120 London Underground. A Victoria-line train consists of four 30.5-ton and
four 20.5-ton cars (the former carrying the motors). Laden, an average train
weighs 228 tons. The maximum speed is 45 mile/h. The average speed
is 31 mph. A train with most seats occupied carries about 350 passengers;
crush-loaded, the train takes about 620. The energy consumption at peak
times is about 4.4 kWh per 100 passenger-km (Catling, 1966).

121 High-speed train.
A diesel-powered intercity 125 train (on the right in figure 20.5) weighs
410 tons. When travelling at 125mph, the power delivered “at the rail” is
2.6 MW. The number of passengers in a full train is about 500. The average
fuel consumption is about 0.84 litres of diesel per 100 seat-km [5o5x5m],
which is a transport cost of about 9 kWh per 100 seat-km. The Class 91 electric
train (on the left in figure 20.5) travels at 140 mph (225 km/h) and uses
4.5 MW. According to Roger Kemp, this train’s average energy consumption
is 3 kWh per 100 seat-km [5o5x5m]. The government document [5fbeg9] says
that east-coast mainline and west-coast mainline trains both consume about
15 kWh per km (whole train). The number of seats in each train is 526 or 470
respectively. So that’s 2.9–3.2 kWh per 100 seat-km.

the total energy cost of all London’s underground trains, was 15 kWh per
100 p-km. ... The energy cost of all London buses was 32 kWh per 100 pkm
.
Source: [679rpc]. Source for train speeds and bus speeds: Ridley and
Catling (1982).

Croydon Tramlink.
www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/corporate/TfL-environment-report-
2007.pdf
, www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/corporate/London-Travel-
Report-2007-final.pdf
, www.croydon-tramlink.co.uk.

123... provision of excellent cycle facilities ... The UK street design guide
[www.manualforstreets.org.uk] encourages designing streets to make 20
miles per hour the natural speed. See also Franklin (2007).

124A fair and simple method for handling congestion-charging. I learnt a brilliant
way to automate congestion-charging from Stephen Salter. A simple
daily congestion charge, as levied in London, sends only a crude signal to
drivers; once a car-owner has decided to pay the day’s charge and drive into
a congestion zone, he has no incentive to drive little in the zone. Nor is he
rewarded with any rebate if he carefully chooses routes in the zone that are
not congested.
Instead of having a centralized authority that decides in advance when and
where the congestion-charge zones are, with expensive and intrusive monitoring
and recording of vehicle movements into and within all those zones,
Salter has a simpler, decentralized, anonymous method of charging drivers
for driving in heavy, slow traffic, wherever and whenever it actually exists.
The system would operate nationwide. Here’s how it works. We want a
device that answers the question “how congested is the traffic I am driving
in?” A good measure of congestion is “how many other active vehicles are
close to mine?” In fast-moving traffic, the spacing between vehicles is larger
than slow-moving traffic. Traffic that’s trundling in tedious queues is the

Figure 20.35. 100 km in a single-person car, compared with 100 km on a fully-occupied electric high-speed train.
Figure 20.36. Trams work nicely in Istanbul and Prague too.