Petrol less than £1 a gallon!!!!!!

I would agree. They would say 'fill it up, please' or 'twenty quids worth'.
They wouldn't say 'x litres' or 'x gallons'.

Mind you, I don't use attended-service petrol stations, since the only one I
know is 10p/litre more than the Shell 5 minutes down the road.

John.

 

....

I think that was one reason that London replaced the tram with the trolley
bus. Not so long ago I was on a tram in Lisbon that had to sit several
minutes until the bell brought someone out of a house to move his car that
was in the way. Obviously, that is much less of a problem if the trams have
dedicated tracks and don't have to share the road surface with other
vehicles.

A study a couple of years ago concluded that an electric car created about
three times as much pollution as a modern petrol IC engine car. Of course,
some people think that moving the pollution out of town is a desirable aim.

Colin Bignell

 

Take a Walk wrote

This is bollox this is. Electricity is already being generated in huge
quantities to run traffic lights, garages, a+e units in local hospitals,
local insurance company claims departments, gatsos and such like, to
service the needs of the motorist. No need to generate extra to run
trams at all, just divert what will not be used elsewhere when people
ride on them

You people are so thinking so hard to try and be clever that you end up
thinking small. It seems to me.

 

You must find computers and the internet rather frightening!!

 

Rather over simplified, there will of course be losses involved it
won't be 100% efficient.

I get the feeling you think the running costs of a tram are much lower then
I think
you have been taken in by the propaganda departments of the tram companies.
Gas 1.25p per Kilowatt hour
Elec 5.79p per Kilowatt hour
463% more expensive to use electricity for power thats 4.63 times more
expensive. Gas and oil power costs are very similar.
The claims that trams cause less polution is laughable, or to use the
technial term - a lie.

I agree that capital expense costs of trams are horrendous.

And of course trams *cannot* avoid traffic jams or other obstructions
Not unless the driver is adept at laying new track and overhead cables.
When road works need to be don't you have to shut down the line,
probably the entire line.

 

"This is bollox this is" - yes what you wrote was.

 

Lets say the trams are a massive successes beyond the wildest dreams and reduce
the number of car journeys on there routs by 25% you still have 75% of the trips
that were being made by car being made by yes you guessed it cars. Where do you
expect the energy saving to come from to power the trams the roads will still
have a lot of cars so still need traffic lights, most A&E patients are not road
accident victims so you can't shut them down (well ok you can Mr Blair but it's
a stupid thing to do) will trams stop burglaries, floods and fires? I don't
think so, sounds like insurance offices will need to continue to exist so I
guess that's only Gatsos that could be culled but that's no change from now.

 

Much, much higher if you include the infrastructure cost (rails,
overhead wiring, etc).

 

No chance of the trams reducing the number of car journeys as the routes
are already well served with both buses and trains (clean buses with bus
lanes etc..)
so the only people who will use the trams will be wealthier bus passengers
willing
to pay the higher fares.
God knows how many accidents these huge vehichles will cause.
£200 million flushed down the shiter.care of your local council.
No wonder every other service they provide is f*cked.

 

half_pint wrote

Cannot disagree in the slightest.

 

How does a tram cause an accident?

 

Its a huge obstacle in the road which will be difficult for cars to pass,
it will also block visability.
Ever seen a tram swerve to avoid an accident?
I wonder what their stopping distance is?
I don't think so somehow.
Of course if the tram by some miracle reduces car traffic, (the planned
method appears to be by making it impossible for people to park
their car without cripplping charges) average
car speed will increase resulting in more accidents.

 

If the driver doesn't look where he's going and forgets to apply the
brakes?

Stupid ****.

 

Be careful, he's obviously very clever.

 

Don't think they've used asbestos for a while.

 

His generation went into space, invented computers, the transistor, the
microchip and ARPA.

 

ummm - transform upwards for transmission, and transform down for use, is
specifically to reduce power loss.

transfer power for miles thru miles of wiring losing power all the

Transformers are surprisingly efficient.

So useful where the route is unlikely to change. e.g. major housing estates
into town. Neither are likely to shift geographically in the short term.
Agree that buses are more flexible (speshlly bendies!! ) )

Some would argue that buses running on deisel, or on chip fat,peanut oil or
even baked beans, leave the pollution IN town ....

I suspect that a well designed tramway system (providing high density core
of the network) complemented by feeder buses is possibly an answer .... but
then one is faced with having to change vehicles.

But at the actual point of use, electric vehicles can be more efficient than
the deisel equivalents. The nasty nukey plant doesn't have to generate
quite as much power as is used burning nast fossil deisel fuel.

 

So, if it's on street track, you drive accordingly. Is this a problem?

Doesn't need to.

Fifty years ago, a Sheffield tram was quite capable of stopping within its
own length, from 30 mph.

And it was a double deck tram, only about 30 feet long.

SEVEN different braking systems, I beleive.

Bollicks.

 

Oh, agreed.

But regenerating power in stopping must be more efficient than wasting it
off as heat. The same benefit applies (or could do) to trolley buses.

Never even bothered to study it. Leave that to the experts, and also to the
economists.

Depends on where you define the boundaries as to assigning pollution to a
particular user. Do you include the ravaging of areas where oil is
extracted as pollution? or do you start counting from the petrol pump?

Do you include the tram's electricity generating facilities? and whatever
supplies that? or just from the input to the overhead net?

Do you include factors like convenience? for one? for the population as a
whole? or not .....???

I can just remember, as a small boy in Edinburgh, being a passenger in a
tram going through roadworks. The track was supported appropriately (I
suppose!!) and the hole dug underneath it.

Recently, in Prague, I saw work carried out on the actual track whilst trams
were in service. They seemed to work in between trams passing, stand back to
let them pass, then carry on grinding or whatever. Of course, heavy work
like laying track would be different. Depends on the work being done.

One problem people might have with tramway systems is that they equate them
to the first,second and third generation trams of our cities up to about 50
years ago. Modern ones are a bit better.

 

Doesn't matter a fishes tit WHAT they use. It still gets bloody hot.

)