring Moscow metro is just political.

Low frequency can really ruin an otherwise great transit route. My parents live at the edge a big city and you can take the bus that takes 10 minutes in each direction to a local shopping street and a S-Bahn stopp in 2 different city districts, where you can either shop or take the Train to reach almost every relevant city nearby, but due to missing staff it only stops there every 30 minutes at the moment, which makes taking the train a pain because you have to wait almost 15 minutes for the train to arrive (almost the same time you need to get to the city center by car via Autobahn) and have the same issue on the way back. While I lived there as a kid the bus stopped every 20 minute, which was passable, but ever since I can remember they wanted to bump that down to every 15 minutes...

'Fewer' and 'Less' can't be used interchangeably. Fewer doors.

It‘s great there is science for how to move people into the train. Our regional train service based on a bombardier talent 2 is certainly no good example. There is a wheelchair enabled bathroom right at the bicycle door which creates a smaller walkway already, yet the bottleneck can be used as bike storage on one side and flip down seats on the other. And _then_ there is the large bike/push-chair/ wheel-chair area. The washroom is needed, but don‘t invite people to sit there / or park there bike in a crucial entry point into the train Oh - these trains are overcrowded and always to late.

Stammstrecke is great in Munich. It does have problems with late trains and delays which create ripples through the network occasionally. But they are planning on adding an express Stammstrecke route.

Dont speak of Berlin here. Base frequency should not be 20 minutes on urban rail

Any idea what is the most frequent service in the world? Do any top the busiest tube lines at 36tph?

Need to persuade the transit authorities that designing a wheelchair ramp that doesn't take a full 60 seconds to deploy is a system wide timetabling issue

does anyone know how to download the opentrack software? because i tried digging around their website but cant figure it out but id like to test some train frequency models

Good news. Did anyone hear about Edmonton finally opening its new Valley Line?

Nice to see my normal commute feature in your video (Wimbledon on SWR 455s). I hope you had a nice time here. It seems like you got lots of new footage!

Something that’s definitely not conducive to higher frequency (more importantly reliability) is shuffling all your trains through a central two-track tunnel bottleneck cough cough Munich S-Bahn cough To clarify, the central section does get a very frequent service, a train every three minutes or less, but all the branches that come together get generally twenty minutes, or further out 40/60. And lord help you if there's a breakdown anywhere on the main line. Then there's no frequency, because no train can go anywhere.

1:14 to could also have 2 island platforms per direction and longer dwelling trains with higher capacity and achieve similar frequency

German "intercity trains do sometimes get delayed"... understatement of the century

We really need to take pages out of Japans book! We should be using locomotive pulled trains only on intercity services, and they actually work great here. All suburban routes should use high capacity EMU's like you said, but I feel we need to design a better trainset that uses a mix of both single deck cars for door capacity and double deck cars for extra capacity in general. Picture something like the Paris RER NG sets but with a few more intermediate single deck cars. Or, ideally, picture something like a JR E231 / E233 (my favorite trains in the world) but with a few more double deck green cars (with wider doors and stairways then current cars of cource.) I really do think America really needs proper Japanese trains! It's also not impossible to run both high frequency service with both express service also local service. I've calculated this myself; It's possible to run 32tph local and express service if you put crossing tracks at every other station. You can still have top speeds of 140 km/h which can mean the fastest service can average ~95 - 100 km/h! Also, you can coordinate schedules that can result in 8 express, 16 rapid (with varying stopping patterns), and 8 local trains. Meaning, you can have up to 24 express-type trains per hour which can be massive capacity for regional trips that suburban rail serves! (Nerdbrain moment: If you use Tokaido line style 15-car JR style trains, which would actually be shorter than the current GO trains, you can have up to 100,800 pphpd per line! 20+ lanes of traffic! With 84,000 pphpd for just the 24 express-type trains per hour! Now THAT'S capacity!) It's hard to explain here how it all works but it's much easier than it looks; plus I'm sure you've already figured things out like this anyway! Overall, we should learn not just from Europe, but from Japan! I'd love to see a JR east style suburban rail network in North America!

SD Trolley's main topological error is that the trunk branches into the Blue and Green Lines at Old Town, despite both branches having extremely strong outer anchors. And now the transit agency is crazy enough to propose an airport rail link running only every 15 minutes that would branch off the same trunk, via a flat junction, even closer to Downtown. (Luckily that plan is dying and the latest plan is an automated rubber-tyred light metro connecting the airport with Downtown with 2 minute frequencies!) Also, San Diego's new UTC terminus has a scissors crossover at the station approach instead of beyond the station...whoops!

The most used lines of Milan's underground run every 1 and a half minute on rush hour but are still pretty full

a railway can work fine with 5' headways without these terminus designs

This was a great and concise look at this. I'd add that platform doors (in places that don't already have them) can likely help with being able to run higher speeds into and out of stations without compromising safety. It would probably help keep the tracks much cleaner too, especially in places like NYC. Those trash-driven track fires really slow down trains...

Does Open Track have a free online version for testing this or was that a joke Reece?

6:19 From what I know the Berlin S- and U-Bahn trains termini also have two platforms but trains arrive on one wait ther for most times 5-7 Minutes to allow the drivers to change cabs and then set off again

Recently opened Pune Metro in India uses the same technique of boarding and deboarding as you mentioned. Just that Pune has it Overground on Viaducts.

I’m a sucker for a design video so I loved this one! Thanks

you missed a point: level boardig

Hear that, LRT Jabodebek.

Na, welcher Berliner ist auch verwundert, in diesem Video die S - Bahn zu sehen?

Where is that loop at 6:05? Thank you 😊

A couple things you might not have thought about: 1) Some doors will have been wide enough for two people when the stock was first built, but now aren't. I won't be surprised when these new trains come up against the same issue, as people continue to get wider. 2) Doesn't matter how wide the door, if people block others getting off. If people could use their brains for two seconds, they might realize making room for people to get off would make it quicker for them to get on.

Are you the leader foamer?

Any Berliners here who find it hilarious to see their S-Bahn as a thumbnail for "best transit systems in the world"?

I saw on Madrid's line 3 on a rainy day I decided to 100% the line (having only gone south of Sol on 2 occasions, one of those times was to the train museum). At Moncloa, it does switch sides, but there was another train sitting on the other side at Villaverde Alto. Line 2 and Line 4 do that too sometimes at their western terminals of Cuatro Caminos and Arguelles-but there it makes sense to have most trains have access to both the side and Island platform (which at Cuatro Caminos is a quick transfer to continue northbound on Line 1-which was useful to me being one stop north), so it simple cuts out some inconvenience where that case at Villaverde Alto proved well as I was just going to take that train back to Legazpi...and then I think I walked over to the Planetarium (I had no plan and had the day off from class)

There have been a lot of simulations of airplanes with a wing architecture, but tube and wing persists for known flow in emergency situations. Livestock seem to have used ventilated box cars with sliding doors. An interesting concept to use retractable doors. I wish I could remember which trains were going to be "short-fast" . The intermodal trend was long and they seem to be relatively fast. The heavy haul are long and relatively slow. It must have been regular freight. Railroads have needed to increase passing tracks.

British buses are worse than North American buses because, outside of London (And some other big cities), buses only ever have one door at the front. Even double-decker buses only have one door. This is generally terrible for frequency due to it extending dwell times, especially at busy stops. My local bus between a town of around 20,000 and a city of ten times that is really busy at peak times, and operates double decker buses every 15 minutes. Another company operates multiple similar routes at similar frequencies, probably totaling to around 5-7 minute frequency. These buses only have 1 door at the front, and it is obvious that they have to wait for ages at the major stops, and especially because we do not have any forms of tap-on tap-off transit cards so every single person has to talk to the driver and get a ticket.

Accessibility is also vitally important. I was recently in Chicago with the family. We have always been a fan of the L. Recently the CTA has been making strides in making trains and stations accessible, adding elevators etc. However, wheeling my grandmother on and off the trains in a wheelchair we found that the nearly level boarding was not level enough. We had to yank the chair backwards up to an 8 inch jump on or drop off the trains. There is also up to a 8 inch gap between the train and the platform that the small wheels could get trapped in. As you can imagine, this made getting on and off take longer. We were told on the last day that there are ramps, and that the people at the station can help with them, and call ahead to the disembark station so they will be ready too. But that also sounds like it would take some time and slow things down.

5:00 Actually the Frankfurt Stadtbahn (aka Subway) reduced their service in u6 and u7 routes. Some trains would stop in the tunnels as there wasn't enough electricity. The VGF instructed the drivers to not accelerate to fast hahaha

Back in the 70’s the schedule for the Budapest tram and metro lines just mentioned the interval trams and trains would arrive during the day. Ranging from every 30 seconds on the Great Ring trams 4 and 6 (the busiest tram lines in the world) to a max of about 5 minutes for less busier lines. The frequencies have decreased now thanks to car use but are still high enough so that you never have to look at a schedule …

Many rail transit lines have built in restrictions . There is a diesel rail line in Denmark called Gribskovbanen which runs 4 trains an hour each direction on SINGLE TRACK for most of the day . Very old established environmental reasons demands that a they cannot build a 2nd track nor string catenary .

It occurs to me that driver pay is also an obstacle to frequent service. Halve the number of cars in a train and you can run twice as frequent, shorter trains for the same number of cars total. But you’re paying twice as much for drivers. This suggests automated systems are a useful tool to increase frequency. Run as many trains as you need, and as your system can handle, and don’t pay any more for drivers because they aren’t needed. Really high frequency transit should probably work as much as possible like a horizontal elevator. Doesn’t need a driver, easy to get on and off, you might have to wait but not for long, and most importantly it’s just *there* and people just take it for granted that it’s there and don’t waste mental energy worrying about whether there will be a train or not.

in athens, there is a railway corridor, but at least until 2025, it will be single tracked in a section. In a european capital. The government gives money to the airplanes for safety from turkiye, but i don't think that there will be a war with turkiye anytime soon. Anyway, when, finally, the corridor is built there might be suburban trains frequently in this underused corridor (greek railway is among the worst in europe, and its basically abandoned)

The Toronto subway is one of the most frequent systems in the world. The frequency of their delays is unparalleled. Sorry... dad joke.

Speaking of frequency there is actually another compromise, which is capacity. That’s because when you’re designing with frequency in mind you’re more likely to choose smaller trains, which is not a good thing for a line that has the capacity of 2 million people a day.

Rmtransit, just watching your video, and was very interested in "loops ' as you called it I be very appreciative if you could do a video on this piece of rail infrastructure. Thank you

I believe the Greater Jakarta LRT planners and operators should watch this first....

RUN MORE TRAINS! (btw "fewer" is the opposite of "more" for count-nouns)

You should do videos about small North American cities, but cover 3-5 cities so its still a normal length video. That being said, you could do a video explaining how to improve current public transportation in cities like Barrie, Orillia, and Collingwood, ON.

Two questions: 1. Which specific substack article were you referring to? 2. Is it possible to access OpenTrack without a university/industry connection?

Door size? Not a 'stand alone' consideration. Try door size vs temperature and vs wind strengths. Now there's a PhD thesis awaiting a postgraduate, if ever I saw one!!

Viewing this from Boston, where the MBTA seems to be in a death spiral of worsening service frequency and reliability on both bus and light rail (probably also on the rapid transit, but I haven't been on those lines much). And the traffic just keeps getting worse, including well after midnight, after the T has stopped providing service at all (and on the rare occasions that they have tried Owl service, it has always been blatantly designed to fail).

Too bad opentrack seems to only be for enterprise licensed users 6:47 Also had to set my VPN to Switzerland to access the main public website

Before electrification, Brisbane used to have full-width compartment carriages; each carriage had nine compartments (seven for southside trains), with two full-width cross benches (seating 5 each). So there would be nine doors on each side of every carriage. Worked well at peak, and these old wooden carriages were prefered to the more modern SX sets in peak. Bondi Junction (in Sydney) had a relay driver. Train would arrive and the driver would walk through the train to the rear end. Relay driver would get in and drive the train forward into a short sutb in the tunnel. When there, the original driver would drive forward onto the departure platform. Olympic Park (also in Sydney) has an excellert variation to the Spanish solution. It's on a loop. The arrival track divides into two, and the platforms are side-track-island-track-side. Arriving passengers disembark onto the island platform, then out to the world. After the train is clear, the island doors are closed and the side-platform doors are opened. Departing passengers for westbound services are on one side platform, and city and east-bound services on the other side platform. Good solution for departing passengers as they know which platform to go to. Good for arriving passengers, as they don't have to fight for waiting crowds. This staion is busiest at popular events, such as the annual show.

Now there's something that will throw a wrench in a lot of what is considered optimal to increase frequency. Accessibility support. Fast loading and fast unloading often is not very friendly design for wheelchairs and other handicap modes

Thank you for this. I wanted to help my city improve service frequency as the trains have gotten overcrowded and this video gave me some insights on how to handle peak rush load. Could you share more videos on the Indian metro which are in progress - Delhi metro and Bengaluru metro to begin with. The latter is facing overcrowding issues

I just sat at a cold stop for 5 minutes longer than I should have, are you going to tell ME what frequency is important? 🤪

Regarding the doors: the Avenio trams used in Munich have two doors per carriage compared to the one door per carriage in the R2 and R3 cars. The last two have that many doors were the good, old P type cars 🥰 And the new 200 m S-Bahn train presented recently has varying doors per carriage: most carriages have three doors, but some have two, but wider doors 😲

I'm always amazed how much information you manage to pack into each video.

Passenger rail cars in the USA may need much bigger doors perhaps because we Muricans have become so obese.

Please have a look at the metro system in Sofia (🇧🇬Bulgaria). The layout design is really good