Memorandum by Bristol Electric Railbus
Ltd (LR 37)
THE FUTURE OF LIGHT RAIL AND MODERN TRAMS
IN BRITAIN
I am writing on behalf of this company to make
a submission to the Committee on the above subject.
This company has successfully developed and
demonstrated a proof-of-concept Ultra Light Rail (ULR) Tram which
operated along Bristol Harbourside for 30 months from May 1998
to October 2000 carrying over 50,000 paying passengers. Its popularity
with the public was confirmed by an independent poll carried out
for the Bristol City Council. As a result a project was included
in the current Bristol Local Transport Plan for an extended ULR
public transport service connecting the Harbourside with the City
Centre and with the Long Ashton Park-and-Ride. This project has
not materialised because no funds have been provided for it either
by the City Council or the DfT. Some funding was offered by the
EU under the Vivaldi project but this could not be utilised because
no matching funding was made available by the UK authorities concerned.
This company considers that it is uniquely qualified
to make the attached submission because of its investment in developing
ULR, which it has done entirely at its own expense without any
official help. The company was set up with the specific purpose
of introducing low-cost, zero-emission light rail which would
conform to Government policy pronouncements on the urgent need
to introduce zero-emission transport at an affordable cost. So
far as we are aware no other company in UK has gone to such lengths
at its own expense to meet Government policy requirements.
I would like therefore to request the Committee
to give favourable consideration to our wish to give evidence
in person and to answer any technical or other questions the Committee
or its advisers may wish to ask.
The scope for introducing new conventional light
rail (CLR) systems, as opposed to ultra light rail (ULR), in UK
and elsewhere, is severely limited by the very high cost of CLR.
It now costs between £10 and £15 million per kilometre
to install a CLR system, including the heavy conventional vehicles,
which are usually manufactured, mainly overseas, by Siemens, Alstom
or Bombardier. It is, however, perfectly possible to design and
build, in this country, light trams which are much more appropriate
for the requirements of the market than conventional trams. This
can be done at a much lower cost, both of vehicles and infrastructure,
than the absurdly high cost of the imported systems. A practically
designed, home-built ULR system need not cost more than £1
million, or at the most £2 million, per kilometre, including
vehicles. At that cost it can carry up to 3,000 people an hour
in each direction, using a standard 100-passenger vehicle running
at two-minute intervals. There is a massive potential market both
here in UK and overseas for this practical type of affordable
and attractive public transport.
The future for light rail lies not in simply
accepting the CLR systems, which are all that is currently on
offer in the market, but in taking a common-sense, pro-active
approach, analysing what the market requires and then engineering
the product to make it available at an affordable cost. This is
what the promoters and pioneers of Ultra Light Rail (ULR) have
done. The result is a system which is designed to replace unpopular,
polluting diesel buses with a more efficient, zero-emission public
transport system, which meets the public's requirements within
available, realistic budgets. It can be confidently predicted
that this kind of light rail system has the potential, within
a relatively short period of time, to replace the diesel bus,
simply because of its much higher level of both energy efficiency
and public acceptability.
As pressure for the introduction of zero-emission
public transport remorselessly increases, energy efficiency is
going to become the most crucial factor in determining the mode
of transport. The most obvious solution is fuel cell powered vehicles.
But the commercial viability of fuel cell powered vehicles will
be determined by their energy efficiency, since the current high
cost of both fuel cells and hydrogen fuel will need to be reduced
to a minimum. The bus will never be able to rival the equivalent
tram, because the tram runs on steel wheels on steel rails and
thus uses only one third of the energy that the bus demands. The
light ULR tram will therefore always be more commercially attractive
than the equivalent bus, providing that diesel fuel subsidies
are withdrawn and emission restrictions imposed. Once that happens,
which it must do if Government policy is to be put into practice,
then the tram will be able to break the current heavily subsidised
monopoly enjoyed by the bus in urban areas.
The high cost of CLR is caused by two characteristics
of the system, both of which are avoided by ULR:
1. The vehicles. Conventional trams are,
in effect, railway trains, only slightly adapted to run on roads.
They are excessively heavy, over-engineered and unnecessarily
intrusive in pedestrianised areas. What the public wants and needs
is a light tram, which is more like a bus that has been adapted
to run on rails. The capacity of the tram need only be around
100 passengers, plus or minus 50%. Except in very large towns
bus services are able to cope with demand for surface transport
using vehicles with this level of capacity or less. It is more
efficient to have smaller vehicles running frequently, rather
than large vehicles running at longer intervals. The extra cost
of the drivers makes a useful contribution to the local economy
by creating local jobs. The depreciation of large, mainly foreign
manufactured vehicles, on the other hand, merely siphons money
out of the local economy. Commercial viability will also be improved
by a frequent service, which will attract more passengers and
thus increase revenue.
2. Continuous electrification. Both overhead
catenary systems and electrified rails are expensive and obtrusive.
Worse than that they require heavy substructure, not only to bear
the weight of the tram, but also to insulate the track in order
to guard against stray currents from the continuous electrification.
These factors also make it necessary to displace the underground
utilities. The result is to raise the cost of CLR infrastructure
to the present high levels. By incorporating an on-board power
source light trams avoid incurring these costs. By using a hybrid
drive train, which takes advantage of on-board power storage,
provided by batteries, flywheels or super-capacitors, the efficiency
of the vehicle can be increased significantly through regenerative
braking and the more efficient use of the power source, whether
it be a diesel or gas engine or a fuel cell.
Despite its popularity, CLR has therefore got
very limited prospects, because of its high cost. It will only
begin to be viable where patronage is projected to rise above
the level of 3,000 passengers per hour in each direction. It will
then have to compete with underground rail systems, which are
probably better suited to this kind of mass transit on a very
large scale.
For surface transport in urban areas the future
lies inevitably with ULR. This is because ULR alone can provide
the most efficient and hence the most commercial mode of transport
in which to use fuel cells as the power source. It is thus the
most appropriate solution to the problem of finding a replacement
for diesel buses. Diesel buses will have to be phased out sooner
or later as fossil fuel dependence becomes unacceptable and/or
unaffordable and as the need for zero-emission transport becomes
mandatory. It makes more sense therefore to introduce ULR systems
sooner rather than later, not least because it would help to save
lives (24,000 people die prematurely every year from transport
emissions). It would also free up £360 million of annual
subsidy (currently provided by the DfT for diesel fuel for buses
under the so-called Bus Service Operators Grant) for reallocation
to zero-emission public transport.
The claims made for ULR, as described briefly
above, have never been disputed but have been systematically ignored
by the Government Departments concerned. Instead of commenting
on the technical aspects of ULR, official reaction has been to
point out the bureaucratic reasons why they cannot support ULR,
namely that it is not classified as "road transport"
and is therefore automatically excluded from eligibility for any
of the grant schemes benefiting buses. As trams are prohibited
from running on railways they do not qualify for rail funding
either. Requests for an independent technical assessment to be
carried out by officials have so far been ignored. We would welcome
an opportunity to answer the Committee's questions personally
and to submit evidence to technical assessors.
The National Audit Office, in their report on
Light Rail in April 2004 recommended the removal of the "barriers
to innovation in light rail" and the setting up of a DfT/DTI
fund to finance demonstrations of innovative light rail. It is
now nearly a year since these recommendations were published,
but no action has been taken. I believe that these recommendations
deserve to be treated as a matter of urgency and acted upon. Meanwhile
the arbitrary, unexplained and unjustified refusal of the DfT
to classify ULR as either rail or road transport, effectively
makes this category of public transport ineligible for any form
of Government grant
I attach three papers which are relevant to
this subject marked Appendix A, B and C respectively. They provide
more detailed back-up to the claims made above.
James Skinner
Chairman
February 2005
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