Australian Light Rail Performance - Comparison with US Trends

Abstract

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-0784 Following a decade of busway investment, light rail transit (LRT) has re-emerged as an inner-city transit investment for Australia. In the next decade Australian LRT network size will grow by about 25%. Analysis shows that Australian LRT is dominated by the Melbourne streetcar network (one of the largest in the world). Although LRT networks have not expanded much, ridership growth has been substantial (+46% between 2001 and 2012) and well above system-wide (all mode) public transport ridership growth in most cities. In general, service levels on Australian trams are low compared to European/United States systems. Also service levels have not kept pace with ridership growth, acting to increase the ridership productivity of most Australian LRT. Melbourne leads Australia in terms of ridership productivity (passengers/vkm) and Melbourne tram route 109 has the highest ridership (935K p.a.) and service effectiveness (11.5 passengers/vkm). Between 2006-2013, Australian LRT ridership growth has been higher than the U.S.; however U.S. service levels have grown substantially more than in Australia during this period. The outcome is that while Australian service effectiveness has grown by 20% it has fallen by 8% in the U.S. The contemporary history of Australian LRT planning has focused on the 'streetcar struggle' i.e. acting to reduce congestion effects on growing road traffic on LRT performance. Medium term plans for new system development see LRT as a solution for urban access, urban redevelopment and the provision of reliable and higher capacity transit in congested inner urban bus transit contexts.