Comparison of costs of Tramway and Bus rapid transit systems – case study: Tabarsi-Imam Reza terminal corridor

Employing mass transit systems has become one of the traffic solutions in metropolitan cities in the world in the recent decades. Using these systems in Iran has also become the priority of city planners and municipality officials. Bus rapid transit and tramway are two of these systems in which the first one is widely employed in Iran and the latter has not been used yet; although there is an increasing trend in the world to apply and implementation of tramways. In this study operation costs of these two system was investigated in a selected corridor and their net present values were compared. Also a sensitivity analysis was performed for demand growth rate and interest rate. The results show that although the construction and starting costs of tramway are much more than BRT, its operation and management costs are much less. According to sensitivity analysis effect of interest rate reduction is beneficial for tramway but demand growth rate does not have any significant effect on operational costs.