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Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

My dad always causes a ~90 second delay for the Denver light rail, because the operator has to activate the wheelchair ramp for him. How do they handle that sort of thing in Tokyo?

(Also, I often see multiple light-rail trains bunched up after sporting events.)

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From what I found in a cursory investigation is that many stations:

A station attendant will They will ask about your destination and escort you from the ticketing area to the appropriate platform and set up the ramp (if necessary) ahead of time. When arriving at a station, there will be an attendant there with the ramp set up for you to disembark.

They also have wheelchair accessible escalators - an attendant will halt the escalator and merge several steps into one flat one, with a lip.

I'd imagine that the platform on most light-rail trains is built so that a ramp is unnecessary?

There's a ramp inside the train that needs to be deployed to bridge the gap to the ramp at the platform.

Sounds like a strange design to me. On most of the train-based public transit I've seen (and even some of the "rapid" buses), the floor of the car is aligned with the floor of the boarding area, such that ramps are unnecessary.

they're aligned, but there's a small gap that needs to be bridged.

Perhaps they just speed the train up to bridge the time gap. That seems like the simplest solution. Do light rails run on a set speed?

That's sort of the elephant in the room, as far as I'm concerned: you don't construct schedules assuming the best possible circumstances and maximum speed.

At least for light rail, it's quite normal to have trains stop for a good few minutes in certain stations. If there are delays, I'm sure that time gets cut.

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