AIR vs ROAD: Most people these days recognise that common forms of air travel are extremely safe, whereas traveling by road carries a higher risk of near misses, injury and death.

ROAD TOLL: People can adapt, and become hardened to an ever-present hazard. We have become dependent on our cars and motorbikes - so the “road toll” becomes normalised. It can be easy to think in simplistic terms, such as “Speed kills”, and it is easy to blame the participants for taking risks, and only think fleetingly about hazardous road design.

RAIL TRAVEL: People also know that traveling by heavy rail is very safe, as is Monorail, despite being fast (in some cases achieving extreme speeds comparable with aviation). So this implies that speed alone (contrary to road safety messages) is not the only determinant of risk for transport.

The factor that makes all the difference is separation. This factor is far more important than speed, as is well-recognised in aviation, and in rail travel. The main vulnerability of RAIL is level crossings, because tracks have long been effectively isolated from roadways and footpaths. So isolated accidents do still occur at level crossings.

 In the early days of Light Rail this vulnerability was well-recognised, but in recent years proponents of urban trams have lost sight of this. They associate the buzz-word "Light Rail" somewhat magically with the colourful and streamlined vehicles, without recognising the multiple safety measures needed at a level crossing and along a railway line. The result is that these days the term “Light Rail” internationally seems to encompass a wide variety of degrees of separation from other traffic, and  in the USA this phony “Light Rail” mixture is reported as second only to motorcycle travel: “light rail fatalities are higher than all other forms of transportation except motorcycle travel (31.5 fatalities per 100 million miles)” [Wikipedia item on LR SAFETY, with reference to 2013 National Transportation Statistics report]

See "Tram Scam" for detailed explanation of the missing safety measures in the supposed "Light Rail" schemes in Sydney, Canberra, and now Wellington. Melbourne Is much the same but they more accurately call their system "Trams". For the result – see our page on 'LR' crashes.

CITY TRAVEL – THE URBAN TRAM ENVIRONMENT: The risk increases enormously when separation is discarded without sufficient thought. City intersections have become Level Crossings, lacking barrier arms and bells and relying solely on lights!  Between intersections, streets have become malls in which tracks encroach without any barriers to prevent pedestrians wandering in front of a tram. with mass transport and more fragile forms of transport becoming mixed together (along city streets and intersections, and not even at proper level crossings). These are environmental risks imposed on us by those who design that urban environment. What if the designers have been careless? And what if they have glossed over the risks, at public consultation, by not telling us that they have dismissed a safer option for obscure reasons?

THE OPTIONS: For Wellington, LGWM listed in effect only 2 options for Mass Rapid Transport (MRT) –

1. BUSES (in various flavours including standard size buses, and the larger bendy buses),
2. TRAMS (which they called “Light Rail” (with variations including trams on tracks, and trackless trams). LGWM stated a preference for trams on rails.
3. But there was a serious lack of information publicised about what consideration was given to a third option -
   SUSPENSION MONORAIL (SM): In a single meeting with FASTR-Wellington (14 April 2021), LGWM dismissed SM without even subjecting it to a cost benefit analysis, although when the Wellington City Council (WCC) met with us the year before, they had been more receptive (12 March 2020).

• RISKS OF LGWM’s 2 OPTIONS: Both these options inevitably involve risks of collisions, with damage of vehicles and injuries and deaths of humans. Yet these are never a risk with the invisible and ignored “Option 3” -Suspension Monorail.   See the next pages for the frequent reports of Tram/’Light Rail’ CRASHES and BREAKDOWNS. In cities like Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, it seems that people are normalising these events. The media make a fuss about supposed “risk-takers” (careless drivers, and careless pedestrians), sometimes making a joke of it. What the news media do not emphasise is that it need not have been so, if proper separation had been built into their transport systems

The above news item (4 May 2021 - “Tram passengers put in danger every day in Melbourne” 9 news Australia)  - inadvertently grouped together two consequences of lack of separation:

• vehicles traveling beside tram tracks, attempting a U-turn, and colliding with trams that had been in their blindspot;
• and vehicles coming from behind a stationary tram, failing to stop, and hitting  alighting passengers.

• This report made much of the carelessness of the drivers, and noted a belated remedy from the Melbourne authorities (spending $2.7m on low barriers as a deterrent to U-turning drivers).

The point was missed that these low barriers would be no help (and perhaps a tripping hazard) for alighting passengers at tram stops that should never have been placed in the middle of a shared road. Nor was any point made about the lack of proper separation for tram stops in the middle of a major road.

THE SAFETY RECORD OF SUSPENSION MONORAIL is not always easy to distinguish from that of other forms of monorail. But Wuppertal‘s Schwebebahn in its 120+ years of service has had only one fatal accident (1999) (which led to further tightening of safety procedures); and in Japan the Shonan Monorail has had no accidents in its more than 50 years.

The bottom line is that (thanks to separation from ground-based traffic), monorail’s safety record is similar to that of commercial airline travel… it is excellent. Compare this to the safety record of ground-based city traffic where trams are involved, with an unacceptable road toll that is endured purely because it has become routine, and because it is inescapable. [See also FAQ #5 - Precedents]]

...But related information about Wellington is largely kept out of sight as LOST HISTORY, Is this Misinformation?
Are we now doomed to repeat the history of Melbourne, Canberra, and now Sydney? [see TRAM SCAM]