Naming the desire for transit as streetcar

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Capacity of one mile of road-lane for one hour

Limited access freeway: approximately 2,000 vehicles
Typical urban arterial: 800-1,000 vehicles
Typical suburban arterial: 1,300 vehicles
Typical bus service*: 6,750 passengers
Bus rapid transit: 10,000 passengers
Light rail/tram: 15,000 passengers
Heavy rail: 20,000 to 65,000 passengers

* Streetcar service is comparable to bus service. Generally it isn't designed for high capacity, high speed service.
(Sources, Jeff Tunlin, Nelson Nygaard, Presentation in DC 2005, Steve Belmont, Cities in Full, Highway Capacity Manual
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Overhead Wire also links to this Toronto Globe & Mail piece, "Rethinking the need for speed," on a study by Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia, which suggests that streetcars are often a better form of transit to introduce than heavy rail.

I haven't read the study, so I can't really comment, but I will anyway, it's the flip side of the previous entry of comparing like to like.

By using my idea of the transit network ("The (Meta) Regional Transit Network and transportation "vision" maps" and "The DC Transit Network") and the metropolitan transit network framework you have the means to rightsize the transit system, depending on the nature of the trip, distance, and projected ridership.

Streetcars are good for trips of a certain distance, light rail is better (or at least cheaper than heavy rail) for somewhat longer trips and higher demand routes, and heavy rail and railroads are better for high capacity, longer trips.The streetcar isn't a solution for every type of trip.

In thinking about this for the DC region, I am thinking that we need to distinguish between LR and streetcar for some routes, which we haven't done as of yet, with the exception of Purple Line planning in Maryland, which is separate from streetcar planning in DC or Northern Virginia.

Anyway, I haven't been to Vancouver, but I imagine there are better subway routes to build in terms of number of trips than one to the UBC.Heavy rail is great if you have the demand to move 20,000 to 40,000 people per hour on one line, double that in both directions, for multiple hours/day.

(The rough maximum capacity for the DC red line subway is about 38,400 people/hour in each direction. Maybe with fewer seats and a greater willingness for crush loads, this could get up to 40,000. But the red line doesn't have to share crossings, unlike the Blue and Orange lines crossing into DC from Rosslyn, which is why it has slightly higher capacity.)

Without looking at these issues in terms of a transit network typology and another concept of mine, what I call the transitshed and mobilityshed, we miss out on the power of explanation and interpretation and blow opportunities to build a useful transit system.

-- Updating the mobilityshed concept