http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/news/transit-vehicle-design-comfortable-profitable.html?channel=61
Until recently, the goal of most public transit advocates,
pushing suppliers and agencies alike, was to simply get vehicles,
preferably (but not even always) with adequate seating capacity. Sure,
some minimal creature comforts were considered essential for Amtrak
and/or VIA Rail Canada intercity service, even in their darkest days.
But for mislabeled “commuter” operations, be they regional rail, heavy
rail, or (more recently) light rail, the style, design, and even comfort
were often, at best, secondary considerations for almost everyone
involved.
Those days are gone.
It’s no longer cost versus comfort; it’s cost and comfort combined,
says Scott Sherwin, vice president of marketing and strategic planning
at Alstom. “You can’t have the tradeoff; you need to provide both
comfort and cost” to market a successful transit vehicle, he says.
Marketing drives planning, production
Alstom
is one of several suppliers pursuing the growing streetcar and light
rail transit market in North America, convinced (skeptics
notwithstanding) that the market can overcome “Buy America,” “Buy
Canada,” or other obstacles. Though not dismissing those factors,
Sherwin sees a larger problem and, fortunately, a solution as well.
Perhaps counterintuitively, he says, at present “streetcars are more
expensive than light rail vehicles. They’re shorter and lighter and
should be lower-cost equipment. The reason they’re more expensive is
lower volume. As the volumes increase and the market matures, those
costs should come down.”
Some
assert that the drive to maximize rail vehicle safety across all modes
counters any hope of lowering cost while increasing comfort. That’s
nonsense, asserts Cesar Vergara (pictured, with
Railway Age Managing Editor Doug Bowen aboard a Metro-North M8, which Vergara designed), principal of
VergaraStudio.
Safety, Vergara says, “should affect the comfort level; it should
improve it.” Asked if that doesn’t automatically drive up the cost,
Vergara bluntly answers, “No. Period.”
“It’s [involving] the exact same amount of metals, plastics, fabric,
and other materials,” Vergara points out. “It’s the shapes, color
combinations, lighting, and layout that make a train attractive, inside
and out. Unattractive trains are the result of lack of interest from the
top down. There are formulas that can be followed to find out what the
people really like and how to get there.”
“The trains we are designing and procuring today will start service
in two-to-five years and be out there longer than most people working in
the industry. We have to think in terms of inventing a better future,
not repeating the boring status quo,” the industrial designer insists.
Sherwin agrees, pointing to Portland, Ore.’s embrace of both LRT and
streetcars as the unavoidable North American model. “The attractiveness
of the vehicle, a product for your passengers and citizens that’s
attractive to look at, comfortable to ride—the industrial design is
critical,” he says. The transit provider, and by extension the supplier,
must “move beyond the functional to the aesthetic; without both, the
product is not going to work.”
Market conditions bode well
With requirements from the Federal Railroad Administration and/or the
Federal Transit Administration a constant factor, transit vehicle
design still must deal with the idea, real or not, of “American
exceptionalism.” But even here, industry players appear willing to adapt
and adjust, perhaps because of the apparent shift in demographic trends
in North America, some of which now appear to favor urban population
growth after decades of urban flight.
Alstom’s Sherwin suggests that the change now recognized by many
fields, including rail suppliers, may simply be more visible. “In the
past 30 years, an average of one new light rail service was put into
place each year in the U.S. and Canada; it’s been a ‘silent’
development,” he observes. “The trend is now more plainly visible: Many
cities have plans for an LRT or streetcar system, or both.”
Citing Kansas City and Ottawa as potential and actual examples,
respectively, of marrying rail transit to economic development plans,
Sherwin says, “What Alstom has done with our Citadis vehicle is develop a
vehicle that has the versatility to start as a streetcar, but be
modified for future LRT additions.” Alstom has company and competition
here; Siemens Mobility is offering modifications of its S70 LRT model
for streetcar use in Atlanta and Salt Lake City.
Sherwin says that for passenger rail equipment, and particularly U.S.
high speed rail development, the Federal Railroad Administration has
been “doing a good job” in trying to leverage global standards out there
today; that allows suppliers to come into the U.S. market “while not
trying to completely modify their vehicles, and that reduces cost.” But
“it’s different for transit, especially with mixed operations issues”
involving safety concerns where passenger (or freight) rail shares
right-of-way with DMUs, LRT, or streetcars (Sherwin cities NJ Transit’s
RiverLINE as one example.) The Federal Transit Administration gets
involved with these lines, but “you’re still under the jurisdiction of
the FRA.”
Sherwin believes the FRA “is starting to make a move to allow
global-style” safety standards involving crash energy management, not
just crashworthiness, and he is encouraged by the progress made for
transit vehicles, “though I think there could be more.”
Competing with the car
Rail transit already posts a far better safety record than cars do,
but historically, U.S. and Canadian travelers have been little swayed by
such a fact. Like so many other products (Sherwin points to cell phones
and related items as a prime example), it may come down to design—the
attractiveness of the product above and beyond its functional use.
Cesar Vergara paints rail transit’s primary competitor, the
automobile, as an example of what can, and should, be offered in terms
of design to rail transit riders.
“Automobiles are much safer and complex than they use to be in the
past, but that does not stop the designers from making them more
exciting, ergonomic, and comfortable,” he notes. “But what or who is
stopping train designers from delivering a better train?”
Both Sherwin and Vergara say transit need not yield the field when it
comes to aesthetics and comfort, something good design makes possible,
something suppliers are ready to offer at a competitive cost. It’s
something rail operators can, and should, commit to for their current
and future customers.
