Sydney Metro - Tallawong to Bankstown

[rogf24]

And the recognised best standard is 4 doors which is simply physically impossible in a double deck rail car.

I've been thinking about this for a while but I do wonder how possible it is to swap the existing arrangement of 3 doors and longitudinal seating with 4 doors and mostly paired seating (2+2) with some but minimal longitudinal seating. It seems that this is the configuration of the old RER cars and other continental European metros. If the main problem with passenger exchange is doors (rather than seating restricting passenger movement, besides 2+2 still offers plenty of room to move around), it might be more beneficial to move to that arrangement without losing seats.

[Fleet Lists]

But what does not show in the capacities is seating v standing. We dont want the Japanese capacities on single deckers if it is 90% standing. Give me the double deckers with extra seating and greater comfort any time. On the one hand we want more people on public transport but on the other had people wont travel on public transport if they dont get a certain amount of comfort.

[simonl]

Who wants Japanese loadings duplicated here?

Or Russian? The figures are to demonstrate that no matter how much capacity you can wring out of a double deck line, you can wring more out of a single deck line. I'm not saying you have to use all of that capacity. It's more like "future-proofing". Better than putting a ceiling on things and then 50 years later the next generation says "why the hell did they do that, now look at the mess we have to sort out" - like with replacing Sydney's trams with buses.

No, what I'm saying is that your comparison is invalid. You need to have an equivalent standing portion and density to show that.

Standing is bad enough, high density standing is worse.

[tonyp]

I've been thinking about this for a while but I do wonder how possible it is to swap the existing arrangement of 3 doors and longitudinal seating with 4 doors and mostly paired seating (2+2) with some but minimal longitudinal seating. It seems that this is the configuration of the old RER cars and other continental European metros. If the main problem with passenger exchange is doors (rather than seating restricting passenger movement, besides 2+2 still offers plenty of room to move around), it might be more beneficial to move to that arrangement without losing seats.

It's useful to watch Perth's progress in this. They're going straight for maximising future capacity on all corridors with what is basically a fast, quasi-metro operation in which long distances are covered very quickly, even with trains stopping. The faster the trip, the less that seating is a critical issue and thus they can make a compromise in terms of the most efficient layout.

Furthermore, it's interesting to see that they've apparently moved from a position of all longitudinal seating to a mixture of this and lateral seats as you suggest. Perhaps they thought all longitudinal was overkill at this stage.

Sydney's double deck system is caught in a catch 22. Because the journey times are so long, naturally you want lots of seats to save having lots of people standing for a very prolonged period. Bring that journey time down and it becomes less of an issue. The other thing of course is the long-standing public transport wisdom that the people travelling the longest distance get seats as the vehicle sets out on its journey and in the other direction the long distance commuters get seats as the shorter distance ones leave the vehicle as it progresses along the route. This is why seating is not a black and white issue. It's not like everybody is standing for the entire length of the route.

[rogf24]

It's useful to watch Perth's progress in this. They're going straight for maximising future capacity on all corridors with what is basically a fast, quasi-metro operation in which long distances are covered very quickly, even with trains stopping. The faster the trip, the less that seating is a critical issue and thus they can make a compromise in terms of the most efficient layout.

I personally think Perth made a bit of a mistake when they switched from 2+2 to longitudinal seating for their A-series. They should have considered adding in extra doors to handle the extra passengers and mostly kept the 2+2 seating. They overkilled it in one aspect but it's still severely lacking in another. Adding in extra doors is nothing unheard of, Hong Kong did it to their old KCR trains.

[grog]

The difference in seating is not as big as you would think. 5 rows of 2 seats transverse is = 9 seats longitudinal. Not sure what the total train difference is for Perth, but for Sydney Metro they lost 36 seats over an 8 car train when changing from 2x2 to longitudinal. From 536 seats down to 500 per train.

[Fleet Lists]

Is that comparing single against double or just single against single - I suspect the latter. In which case it is again not relevant.

[rogf24]

While the difference in numbers per train is not so big, it's worth also remembering that passengers almost always prefer to have lateral seating (there is strong research to back this up) and that should also be taken into account. People are not cattle and we should accommodate passenger's (like ourselves) needs when we have the capacity to. There's less of a feeling of being trapped in a small box with lateral seating especially if you are seated and that's quite a significant difference during both peak and off peak.

Also, the extra 36 odd seats amounts to half a car of extra seats in itself, over a period of a hour during the peak, that amounts to over 1000 extra seats. However, as I said, would prefer to have one more door in addition to 2+2 seating, at least for this metro.

[Mr OC Benz]

It's useful to watch Perth's progress in this. They're going straight for maximising future capacity on all corridors with what is basically a fast, quasi-metro operation in which long distances are covered very quickly, even with trains stopping. The faster the trip, the less that seating is a critical issue and thus they can make a compromise in terms of the most efficient layout.

I personally think Perth made a bit of a mistake when they switched from 2+2 to longitudinal seating for their A-series. They should have considered adding in extra doors to handle the extra passengers and mostly kept the 2+2 seating. They overkilled it in one aspect but it's still severely lacking in another. Adding in extra doors is nothing unheard of, Hong Kong did it to their old KCR trains.

Refitting seats was a much cheaper option than adding more doors. It will however, cause problems in the future because given that capacity has increased, dwell times are now longer given there is still only the same amount of doors as before. For now, trains aren't carrying crush loads, but the slight increase in running time is evident of the impact it is making (and hence the desire to move to 4 doors per carriage) with 1-2 mins added to running time during the peaks on the Joondalup-Mandurah Lines.

Also, they haven't backtracked on seating stance. All new trains are delivered in a longitudinal layout. The only reason there are some trains with a mixture is that they only refitted one car of about 10 sets to increase capacity (leaving the option to do the same to the remaining cars, or other sets in the future). Perth people seem to be more accepting of standing on buses and trains and in some cases, for trains at least, has actually resulted in a more sociable environment given the openness nature and clear sight lines to the other end of the train which I personally think has helped in reducing anti-social behaviour and vandalism given the increased human surveillance.

I personally think 3 doors per car on the Northwest metro is tolerable, given the significant distances and long journey times not normally characterised by metro systems. But I hope that future shorter/traditional metro lines such as City to Parramatta would be more appropriately designed for 4 doors per car.

[grog]

Is that comparing single against double or just single against single - I suspect the latter. In which case it is again not relevant.

It is 100% relevant to the post previous to mine which was about the replacement of 2 x 2 seating with longitudinal seating in Perth.

[tonyp]

After extensive exposure now to travel in Perth I find I'm not minding the longitudinal seats (my wife hates them and goes for the bus if the alternative is available as she'll only ride forward-facing!), but that's mainly because the journeys are very quick and, at my height I actually get legroom for a change in a longitudinal seat. Standing is also very comfortable in these trains and is even not so bad in Perth buses due to the quality of the roads and considerate driving. I really think the greater sensitivity to seating/standing issues in Sydney is due to the drawn-out journey times, something the metro should hopefully address. Unfortunately, unlike the Perth trains that can run up to 130 km/h, the Sydney metro trains I believe are limited to 100 (or 80?) which probably mostly explains why their projected journey time is unusually slow for a metro. If so, they made a poor decision there.

Look at the present situation in parts of Sydney. On some Wollongong trains people are standing for 1:30 hr on a train that groans along slowly, taking nearly half an hour longer to get to Thirroul than the Mandurah train (same distance) despite having several less stops to make than the Mandurah train. With such dire service, obviously seats are an issue (even if they are hard Oscar benches)!

[simonl]

Metro will address long journey times eh?

It will make a difference for a very small minority, and except for a few people around Castle Hill station or running counter peak to Norwest that difference won't be very pronounced even for them.

I don't love double deck particularly but single vs double is such a small part of the equation. More important are other things such as level boarding, straight platforms etc.

[tonyp]

Metro will address long journey times eh?

It will make a difference for a very small minority, and except for a few people around Castle Hill station or running counter peak to Norwest that difference won't be very pronounced even for them.

I don't love double deck particularly but single vs double is such a small part of the equation. More important are other things such as level boarding, straight platforms etc.

What are you talking about? The metro will be significantly faster per distance than any equivalent Sydney Trains service. I've given all the comparative figures previously.

[neilrex]

Dwell times due to door congestion is a much-overated problem. It is mostly a problem at one station - Town Hall - because that is where you have the most people trying to get on and and get off at the same time.

[neilrex]

The other thing about Perth is.... how many people actually use the trains ?

Look at the figures on how many CBD workers in Perth drive to work, and compare that to Sydney.

[neilrex]

You need to see our double deck trains in the same way as you see double deck buses. You wouldn't use them on the Gong Shuttle or to Bondi Beach, you'd use them out to places like Palm Beach and Baulkham Hills where the bus is running express with a low turnover en route. Our double deck trains are best suited to long distance express runs to the outer suburbs and interurban/intercity service. They're completely inadequate for high-turnover stopping services, not because of carriage capacity but because of how they exchange and store passengers which ultimately governs true service capacity.

This is another one of the semi-delusional views that die-hard metro fans seem to have trouble understanding.

Not all cities are the same. Eighteen-century megacities like Manhattan or London or Shanghai are very large. And I don't just mean twice as big in total population as Sydney is. I mean that the downtown area is large. There are large areas covered by very high-density commercial and residential areas.

For various reasons related to both history and topography, the downtown area of Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane are small and compact.

And in Sydney, the downtown area is not expanding very much and taking over nearby suburbs. In many ways, it is exactly the opposite. Instead, you have a polycentric approach, where CBD expansion is occurring not in Paddington or Glebe but in Parramatta and Chatswood.

If you picked up Burwood and moved it to Macdonaldtown, and then picked up the whole of Parramatta and moved it to Stanmore, and then moved Chatswood to Wollstonecraft, and then moved Hurstville to St Peters, then you would have something more similar to what a lot of large cities are like. And that is not just real megacities like Beijing or Shanghai with 15 million people.... that's what Chinese cities with FOUR million people are like.

So, on lines through the "downtown""area, you have 10 or 12 stops and there are LOTS of people getting on and off , at all of them. You are not going to see much of that on any Australian commuter lines, anytime soon.

And that's where the ridiculous metrosexual notion of metro-riding as a ""sociable""activity comes from. Hipsters visting inner-London, or places like San Fransisco, which perhaps could be pointed out to have a population around 400,000 people. And most of those metro rides are a few stops. Not an hour.

I've been on metros in many Chinese cities, and stood on the train for 70 minutes. It''s not much fun.

The notion of people getting on and off, in substantial numbers, all along the route, and being able to easily get a seat, doesn't work everywhere. It doesn't work even on roads like Oxford Street or King Street.

[Frosty]

Dwell times due to door congestion is a much-overated problem. It is mostly a problem at one station - Town Hall - because that is where you have the most people trying to get on and and get off at the same time.

It's also now spread to Wynyard where I often see station staff limiting access to platform 3/4 in the afternoon peak. There are some other stations that dwell times are starting to creep up like Green Sq/Mascot where the train is full and people need to get off. But I've noticed in the afternoon peak at Mascot/Green Sq that the train isn't full but dwell times are long due doorway and vestibule congestion nobody really wants to go upstairs or downstairs if they are travelling one or two stops.

[grog]

Same on the Inner West line at Macdonnaldtown/Newtown/Stanmore, and the Western/Northern lines at Strathfield.

It also only needs to be a couple of stations to impact the frequency of the whole line - a line is as weak as it's weakest link.

[Transtopic]

This post is specifically addressed to tonyp. What are you talking about?

Nobody is suggesting that you run DD trains on a metro system. It's clearly not feasible. Your problem is that you can't or are unwilling to differentiate between a true "metro" system and a "suburban" rail system. They service a different commuter market. The Paris RER which is a "suburban" rail system is quite different to the Paris Metro which services a high density inner city catchment. I've travelled on both and I appreciate the difference. Similarly throughout Europe, there are distinctly separate systems classified as S-Bahn and U-Bahn.

Sydney's rail network is basically a "suburban" system, servicing long distance commuters as well as inner city commuters, with quad and sextup track allowing for the separation of services in the inner city. It does not have a high density metro system. Sydney's system is more equivalent to the Paris RER than it is to a typical metro system.

Whatever spin you like to put on it, the NW metro and its extension to Bankstown is still a "suburban" rail line using metro rolling stock. It's not a true metro, so comparisons between SD and DD rolling stock is misleading. With the station spacing between Cherrybrook and Epping being 6km, how can you say with a straight face that's it's a typical "metro" line. Give me a break!

The only true metro line in Sydney will be the proposed West Metro from the CBD to Parramatta, which I support.

[rogf24]

The NW metro line will be a case of a metro doing the job of suburban rail. The best examples of this right now are BART in San Francisco, especially the Silicon Valley extension, and maybe Washington Metro, at least the Silver Line if not the other lines.

And in an extreme example, the Pearl River Delta's "high-speed" network could also be a metro doing suburban rail (except for the original Canton-Shenzhen line) although that system is very blurry since you could also say it's high-speed rail doing a suburban rail role on otherwise metro style infrastructure, as with Delhi's proposed RRTS.

[Tonymercury]

And just to add to those comments from ROG, many new 'LRT' lines in the US should be suburban railways.

[tonyp]

It's also now spread to Wynyard where I often see station staff limiting access to platform 3/4 in the afternoon peak. There are some other stations that dwell times are starting to creep up like Green Sq/Mascot where the train is full and people need to get off. But I've noticed in the afternoon peak at Mascot/Green Sq that the train isn't full but dwell times are long due doorway and vestibule congestion nobody really wants to go upstairs or downstairs if they are travelling one or two stops.

Spot on Frosty. And nobody is thinking ahead, 30, 50 years when it's going to spread even more as Sydney densifies. It's all about providing capacity for future growth, not the present status quo.

Vestibule congestion is now Sydney's specialty (it never used to be, exactly the opposite), whether it be double deck trains with two doors that nobody will move away from, front-loading buses (these first two with internal stairs as a further barrier to internal distribution) or IWLR trams with too few doors. It's really critical to break out of this if the systems are to handle future growth. It's also essential to reduce journey times. Metro will address both these issues. And to whoever said I don't understand the difference between metro, S Bahn etc, after 50 years either following or being in the game I think I've picked that one up by now. But I've also learned that you shouldn't remain stuck in the old paradigms when everything else is changing. You have to continue to adapt.

Here are the journey times and I think the metro can still do better than these projected figures, which are basically Perth S Bahn standard:

Chatswood to Cudgegong Rd on the metro - 11 stops, 37 minutes. Richmond to Westmead (same distance) on Sydney Trains - 11 stops, 47 minutes.

Bankstown to Central on the metro 28 minutes, on Sydney Trains (2 more stops) 36 minutes.

Faster journey times are the key to getting people out of cars.

[Glen]

Dwell times due to door congestion is a much-overated problem. It is mostly a problem at one station - Town Hall - because that is where you have the most people trying to get on and and get off at the same time.

Quite!

And when the trains were slowed in 2005 there was no real evidence that they needed to be slowed right across the network.

Even the Carlingford line got slowed!

It was all about on-time running statistics bundled up, sadly, in some post-Waterfall paranoia.

I took a number of timing checks around the City Underground just before the slowdown and recorded numerous examples of trains having to 'wait time' even then at the height of the peak.

[tonyp]

Dwell times due to door congestion is a much-overated problem. It is mostly a problem at one station - Town Hall - because that is where you have the most people trying to get on and and get off at the same time.

Quite!

That's most certainly not the way they think in Europe where much study and investment has gone into eliminating this congestion and reducing dwells. More and wider doors, more closely distributed along a vehicle and shorter dwells is the trend (and was once the case in Sydney). As the years progress, this problem on the trains is going to expand from just Town Hall and a small number of others to system-wide. On the bus system the problem is deeply-institutionalised and crippling. We have to provide for the future and not continually put constraints on everything. In NSW we've been putting the brakes on public transport for over half a century now. Time to get over it and move on.

[tonyp]

I think I'll throw in a rather damning comparison here.

Bankstown to Central on the metro 28 minutes, on Sydney Trains (2 more stops) 36 minutes.

Central to Bankstown by rail is 18.7 km with 13 intermediate stops. It takes 36 minutes. On the metro it will take 28 minutes with 11 intermediate stops. I think the distance via Waterloo may be a tad longer, not sure how much.

Perth to Fremantle (legacy suburban line) is also 18.7 km with 14 intermediate stops. It takes 28 minutes. (The peak hour expresses with 8 to 9 intermediate stops take 23-24 minutes.)

While this is definitely a pie in the face to the Sydney Trains service (we already know that), it's also one in the Sydney Metro's face. This is why I think the metro could do better than the journey time projections they're claiming at the moment. Poor old Sydney, nowadays doomed to bumble along forever and never get anything right it seems.

I'll recast my earlier comment that Sydney Metro should lift service to Perth standard to not quite Perth standard.

Edit: SInce writing this, I've done the same comparison between the Cudgegong Rd-Chatswood section of the metro and the equivalent lengths on the Mandurah (to Wellard) and Joondalup (to Clarkson) lines in Perth and found the journey times very similar, taking into account the number of stops, so that part of the metro is up to Perth standard.

What it leads me to believe is that this metro performs well when there are long station spacing to leg it between but it falls short on short stop-start work (Bankstown line), which is ironic for a metro because that's what it's supposed to be best at. The Fremantle S bahn line, on the other hand, is performing like a metro! Personally I actually see the Perth system as actually having many metro characteristics and the trains are like the Sydney metro trains - they compensate for having less seating by means of significantly shorter journey times, which is what I see the Sydney metro doing as well. It overcomes that tyranny of distance that the Sydney suburban trains drag their feet on.

So in short, as in Perth, it's actually just the right train for the job and the suburban deckers need to be doing their stuff further out at the edge of the metropolis and the interurban conurbation. This is how it works in Europe. In addition, unlike the deckers, the metro will have the capability to deal with high turnover work in all those polycentric activity centres across the metropolis as they develop. Deckers by their nature will never be cut out for this.