Thread by @ChittiMarco

1/ Someone once asked my how Lausanne, a tiny city of 140k in a metro area of 400k inhabitants, can get such high transit usage (800 trips/year per inh.) and even boast a metro.

After touring the city's network, I can really say the answer is: pragmatism and restraint.

2/ What do I mean for pragmatism and restraint? That the policymakers put incrementalism, functionality and ease-of-use on top of everything else as the guiding factors of how to improve and design their transit system.

This thread shows that, as always, Devil is in the details.

3/ Take M1, the first "metro" line of Lausanne.

It's really the closest thing to a North American LRT you can find in Europe. It uses high-level tramway rolling stock akin to German Stadtbahn and early NA LRTs

But it deliver a very high frequency (5 min!) on a single track line

4/ M1 stations are plain simple high level, narrow platforms with bus-like shelters. Crossing is at grade with perfectly timed barriers.
Only a few major stops, like EPFL, are more sophisticated, with bigger canopies, overpasses and lifts (Never escalators. Never).

5/ Grade separation is used with care. And even at major intersections there are barrier-protected crossings coordinated with traffic lights
Can you imagine a NA engineer designing an intersection where at peak barriers will go down every 2.5 minutes on avg.? What about LOS ?!?

6/ This amazingly pragmatic approach (making the minimum necessary to deliver a highly usable, reliable, accessible, and frequent service) is what makes also possible to have more grandiose design at important nodes, like Renens. Still, functionality and ease-of-flow is king

7/ The same can be said for M2. Born as a conversion of a funicular to rubber-tired metro with a further extension into the city, is an exercise in restraint and pragmatism that allowed the city to get its own little metro for some 500 million CHF.

8/ Take stations: Shallow sub-surface ones are essentially an u/g room with two lifts in the middle and one fixed stair at each end (reminiscent of Brescia and Copenhagen)
Access pavillons on the surface are the size of a bedroom, enough to fit a ticket vending machine + a board.

9/ Same approach for deeper stations, like Ours pictured here. A shaft containing 4 lifts (2 per platform). Very minimal fixed stairs that double as emergency exits. That makes for very small, cheap shafts.

On the surface, another very minimal pavillon containing the four lifts.

10/ Even a quite deep station like Ours, has street-to-platform walking times of roughly 20-25 seconds. An elevator ride.

11/ That also means tailoring solutions to very specific sites, like the amazing Bessières station built under the bridge of the same name. Just lifts connecting with both street levels (above and below). The "mezzanine" under the track is just a passage open to the nearby street

12/ And remark the details: painted walls, exposed concrete, basic paving and barebone metal stairs, some only 1 m wide! And no escalators.

Escalators can only be found at a few major stations.

13/ The appearance is not fancy, perhaps, but the layout of circulation at major nodes is quite good, especially at Flon (less so at Lausanne-Gares). This is what I call a seamless, effort-free transfert between the M2 (right) and the LEB railway (left)! And M1 is just steps away

14/ Finally the LEB, a local railway that instead of being shut down as it happened almost everywhere else, was upgraded into a frequent (15 minutes) suburban line with targeted improvements over time: grade separation, a new city terminus, high platforms etc.

15/ on top of that, an incredibly extensive trolleybus system that was not disinvested in favor of rail but actually improved. Most lines run at 10 minutes interval or better throughout the day until quite late at night.

Wires are everywhere and apparently nobody cares.

16/ The lessons we can learn from Lausanne are incrementalism (maintain and improve what exists continuously), network-thinking, and restraint & pragmatism as the leading design approaches.

Overall, the feeling of transit being a "public good" that lacks elsewhere.

17/ The result is a transit system that, like most in Switzerland, is characterized by the smoothness of use. Using transit to go around is as easy as breathing.
Many more little details add to that feeling, such as having ticket machine and shelters at (almost) every bus stop.

18/ Also, the preponderance of electric transit within the city and the low level of private traffic makes for a very noise-less experience of the city (the same can be said for Zurich), as ICE busses can be extremely noisy (a big issue in Bologna, for example).