Quote:
Originally Posted by Sheba
There used to be a rule that baby strollers had to be folded and carried onto buses - now that's not true. The maximum size of allowed strollers is 48" x 24" (I just looked it up) and "must be collapsible". Uhm how many SUV sized strollers are collapsible, and when was the last time you saw a bus driver say anything about it when another stroller / wheelchair / scooter was waiting to board. But I'm a bad person for suggesting such a thing too.
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It might have been the rule before low-floor buses became standard. If I were a bus driver, I don't want to be the villain who tells a mother with a camera-equipped cell phone that she can't take her SUV-stroller on the bus.
On the skytrain, it's much less of an issue, since the Mark II and later revisions and the Rotem rolling stock have sections near the doors designed for accommodating bikes, which are much longer.
Most LRT LRV's out there however not handicapped-accessible, and I wonder how well that would go over in Surrey had one been built more than a decade ago.
(This is from roughly 2003)
http://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs...20VEHICLES.pdf
Quote:
Currently, light rail vehicles (LRVs) comply with the federally mandated Americans with Disabilities Act requirements by providing access to disabled patrons through the use of wayside high blocks combined with onboard bridge plates. This set-up has limited access to the leading doors on each train for passengers using the high block, which is typically used by passengers who are disabled or those with luggage or strollers.
The Authority wanted to investigate the possibility of replacing the existing method of providing access and increasing system capacity at a lower cost. The concept under consideration is the addition of an low-floor extension (LFE) to the center of existing LRVs. The driving force for investigating this concept is that the “non-powered LFEs may be added to the entire fleet at a
significantly lower cost, as compared to procuring a fleet of new low-floor LRVs.”
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The gist of the document explains that LRV's have to be engineered to twice the collision survivability of those in Europe, hence light rail vehicles will cost twice as much to "do any improvement" on. At one point in the document it mentions how retrofitting a fleet is expensive and requires much higher rail precision/maintenance for low-floor model light rail vehicles. Low-floor = higher derailment risk, and less survivability in a collision.
But the same can kinda be said for buses. The low floor models only last about half as long as previous "high floor" buses, and their construction is less survivable.
So it seems that in trying to make accessible vehicles, it actually makes them more dangerous to ride on. Then consider that a buses don't have seatbelts.
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