Researcher on urban planning and public transportation.
https://marcochitti.substack.com/
Marco Chitti
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Repost to scare your fire department
Marco Chitti
Slightly polemic post.
A great example of how modal filters/short segments of transit or bike/ped-only roads can enact circulation-based priority.
Only trams and cars can enter Limmatstrasse from the East via a short tram-only segment, de facto making the entire street downstream a transit-first corridor
So sometimes you really need quite a lot of interpretation effort to understand whether a particular lane is reserved for trams, and in general, transit priority relies on very light infrastructure, most of the time, paint, rules and people's behaviour. Wildly different from the French approach.
The only thing that suggests that it's a lane drivers should not use is that it doesn't have the stop line at the intersection, nor zebra crossings outside of signalized intersections (all traffic, including peds, is required to yield to trams and street-running trains in CH)
Another little-discussed element is that on-street parking is banned along most arterials. Combined with narrow-ish sidewalks and generally narrow lanes (3 m or less), that's how they get 4 lanes, with the two in the middle dedicated (sort of) to trams and buses in 16-18m RoWs.
Marco Chitti
Marco Chitti
One of the little-known secrets of Zurich's transit priority and traffic management policies is that they systematically prohibit left turns to an extent that would never be accepted by a US DOT.
In these 4- and 5-way main intersections, not a single left-turn is allowed. So many such examples.
Marco Chitti
Marco Chitti
Marco Chitti
Well I guess that the new normal in my area is:
wind = no electricity.
Seems like an issue to me. But what do I know.
Sometimes it's very hard to understand if a lane is reserved to trams in Switzerland. There is no such thing as "tram-dedicated lane markings" in the road code, only bus-dedicated ones, so most of the time you get either a continuous white line (do not cross) or a dashed one (can cross)
More recently, the final segment of Zollstrasse in front of one of Zurich HB's access points nearby has been closed to cars too, transforming it from a through route to a local-access one.
