Designed to Fail
via Designed to Fail.
After I had posted on Honolulu’s rail woes on Sunday here at VOAKL, Councillor Quax had passed on a blog link giving further insight on Honolulu’s woes.
I can not comment much on it for various reasons. Needless to say Auckland with its rail is not in the same situation – especially with our peak commuters going from A to B and our off-peak commuters doing the same.
Put it this way, a heavy rail line replacing the Northern Busway with our brand new 3-car EMU‘s running as 6-car (double) sets running every 4-7 mins would increase the capacity of that particular line upwards of the 1000% mark. This is based on replacing a 72 seater large bus travelling down that bus way every 2-4 minutes (any more frequent and you get bus-jams) with a 6-car EMU holding 800 passengers every 4-7 minutes. So 15 buses an hour (bus every 4 minutes) at 72 seats each means a capacity of 1,080 potential passengers down that bus way an hour – double if every two minutes. 6-car EMU holding 800 passengers travelling every 5 minutes would mean 12 trains an hour – so 12×800 = 9,600 passengers on the move. Looking at those numbers – you are going to need some serious crowd control at Britomart and the CRL stations 
Auckland's Northern Busway adjacent to the Northern Motorway, State Highway 1. Passengers boarding a 'Maxx Northern Express' service operated by Ritchies Coachlines. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
