The Trains newswire today quotes Baltimore as using, in full service, 32 of its 53 cars. This is a 60% availability which seems extremely low for any system, let alone a relatively modern one. Even if all is well at least 15 cars are in the shop for maintenance, which suggests that the best avaialbility that can be sustained is 71%.
Do any of you know what the availability figures are for other transit systems in the North America? Over here in suburban south London our Light Rail System works on 22 of 24 cars (92%) being operable at any one time. This is very tight, but achievable.
Spare ratios can be all over the map. I know many maintenance guys that would just as soon keep the spare ratio as low as reasonable, as every spare car is just one more that has to be kept up, etc. CTA rapid transit system is around 12-13% spare ratio, though this number varies from line-to-line, and by type of car nominally assigned to that line
I know of other rapid transit systems in the US (sorry, I know you were citing an LRT-specific stat, but hope you'll accept the HRT data, nonetheless) that had extremely high spare ratios (in the realm of 40%), but this was due to having bought cars based on a pre-opening ridership projection that was a bit too optimistic.
Hope this helps! Art
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.