LIGHT-RAIL TRANSIT: LESS CAN MEAN MORE

Perhaps the single most appealing and most useful characteristic of light-rail transit (LRT) is its inherent flexibility. Yet engineers and planners have sometimes overlooked the opportunities that accrue from this flexibility and have tried to use LRT to create a system as much like conventional rapid transit as possible at less than rapid transit's cost. This paper explores LRT's flexibility to operate in a conventional rapid transit environment, as well as its ability to not operate in a rapid transit environment. LRT is also at home in contexts more typical of the bus mode. This provides for a broad range of designs between these two extremes and allows optimal design choices to be accommodated. Design options considered in this paper include right-of-way treatment, approaches to fare collection, grade and curvature alignments, high-versus low-level platforms, signal and vehicle-protection requirements, and trade-offs between speed and capacity. /Author/