London (Croydon) Page
Another sudden trip gave me the chance today to spend about four hours travelling and photographing London’s tram system in Croydon. Part of Transport for London’s system that includes buses, the tube, and city trains, this LRT system exists where it was not deemed financially feasable to build tube lines.
Much of this system is on its own right-of-way and can be described as “true LRT.” Interestingly there are some single-track sections.
Look for the page for this shortly along with the Oslo page.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Calvin, Thanks very much for allof the photos of both Oslo and The London “Croydon” Tram. As you look at Oslo, you see equipment that with their climate (being somewhat similar to ours), could very easily operate here in Greater Toronto. But London,… and those photos (also look into the Tram’s own site—–great photos at each stop there too), make it all to obvious how great this could work here!
Cal’s comments: The one thing that struck me about both systems is how they both take advantage of the flexibility of LRT. By this I mean that they can move from private ROW to mixed traffic streets to pedestrian/transit mall easily. This is something that can be exploited in the GTA.
It looks like that in a few areas of town, London created a “transit mall” for a block in some areas where there was a stop. By eliminating vehicular traffic at the previous block, it made it more pedestrian friendly and more of a neighbourhood! Funny, that sounds like something that some of the Subway North people wanted.
Cal’s comments: Oslo also does this in a few places, most notably in the Aker brygge area near the waterfront. Not to mention other cities such as Calgary, Melbourne, Minneapolis, and Dallas. Another useful thing is what Denver does: run a single track in a curb lane on a one-way street - in the opposite direction to the road traffic! This actually reduces accidents as drivers tend to be more aware of opposite-moving LRTs.
And wouldn’t this work quite well on somewhere like Queen Street, the idea of a transit mall would be amazing and eliminate much of the scheduling problems as they exist today. Great job and great photos. Keep up the good work