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None of which are representative of LRT. To have a better sense of light rail, go see DART, Houston METRO, Salt Lake City UTA, St. Louis Metrolink, San Francisco MUNI, Santa Clara VTA, Philadelphia SEPTA, Portland Max, Baltimore MARC, and so on.

Jointed tracks cause the "clickety-clack" most people are familiar with. Modern systems use Continuously welded rail to solve this problem.

Referring to me? I'm for transit in all its forms (bus/BRT, LRT, heavy rail, monorail, even maglev)but I just want to make sure people make their decisions for the right reasons.

I think you might be mistaking BART for Caltrain or Muni in the bay area. Bart runs on its own tracks, alternates as elevated or underground, 105 miles of track (no street crossings that I am aware of). The original spec average was 45 mph including stops, but I think actual is a little less than that.

Yeah, the San Francisco Muni is only computerized while the trains are in the tunnels (and not while the trains are on the surface streets).

That said, even in the tunnels, each train still has a conductor/driver to take over in case something happens (such as someone throwing themselves in front of the train). The only thing the conductors do in the tunnel is close the doors (even the opening is controlled by computers).

The MUNI montly pass allows you free use of BART within the city of San Francisco. This is probably what the parent post was talking about.

You might talk to the folks at NextBus who offer that sort of info for San Francisco's Municipal Railway. (You can check my stop if you want.) They are probably too expensive for your situation (I suspect they're out to make money) but they might at least have some advice for you.

down the street from me to see if the bus is coming. I wonder if MUNI is up on this-- the pilot program for tracking buses seems to have fizzled out...

And MUNI, that's still a dollar, right?

But here it is. Yes, San Francisco Muni just retired the last Boeing streetcars, which were amazingly unreliable. But they're not all dead yet! Manchester, England is buying a few to tide their system over until they can get some new cars.

San Francisco is a little strange. We have a combination of gas-powered buses, electric buses, restored electric street cars from other cities (you know, the ones that look like bomb shells), and cable car trollies (sp?). The cable cars are of course one of the neatest forms of transport due to the fact that they are 100% manually controlled. My understanding is that the operator pushes a lever that connects to a cable underneath the street. (This lever, BTW is easily 4 ft. long) When they want to stop, they disconnect the lever and apply the brakes. The trolly itself has no locamotion of its own and is really very much like a boxcar being tugged along on a rope. Pretty cool tho.

Oh, and the obligatory link.

This should be an example to anyone designing a web site distributing customer information, in my opinion.