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That photo is from Helsinki. Around Eira I think?
I was thinking Vallila but you’re probably right!
You are right. This is in Vallila, I tracked down the red building on the right, it is Mäkelänkatu 19.
This tramline used to be my commute briefly. Very picturesque
No, it’s Vallila. Found an article where they had interviewed the photographer Ants Vahter.
My US city put one in in downtown. It would be fine should they have their own lane that bypassed traffic, but no thoughts were given to it’s actual implementation. They picked a loop path that goes from two lanes to one frequently. They simply placed the track on the road and kept car street parking on the other side. So you get the pleasure of waiting in traffic on the tram and the tram getting stuck because someone poorly parked their monster truck. Top that off with it was open 10am til 6pm when it first started, but downtown doesn’t have much going on during the day. They’ve changed times now but it barely scratches the surface of use issues. As someone fully for public transportation, this has been so poorly done it’s very frustrating. I do hope they have more fixes in the future.
Most US cities are doing trams for tourist purposes not transport. The bus is better than a tram in almost all cases, it doesn’t need track maintenance ,can go around obstacles, can change routes quickly if you didn’t get it perfect in advance.
The disadvantage of a bus is they can hold 1)at most 100 people, and can’t come more often than every 5 minutes. If you are running into that limit a tram might be right for you. (Even then think carefully , a subway might be better)
I wish my city would have trams, they’re one of the best means of transit
We have very similar trams here, they are quite neat when they travel in their regular 10 minute interval. But once they go into night mode e.g. every 30 minutes it makes them a lot less useful further outside of the city. But thats critique on a high level, they perform really well and in 95% of cases I don’t have to check a timetable to catch one to work or uni.
I have fond memories of a couple of metro lines in Berlin that had part of their routes going thru parks without the usual road the metros go along. It always gave me a little feeling of magic when suddenly we were going thru beautiful nature instead of the Big City.
Also check out Gothenburg/Göteborg in Sweden. There’s some nice grassy tram tracks there too.
… and you call these grassy trams despite them clearly driving on lichen…
@poVoq It really is Peak Urbanism! I can’t stress enough how great it is to have a green track for trams. Here’s an example:
Tram line in Liviu Rebreanu street, Bucharest, before modernizing:
A picture of the old tracks, next to the new tracks:
Other ones, with old tracks still intact:
Nowadays, after years of modernization works, it looks like this:
Google Maps Street View link from the area (just navigate ahead).
While the area is more congested indeed, trams run smoothly through, and drivers can no longer get in the way of trams unless they want to get stuck in the mud.
Looks like Helsinki trams… some sections of their lines are quite beautiful in spring/summer.
Yeah looks like it was taken around Käpylä
Yeah, I always really liked those two weeks when I lived there.
Wtf! Where is this? China ?
Put them underground
Mass transit must scale. An underground metro rail system is the most valuable intracity transit system, but it does not offer full value. A high-value comprehensive transit system also offers transit systems for getting users to the underground metro rail system from their local sources and destinations. This is usually done by trams, buses, or treating trams as the intermediary value transit system between buses and underground metro rail systems. If you rely exclusively on a high cost, high-value system like an underground metro rail system, your system will not be comprehensive enough as it will not reach all of your city’s citizens, leaving many to rely on car infrastructure to get to and from the metro rail system stops.
Here in Greece, only one city (the capital) has an underground metro rail system and the second largest city has its metro system being built for the last ~20-30 YEARS. That city used to have a tram decades ago, but they removed it and now it only has buses/taxis…
You may ask why didn’t they make a new tram… Well, money/bribery (~most likely). That city may not be ideal for a tram, but still they could work it out and have it fixed much much sooner and cheaper and in the meantime the could be building the metro… It said the main part will be finished by the end of the year (though this was said multiple times in the past)…
YUP. Don’t refuse to create ad-hoc lower value transit systems because, hypothetically, you could have a monorail or underground metrorail. Some mass transit is better than no mass transit, and higher values of mass transit now are better than superior mass transit in the future.
And also hyperloop is never the answer.
Yeah, something ~is better than nothing, but they could do so much better if they weren’t greedy…
The metro rail system in the city I moved away from recently had an expansion fail to open for 3 years because the contract selection process involved cronyist intervention by a former president and the result was the buildings not being built with safe concrete for building
I mean, Helsinki has those, too. The metro line is extremely good here.
But the same goes for these tram lines, they tend to cover connecting lines into residential areas, as they are slower, but a lot cheaper to build.
The metro meanwhile is an extreme capacity line that runs literally less than every five linutes, between the varius transit hubs of Helsinki.
Thats waay more expensive
It’s the only logic way to proceed, my hometown Madrid would be complete madness otherwise
Wait wait wait. I’m confused. Madrid has a multimodal mass transit system with multiple tiers of value. It’s one of the cities that uses a tram system to connect its bus system to its metro rail. Am I misunderstanding what you’re trying to say?
Helsinki has had trams from the beginning, and many new residential developments are being built with them in mind. Two examples are Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama.
Both use the tram lines to connect residents to the adjacent, already existing, metro line.
Extending the metro line with just one or two stations, 90 degrees off its existing tracks, would be STUPID levels of expensive in comparison.
But then i have to walk downstairs
I like trains because if I notice I forgot something important 20 minutes into a one hour commute it will set me back two hours and forty minutes.
Why would you go the whole way to your destination and not exit the next stop to return home?
I take the express train. I don’t want my one hour commute to be a two hour commute because they stop for five minutes every 8 minutes and have to get back up to speed. I already have to wake up ten minutes earlier to take the light rail, change trains to a local, take that three stops to a hub, and change to the express train. I should just buy a car.
Oh damn. That kind of sucks :/ do you often forget things at home?
I really enjoy commuting by train + bike, it is really cheap and kind of fun to be active before and after work. But my commute (at least the train part) is quite a bit shorter.
Depending on weather or track maintenance/construction I often think about getting a car as well. But then I remember how stressful commuting by car is and that thought is gone
One time I did all my grocery shopping for the month by train but I had to bring six friends to help carry everything home and I had to pay for all their tickets there and back. I bought them all dinner for wasting hours in their day to do what one person could trivially accomplish with one car. It actually ended up being cheaper to just pay the premium for instacart and tip the driver.
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Why the fuck would you do all your grocery shopping for a month all at once? Do you not live anywhere near civilization?
Well as apparently it takes them hours to get to their destination… probably not.
Why is this a valid point in the urbanism instance then?
It’s usually cheaper and more time efficient to stock up on more things less often. I don’t have the time or inclination to doodle around the Fred Meyers three times a week to pick up a single baguette.
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That’s the dumbest argument for cars I’ve ever heard. And I’ve heard a lot of dumb ones.
“I can go wherever I want whenever I want and carry a reasonable amount of cargo or people if need be” trumps any other argument against cars. 😉
Extremely relevant to bring up in a post about urbanism and trams of course. So did this experience make you hate all public transport by association?
Don’t forget things.
This is victim blaming. Tired of getting brutally and violently raped? Well just don’t get raped ya silly goose! 😒
If your commute is an hour by train, it’s gonna be like >2 hours by car in traffic. But sure, if you ignore all the benefits of trains and only look at the downsides they look bad.
In all seriousness I have commuted into a major city for various gigs throughout my life, including driving in at trades rush hour (5-6am), driving in at normie rush hour (7-10am), and driving in at off hours (around 11am-12pm) and a one hour drive leaving at 5am would be a two hour drive leaving at 7am and it would be a 30 minute drive at 11:30am. Taking the train in generally took about an hour ± 20 minutes depending on getting to the station, finding parking, and catching the correctly timed train. The delicious baked-in luxury of being alone and going wherever you want in a car instead of having to pile in another fart tube with 100 other people also rules.
The real answer is: it’s complicated and painting everyone with the same brush is kind of shitty.
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Now imagine a tradesman dragging 400 lbs of tools and equipment back and forth on a train every day and on every train and bus to each job site. Then the fresh new hell of losing an additional hour every day because train run every 15 minutes from 7-10am but only on the hour before that. Now the 5am and 6am trains are jam packed SRO full of carps and welders and electricians all with their full kit. Dooming labor to a dystopian hellscape by thinking 0 steps ahead and idealistic nonsense.
If you got off at the next stop and turned around you’d add maybe an hour to your commute. A car would still be 30-40 minutes. Plus trains are way less stressful since there’s no dealing with idiot drivers.
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If your commute is an hour by train, then with traffic it will be like two hours by car. But yeah if you ignore the upsides of trains and only look at downsides they look worse.
That’s a very edge case scenario to bring to the table as a counterargument… Like my buddy who was sceptical about reverse cameras in cars because “and what if it breaks?”. Well, then we just use the rear view mirror like we always did. Nobody is arguing for abolishing them, just as nobody is arguing for completely abolishing cars.
“Forgot something” probably isn’t the edge case scenario you think it is, it’s just a matter of convenience vs necessity to fix it. If I forgot my lunch I’m not going to ride the train into the city then back then back again, but if I forgot the only copy of the keys to the work van well then I have to.
Sure, have contingencies in place, but the real world does not often go as expected.
Living in Europe I completely don’t share that sentiment.
Cars should be used only when necessary and actually save significant proportion of time, otherwise cities become inhospitable hellholes and everyone loses (including cars now stuck in traffic).
But then again, I don’t forget things too often, and in other post I saw you said that you regularly need to make a 3 part jurney. This would be a good situation to get a car.
Could you imagine if you were forced into a transportation situation that didn’t meet your needs? That would suck. Luckily we are all free to choose what works best for ourselves.
As an extremely forgetful person who commutes by public transit myself, this is why you make a mental checklist to run through before you leave home / the office. Phone, wallet, keys, lunchbag, anything else important you need for that day.
The trick is to run through it every single time you leave for your commute, no exceptions. It does take a few repetitions to get in the habit. But once you do, it’ll dramatically reduce the number of times you forget anything important.
So here’s the thing with that- doing the exact same thing every day is even worse for me because the memory of doing it every day for the past x days occasionally ends up ticking off the check box in my mind for today as well. Also the way my brain is wired it often ends up counting “remembering to do/bring a thing” as “doing/bringing the thing”. It’s a wild way to live life and it’s a constant patchwork of coping mechanism and cheats and hacks to get things done. AirTags help out a great deal.
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