What's the Best Transit for Small Cities?

heh 8 train line 16 tram lines like half a million bus lines and 10 metro lines in my city in cs that has 200k ppl

yes, any, we dont have any rail at all :/

Meanwhile Manila: Uses medium-capacity transit for a densely-populated city

You must consider the history of existing infrastructure in a city when doing these comparisons. Economics and politics have changed over time. For cities which kept their trams, they tend to expand these. Those without trams went to buses, and eastern Europe continued with Trolley buses. All these medium or light rail alternatives are expensive compared to trolley busses. My view is the best solution is to use trolley battery busses until you have demand for A heavy rail large loading train. All the different names you use are simply marketing. My city is Sydney, and it had a bit of everything over the years, however the decisions in recent times to build trams, light rail and automatic single deck metros was political, and the politicians making the decisions did not have any relevant experience or qualifications to make sensible informed decisions. I'm sure this is common around the world, considering some of these crazy systems in you video.

I think that's the ideal solution to Goiânia-Brasil, where I live. Thank you for your videos!

Nürnberg is a small city with just 500k population, has 6 suburban lines and 3 subway lines, with automatic subways, heavy automatic metros, and 7 tram lines, and in germany you find s-bahns in every big town. that connects to bigger citys. is complicated, but if you get it, it can be really usefull to get around with public transport.

Would you call the nürnberg ubahn a light metro?

Florence, Italy is developing a tram network but do you think it could be suitable for a middle town solution like the ones showed in this video? Thanks!

Where are the small cities? What about cities with 20k-100k?

I just watched a video of how they make a beautiful rail transit project affordable. And that is for a REAL small town of just 100,000 people: Besançon in France.
RM Transit's small cities are just not small. I really don't consider Berlin with it's suburbs small.

Actually Chicago also has 24/7 rail service on the 'L', those are the only 3 I'm aware of

In Valencia's case, the vehicles are low floor and even unidirectional.

The real question when deciding the best public transport system is density, not size. European cities are still pretty dense, more so than American "cities". Density drastically improves public transportation efficiency, unfortunately many dense cities especially in asia were built without public transportation planning.

Singapore is a good example of a dense city with an extremely well planned public transit system.

Deutshe Bahn is NOT on time 😂😂, but it is well connected!

A Stadtbahn would work wonders for Nashville imo

Is Strasbourg considered a small city?
Either way, I like the transit system. With my regional train, I get to Strasbourg in just over 30 minutes and then the tram takes me where I need to go. Most of the time it's to go to the cinema so I take the tram C just outside the train station. Otherwise, I get the A or D tram to go to the city center.

I went to Uni in the city for 4 years, so I can confidently say that I love trams, it's both comfortable and reliable!

Again, I keep thinking of how north American LRT systems try to emulate the stadtbahn model but without the complex branching seen on German systems (which is really where stadtbahnen come into their own). They forget that the reason the stadtbahn exists is because these German cities already had extensive tram networks, which was not the case in France or NA because these had largely been torn down. This is why I think the automated metro concept is much better for North America, especially given their policies around land use which concentrate development along narrow corridors (though I do also think that these policies are short-sighted)

Thank you, Reece, for giving another shoutout to Seoul! The light automated metros are cost-effective expansions of the overall network to more neighborhoods.

What about trams that run on dedicated tracks in the middle of the road and have priority in intersections so cars don't slow them down

Transit types depends on population densities unlike most places anywhere in north America, NZ or Australia.

hmmm what about telsa robovan with separated lanes? what about the connected transit with bike infrastructure? what about regional buses that are in sync and connect to a train schedule (like switzerland).

Can you do Belgrade metro development, as it is on the beginning with France and China companies making it?

What I learnt from this video: Stadbahns are hybrid of tram and metros

Well it depends on the way population is centred that is in small clusters of high density or far spread and sparse
In later case a mass transit system often gets rendered inefficient but in earlier one it proves to helpful

Where is stockholm, stockholm is very cheap, only cost 26 kronor per 75 minutes (10 - 11 kronor = one euro / one dollar)

I born in Norrköping city in sweden, Norrköping have trams

Stadtbahn is just really the good (and og) version of light rail

Bristol desperately needs a tram-train/Stadtbahn network, but our local council is trying their best to appease the city's car-centric crowd by taking another 6 years to decide whether perhaps BRT would be better. we have an ungodly number of bus routes already, not to mention a largely unsuccessful BRT system (why build another one if the first one didn't work!?!?), all while the city's rich rail history is rotting in front of our eyes...

Dodge Ram 1500 that's the best

but for a city like Pescara is difficult to do it, because they have from one side the sea and the other, the hills. Your suggestion?

Great video. Have you looked at the Australian cities Melbourne and Adelaide? Both have mixes of heavy urban rail (with a subway in Melbourne), trams (light urban rail), and buses. Adelaide also has a guided busway the O-bahn from Germany. Both cities and other Australian cities are expanding their urban rail systems. Cheers 👍

I live in Strasbourg and originally there were plans to make a metro network, but during the elections for the city's mayor, there was a camp for the tram and another for the metro, yes it was political situation.
In the end the tram was more flexible, allowing more branches and more places crossed by the tram,
But today, the tram is saturated, at Christmas and during rush hour it is more than hell and commercial speeds are down.
Last year there were passenger congestions for several weeks in the most served stations causing major delays, the big stations saw more than 3 lines out of 6, that's half of the network that is disrupted and that's in the best conditions.
Today we wonder which system would be best suited for our city, perhaps a system like in the video or an underground S-Bahn that would pass through strategic locations while still allowing during peak hours a large capacity and during off-peak hours allowing for more flexibility on timetables

Ever done a video in Puerto Rico? I think I'd be nice

I think Stadbahn works well for some of these areas because of how the areas developed. There are fairly centralized towns with large gaps in between, often connected by existing rail. This means that you can connect these towns relatively cheaply on the surface, with the trains running relatively fast. It also means that when it gets into a town there are plenty of riders (enough to justify a train).

Only a handful of cities in the US and Canada grew that way, which is why only a handful have something similar to a Stadbahn (Boston being one). Most have steady, medium-density sprawl without centralized towns. You can serve it with a tram, but they are slow and/or expensive and the stops aren't high ridership. They would likely be better with a light automated metro and lots of buses (live Vancouver BC).

The question I have is, what would be the starting and ending points of something being a small city? Is 100k inhabitants large enough to consider rail transportation? Is 500k inhabitants the cutoff point for when something isn't a small city any more? Are there other things that we might need to consider, like bike friendliness?

For instance, my city of about 100k inhabitants in the Netherlands has pretty solid intercity transit, but intracity transit is pretty bad. Most of the city gets a bus once every 30 minutes, and the buses don't see a lot of ridership either. But it's really bike friendly, and you see a lot of people using bikes, cargo bikes and similar forms of micro mobility to get around very handily. More transit just doesn't seem that necessary.

mention BRT system in Guangzhou and Bogota but not Jakarta, that's not it

We need to take look system tram or metro in north Africa . I live in Morroco Casablanca city we have tram but is not work good

With the Regional Connector, you could argue that Los Angeles now has both a Stadtbahn (A & E Lines) and a subway (B & D Lines)

I see you've carefully avoided the elephant in the room: Amsterdam's former metro line 51 which was an express tram line that partly ran on the metro network. It was discontinued a few years ago because the system showed too many errors when switching between the metro and the tram network.

Rotterdam doesn't really have metros mixed with other traffic. Sure, the metro goes above ground for a bit and has level crossings there (with barriers like normal railways do), but it doesn't mix with other traffic. Utrecht's express tram would've been a better example for that matter, though that one doesn't go underground. It was originally built for high-floor trams but recently converted to low-floor.

My hometown of 25k people in Germany will build a 10km tram which connects it to it's neighbouring town of 100k people and from there the tram will continue to the next bigger town of 550k people just another 12km away, there it will connect to the existing tram and tube network.

I’m a grandparent living at a subway station in Toronto. Grand child lives in Kingston. $600 return for 2 on public transit, $60 in gas if I drive. 10x the difference? Don’t think so

Tel aviv is the worst.
Light trains with a driver
And stations of a metro

If you have a sprawling city is it better to serve the city's existing layout or use automated rail to encourage densification?

Houston for example has automated light rail. A line that runs N/S, center-E, and center-SE. The issue is it doesn't serve that many people. Millions live outside the beltway and a west line won't be built for at least a decade. Adding lines and extending lines takes years to decades. But the places along the lines and around future lines are becoming the nicest, most sought after, dense parts of the city. The city is rapidly changing and refining itself along those routes.

I live on two cities that are relatively close to each other (±16KM). One is T has 290K and another one is S has 74K and few villages within it. Them cities are pretty much motorbike centric, with the only official transit consists of minivans on some route with absolutely no fixed stops nor schedule. Yup, pretty shi.

The thing is, them city roads are considerably med, a full length bus feels gigantic. As far for my case, I'd say medium sized bus gonna work. The route is gonna split up into 3 main categories. Being cat. 1 for each city, cat. 2 for local intercity, and cat. 3 for express. The density is pretty decent on the area, although dominated by single housing it's still compact.

We do have train lines, but the double tracked mainline only exists on the T. The mainline on the S are still single tracked. The trains, well it's like Amtrak style. Diesel locomotive hauling coaches, not the urban style ones 🤷