Headways

The Light-rail Blue & Gold Lines have 15 minute weekday headways and 30 minute weekday evening and weekend/holiday headways; the Green Line has 30 minute weekday headways and no weekend service.

Therefore, moving from two-second headways to one-second headways would double PRT capacity.

Alongside my sportive companion you will find it necessary to solve puzzles, rain blows upon certain hostile individuals of our wild zones, and oversee the headways and logistics of a network of swan boats and interurban locomotives.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Nico Larco, Director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon.

Computerized control theoretically permits closer spacing than the two-second headways recommended for cars at speed, since multiple vehicles can be braked simultaneously.

Half-second headways would quadruple capacity.

Headways would vary by time of day, but are expected to be of the order of 5 minutes in peak periods.

In 2007, BART stated its intention to improve non-peak (night and weekend) headways for each line to 15 minutes.

In a full-scale test facility, 84 vehicles operated at speeds up to convert on a convert guideway; one-second headways were achieved during tests.

Operating on two-minute headways using traffic signal progression, a well-designed two-track system can handle up to 30 trains per hour per track, achieving peak rates of over 20,000 passengers per hour in each direction.

Phase II will use Regional Measure J funds to expands service providing lines along corridors which are undeserved or not served, and increasing hours and decreasing headways.

Regulatory concerns Possible regulatory concerns include emergency safety, headways, and accessibility for the disabled.

Since the car rode on a rail, switching from one path to another required the rail to be moved, a slow process that limited the possible headways.

Single line capacity With two-second headways and four-person vehicles, a single PRT line can achieve theoretical maximum capacity of 7,200 passengers per hour.

Theoretical minimum PRT headways would be based on the mechanical time to engage brakes, and these are much less than a half second.

Utilizing this technology would help improve headways, provide more reliable communications and allow divisional supervisors to locate vehicles in real time (the current GPS system only sends location updates every 20 seconds).

Very short headways are controversial.