What the Heck is an LRT?

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Hi, my name's Reece. I'm a passionate Creator, Transportation Planner, and Software Developer, interested in rapid transportation all around my home base of Toronto, Canada, as well as the whole world!

[RMTransit]

What other transit modes need better definitions?

[ruejr]

Oh yes the Manila LRT. The not-LRT LRT line actually has higher capacity trains than the line called MRT. But what do you expect from the city that plans to name its central station as the woefully long Unified Grand Central Station.

[vovacat]

I am pretty sure that rail transit is a continuum. You have street car trams, light rail, light metro, actual (subway/underground) metro, regional trains and then long range intercity trains... And I am pretty sure you can find everything in between, if you look for it. Like, the city of Volgograd has a tram line that has 6 stations of actual soviet-style underground metro. And it's just a tram for the rest of the line, though it is more grade-separated than the rest of the trams in the city. And I love the trams in Volgograd. Even though they are old, you can actully comfortably go places with them.

[lillywho]

Actually, it stands for Licorish Rotary Transport.
Basically, a helicopter made of that candy.

[jack]

It shouldn't matter. The ingenuity to think outside standard models is the reason we have RERs like Paris and Sydney, German Tram-trains and a continuum of light rail schemes from trams to pre-metros to Stadtbahns to light metros. It is however annoying when polititions label any suburban rail upgrade a 'metro' and any new bus line a 'BRT'.

[nee__]

Here in Belgium, we had something we called vicinal tramway, they were a system of narrow-gauge tramways or local railways and covered the whole country, including the countryside.
They carried considerable quantities of freight, especially agricultural produce as well as, of course, passengers.
They gradually switched to buses and dismantled the tram tracks later on.

[dominicarceo]

Fun fact: Manila LRT 2 called an LRT since it is managed by Light Rail Transit Authority despite it is a heavy rail metro.

[wwbaker]

Doesn't help that "Metro" as a term is generally thrown around to classify/brand a transit system. Example being King County Metro, which is primarily a bus network that serves Seattle, Bellevue and other cities in King County - it has nothing to do with capacity or mode of transport. When people in Seattle say, "ride the metro" it doesn't refer to anything other than the busses.

[dani-zmmx]

in indonesia theres three type of urban rail transport
1. KRL/CL: commuter train (rail on the ground and sometimes overground)
2. LRT: smaller version of metro/MRT (rail on overground)
3. MRT: same with metro in other countries, bigger version of LRT (rail on overground and underground)

[Nikky]

Foolish me! For years, I just called everything on rails by another name: "train"

[ddax]

I keep going back and forth on whether one should make a distinction between RER and S-Bahn, or consider RER the french translation of S-Bahn. There's an awful lot of overlap and shared concepts between the two things, and most differences seem to be historic accidents (e.g. that Berlin has some local-only lines with the Ringbahn, or that Berlin uses smaller rolling stock that's incompatible with the national network because they were trying to save money in the 1920s and 1930s), but there's no denying that there are differences. Though the newer S-Bahn systems (the ones that deserve the name anyway) do look more similar to the french RER.

[burdizdawurdOfficial]

My degree in English tells me that creating terms we can all agree upon globally won't be easy. That's not because we all speak different languages, but because our cultural and social understands of transportation differ. If I said the MBTA and GO are both heavy rail commuter railroads, that's something we can all agree upon be they're on the same continent. But the NYMTA subway lines and TFL Underground lines are all differently built because of geography and history. Even the BMT and IND are different in ways!

That's why I like the analysis about shared bogies. We can distinguish different modes of transit by how they look. Ask questions like how high is the boarding level? How long is the route? How many routes? What do stations look like? What are the service patterns and schedules? Type of coupler can also say something about a service too. If I put up some pictures of a vehicle, it's route, and the stations, that's what we need to form definitions. Unfortunately there aren't clear, exclusive categories.

As for bogies, you forget that high speed trainsets also have shared bogies in some cases (R.I.P Talgo VI) which means you need to specify more factors to distinguish trams from big zoom zooms.

[momo]

Kobe in Japan revealed today that they are considering building an LRT, as in modern urban tram, in the center of the city between JR Sannomiya Station, the harbor area and JR Kobe Station. This is in line with the use of the term LRT in Japan, which is used when a new tram service is created. It's for a new services, like the Utsunomiya LRT which is currently under construction. If it's a similar line as an extension of a existing tram network it just remains a tram.

[AaronSmith-sxez]

Terminology is important because often proposed expansions/new lines will be politically labeled with implied meaning (subway, light rail, metro, etc) that not everybody can agree on. Voters might want a proper metro system but get conned with a slow street car because they didn't understand definitions. This happens with many American cities...like Milwaukee which recently wasted federal transit money on a slow street car/glorified bus "The Hop" that should have been spend on a proper metro. To me the best term for proper metro is "rapid transit". You should be able to load/unload in a hurry and the line should be COMPLETELY grade separated. Suburban rail is a tough definition. In DC, that is kind of a hybrid metro/suburban rail network. The outer stations tend to have large parking lots/garages and less frequent service while the inner stations tend to have more frequent service, station density, and less car dependent. IMO a good suburban rail definition would be if more than 50% of station passengers came from a car. Metro is a confusing term, because many American cities use it to describe their bus network, while subway is obviously one of the most confusing terms out there. I think this was an important video for the transit community to raise awareness of the issue!

[matthewjohnbornholt]

The real LRT was the one in our hearts....

[kiroolioneaver]

One of the funniest/most memorable moments from the Sheppard LRT debate in Toronto City Council circa 2011/12 was when then councillor Raymond Cho (born in Korea and in favour of the LRT) told Doug Ford (then a Toronto city councillor) in a self-deprecating joke: "Why (do) you keep calling (LRT) 'streetcar'? You (have an) English language problem like me?" (Funnily enough, Doug would be the campaign manager for Raymond Cho's successful election to provincial politics and would later appoint him to the cabinet when he became premier lol)

[offichannelnurnberg]

3:23 It's actually literally "Regionalbahn". It's so simple, -bahn is more like a suffix than a word in German. If it's high above street level, it's a "Hochbahn", if it runs in the City it's a "Stadtbahn", if it's suspended it's a "Schwebebahn", if it runs on one track it is an "Einschienenbahn" if you encounter ghosts on the ride it's a "Geisterbahn" And if it's meant for cars it is the "Autobahn". Gernans really depend on -bahns but they tend to mix up the terms, calling trams S-Bahn and Stadtbahns either Tram or U-Bahn.

[henny]

btw the regiobahn at 3:15 is actually just a company that runs a s-bahn line in the rhine ruhr area of germany. the rhine ruhr s-bahn network is pretty interesting in general because since this area has a lot of city’s with more than 100.000 inhabitants it serves as a polycentric s-bahn and has some regional train character to it especially with some of the rolling stock but they are still more frequent and have more stops. whats also cool in rhine ruhr is if you want to commute from düsseldorf to cologne for example you can choose between s-bahn, regional and intercity trains . s-bahn for the districts and suburbs between them, regional just for suburbs and multi transfer stations and intercity as an express. would love to see some videos about german s-bahn networks, they all have different purposes and some are just regional train networks called s-bahn because they are better to commercialize, and more videos about german transport systems in general.
love your content man salute

[cosimoserpolla]

The Italian term for "Light Rail" would be Metrotranvia, which literally traslates to "Metrotramway", which I guess doesn't really provide clarity.

[admnspotter]

The Sound Transit Link (Seattle area) that you showed in the video is referred to locally as "light rail". It's got above-ground elevated parts, parts that run in tunnels underground, and it's got parts that run along roads. Seems like the new extensions they're working on (that I've seen anyway) are all above-ground elevated. I wish they would have gone all underground, but I'm sure that's crazy expensive and probably slow to dig compared with building concrete piers and connecting them with concrete spans. They've got huge plans for regional connectivity, which I'm excited about, but of course some of the expansions aren't planned to open until the 2030s.