netwiss
netwiss
Cost and Energy Savings through Intelligent Vehicle Layouts
This article first appeared in the Railway-News Magazine Issue 3 2024.
The focus on high passenger utilisation increases costs and energy consumption, while well-designed layouts save money and energy!
It is important for operators to transport as many passengers as possible in order to fulfil the requirements of transport policy and at the same time to improve their own profitability. A common approach is to increase the number of seats on the train. However, this ignores important principles that ultimately lead to the following:
- 1. The potential number of people to be transported decreases!
- 2. Energy consumption rises!
- 3. The costs rise!
- 4. Punctuality falls!
- 5. Customer satisfaction falls!
Why? Incorrectly designed layouts mean that the luggage racks on one side are incorrect and undersized. As a result, only part of the luggage can be stowed and the remaining pieces of luggage obstruct seats and aisle areas. This leads to a decrease in available seats and to major problems when changing passengers, which means that this takes longer and punctuality decreases or a lot of energy has to be invested in making up for delays by travelling at higher speeds.
