by Kaibeezy on 6/7/25, 9:35 PM with 281 comments
by habosa on 6/8/25, 12:14 AM
> The vehicle is battery-powered, eliminating the need for overhead wires. It features an innovative turning system, enabling it to handle 15m radius curves. This allows for installation in tight corners within the existing highway. The Council intends for it to operate at a high frequency, providing a turn-up-and-go service. The vehicle has a capacity of 56, is comfortable and has low floors to enable passengers to embark and disembark easily. The vehicle has been developed to allow autonomous operation in future.
> The new track is laid just 30cm within the road’s surface, minimising the need to relocate pipes and cables, which is time-consuming and expensive. It achieves this by leveraging cutting-edge materials science, while still utilising standard rail parts to ensure ease of manufacture.
by andrewl-hn on 6/8/25, 4:52 AM
I haven’t found the projected figures for Coventry but it would be very, very awkward if they can’t beat the numbers above with a supposedly much cheaper track.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Besan%C3%A7on?wprov=s...
by PLenz on 6/8/25, 1:03 AM
by rsynnott on 6/8/25, 10:34 AM
That's a _very_ small tram, smaller than most buses.
by ClumsyPilot on 6/8/25, 3:47 PM
UK tram track construction typically involves deeper track beds compared to France/EU, using concrete slabs of 500-1000mm deep, is intended to protect utilities. In contrast, many European projects utilize shallower trackbeds, even with grassed areas, which are 300-400mm deep
by bluGill on 6/8/25, 12:57 AM
They make all kinds of claims that don't stand up to over 100 years of history running trains. The claim they are innovative, but there is nothing new here, and no evidence they have looked at the real problems of transit systems. Someone is going to make a lot of money on this at the expense of the community that loses.
Trains have been around for a long time. You can buy all the parts you need for a good system off the shelf. You won't be saving money by designing something new, you just waste money on engineers to design something and then lose the scale factors you could get from buying the same thing as everyone else. If you buy the same thing as everyone else that means there will be a market for spare parts and thus in 20 years when (not if!) something breaks you can keep the system running.
Yes overhead wires are expensive - but they are a rounding error compared to track. Batteries are expensive too, and you have to buy a lot of them. Batteries need to be recharged which means these trams will be out of service often so they have to buy a lot more so that when one is out of service for charging the others can work. (you still need a few extra for maintenance, but battery charging is more common so you need a lot more)
If you want to build a train the best way to save money is to build exactly the same as everyone else does: standard off the shelf trains, running on standard off the shelf rails, and standard off the shelf overhead rail. If you want to innovate make sure that everyone is fluent in Spanish, Turkish, Korean, or Italian - because places where those languages are spoke build and run trains much cheaper than other places you can think of so you want to learn from them. (note that French or Japanese are not on the above list - while those areas do cheaper than English speakers, they are still expensive)
I'm not sure about the UK, but in the US most of the cost blowout for trains seems to be in stations, so focus all your innovation there: don't make them monuments to how much money you can spend. (The UK has cost problems almost as bad as the US, but I'm not aware of any study on where the issues come from, while at least in the US there are studies).
by ninalanyon on 6/8/25, 8:01 AM
by skybrian on 6/7/25, 11:56 PM
by tempodox on 6/8/25, 6:12 AM
by pkaodev on 6/8/25, 6:05 PM
by JdeBP on 6/8/25, 2:16 PM
Coventry is, like many cities in the U.K., burdened with road systems that in some places go back to mediæval times. Yes, the Nazis did famously bomb the city centre, but there are some parts of the mediæval city remaining, and much of the outskirts of the city is where it has expanded since World War 1 to swallow what once were standalone villages like Walsgrave and Stoke that dated back to the times of the Domesday Book. Much of the street systems are the old country roads through those villages, augmented by housing estates built around them. So Coventry does not have a wide and regular street system. There is no grid, Norteamericanos!
There are only a handful of dual carriageways for major arterials. Some of the rest is quite cramped, and the ring-road, an early experiment in U.K. post-WW2 reconstruction that basically taught the U.K. how not to build inner city ring-roads, is a massive barrier to any public transport system. The ring-road was some years back significantly re-built just to make the railway station better accessible, whose entrance is on the ring road.
Coventry is actually fairly well served with bus services, to and from nearby Warwickshire and Solihull, and within Coventry itself. There is a significant electric bus network already in place for some years, and Coventry has been more proactive in moving buses from diesel to electric than those other two have, although they too are gradually replacing the old diesels. Stand at the bus stands on Trinity Street in the city centre, and you'll see mostly electric buses go by.
The ironic thing of this project being placed where it is (aside from the amusing fact that the tram route is literally a route to nowhere, as Queen Victoria Road was blocked off in the mid-20th century when the ring road was constructed and is now a dead-end) is that to construct it they had to divert many of the bus services, since Greyfriars Road is one of the routes to and from the main city centre bus terminus.
Coventry has been quite experimental in recent years when it comes to transport design. Aside from hacking the ring road about, it has experimented with things like converting many of the street intersections around Coventry University (not to be confused with Warwick University, a partner in the headlined project) into shared space intersections.
Would this actually work as a general transport system in Coventry as whole? Almost certainly not. A light rail system from, say, the Coventry Arena to anywhere useful elsewhere in the city would bedevil Jimmy Hill Way. That's why there's a commercial centre right next to the Arena in the first place. In the outskirts of the city the Hipswell Highway and routes like St James Lane/Willenhall Lane and the Holyhead Road are major thoroughfares but some are already down to 1 lane wide in places. And the idea of running a tramway along Radford Road or the Foleshill Road is sheer lunacy to anyone who has seen those roads.
The scope of any tram system is almost certainly physically confined to the old city, and maybe the A4600 and A428. But the old city is actually walkable. The places where public transport is needed is the arterials like the Holyhead Road, already well served by buses. Cynically I expect that much of this is about selling this system to other cities.
And indeed, the partnership with Dudley Council is strongly indicative that this is mainly using Coventry as a staging area for development that will be, if it takes off, more in the rest of the West Midlands than in Coventry itself. There is, physically, more scope for this sort of thing in the road systems of Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley, West Bromwich, Wednesbury, Great Barr, et al. than there is in Coventry. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one councillor is being sold the line that this is really to sell it to other cities around the world.
by xnx on 6/7/25, 11:37 PM