The current statuses on signaling system of Beijing rail transit, including the signaling devices, repair and maintenance, spare parts, and personnel training, were investigated and presented in general. The existing issues were also presented. Considering the development of Beijing rail transit in future, some suggestions are proposed to the local government for Beijing rail transit in future development.

Faced with the escalating demand for public transportation in metropolitan areas, transportation authorities are challenged to select a technology that will satisfy the often conflicting demands of high capacity and reliable service, urban fit, minimized environmental impact and budget restrictions. There are many technologies available today that can provide medium to high capacity mass transit service, however, in many cases these technologies are costly or are not suited to today’s urban environment. High capacity has typically implied costly underground tunneling or obtrusive elevated metro systems that required extensive infrastructure disruption. Although monorail systems have been around for some time, only recent developments such as Bombardier’s INNOVIA Monorail 300 System have permitted transit authorities to now consider monorail as a mainstream contender to meet their mass transit requirements.

Straddle monorail, using rubber wheels and precast concrete track beams, is a kind of distinctive urban rail transit system, featured with strong climbing capability, small turning radius, less land occupation, low noise, moderate volume, and low cost. Those unique technical characteristics have played an important role in Chongqing urban rail transit lines. Chongqing provides a typical demonstration project, and straddle monorail transit system will be a favorite urban rail transit system for our other mountain cities, landscape cities, coastal cities, historical and cultural cities, etc. And it has laid a good foundation and favorable conditions for further popularization and application of straddle monorail transit system.

At present, the urban rail transit (URT) system has achieved network operation in many major cities of China. But, little attention has been given to the vulnerability of the URT system. The purpose of this study is to assign the passenger flow under the condition of section interruption in URT system. Two surveys (a passenger behavior survey and a stated preference survey) were conducted and a multinomial logit model was developed. The results show that although the first choice of passengers in emergency situation is to stay in URT system by a circuitous way, more than half of the respondents express interest in the temporary shuttle bus. For the temporary shuttle bus, the sensitivity analysis show that the relative speed is more important than crowding degree for passengers. The significant variables mostly fall in the personal attributes such as income, gender, age, etc. The impacts of trip feature factors are similar to the previous research in normal situations. These results provide basic support for passenger flow assignment at the shuttle bus level and reducing the risk of crowding at some special stations. Moreover, it is also good for reducing passenger delay and recovering the trip.

This paper attempts to determine the suitability of tilting technology as applied to metro systems, taking the Tyne and Wear Metro as its base case study. This is done through designing and implementing of several tests which show the current metro situation and reveals possible impacts on ride comfort and speed, in case tilting technology has been implemented. The paper provides brief background literature review on tilting technology, its different designs and types, control systems, customer satisfaction and history on the Tyne and Wear metro system. Ride comfort evaluation methods, testing of the Metro fleet comfort levels and simulation modelling through the use of OpenTrack simulator software are also introduced. Results and findings include test accuracy and validations and suggest that although tilting technology could be beneficial with respect to speed (minimal improvements) and comfort, implementing it to the Tyne and Wear metro would be an unwise decision owing to the immense amount of upgrades that would be needed on both the network and the metro car fleet. Therefore, recommendations are subsequently made on alternative systems which could achieve or surpass the levels of comfort achievable by tilting technology without the need for an outright overhaul of lines and trains.